I understand why they're doing it--after all, they made sure that everyone thinks he's dead to kick off this storyline, and they can't have him return in the midst of the war and say, 'hey gang, I'm not dead' because that would distract from the Romulan War story that they're telling.

But when Trip was rescued at the beginning by a Vulcan cargo ship which just happens to have a buddy of T'Pol's from her days as an intelligence agent on board, and she just happened to go, "Well, I just need you to do one thing for me before I can let you return to Earth...", it was time to :rolleyes: because Trip (as he himself pointed out in the story) is not a good spy. Yet in her original plan, she wanted him to "check up" on individuals on Vulcan in the intelligence community and High Command... as if they wouldn't suspect him in a heartbeat.

And of course, towards the end, Trip makes a decision not to return to Enterprise with T'Pol--despite originally intending to do so--because he feels like he has to "keep an eye on" a Romulan centurion they'd brought back to Vulcan (whom Trip's new buddy, the lady agent from the cargo ship, had implanted fake memories of him actually being a Vulcan on a deep undercover assignment into) because the guy has shown signs of possibly starting to break through the fake memories, and he's afraid the Romulan will go nuts and take out innocent Vulcans or something.

And just when Trip is reconsidering going back to Enterprise, at the very end of the book, then T'Pau meets with him (though it's unclear whether she actually knows Trip is Trip, or if she's buying into his current cover of being a Vulcan trader--Trip, btw, doesn't have the Romulan brow ridge anymore, the lady agent insured that was cosmetically removed earlier in the story), and Trip feels compelled to remain on Vulcan to help T'Pau (despite her refusing to help Earth fight the Romulans).

I also found it interesting that the events in the prologue of the book actually take place after the rest of the book. Basically, in the prologue, Earth is forced to ask the Klingons for help in defeating the Romulans--which might be why Spock never actually names who, exactly, Earth's "allies" in the war was in Balance of Terror.

Why are they forced to do so? you might ask. Because it isn't only Vulcan that backs out of the Coalition of Planets mutual defense pact with Earth. No, we learn at the end of the book that both Tellar and Andoria's governments have also decided to back out, leaving Earth to fight on its own. This might, btw, also underscore why they were reduced to using nukes to fight--if Earth doesn't have the materials to make the more advanced weapons, they might resort to the older tech that we do know all too well to use against the Romulans.

I suspect that Shran, at least, will continue to aid the Federation to the best of his ability, as will Soval (once he gets over the planetwide grief that all of Vulcan is suffering from, given what happens towards the end of the book--which incidentally unites all of Vulcan against the thought of ever entering the war. What might do that? An assassin killing the vessel of the living katra of Surak, not to mention a bunch of other monks, by blowing them up at Mount Seleya, apparently.

The Vulcans are quite horrified by that terrorist act (apparently even more so than they were by the bombing of the Earth Embassy which occurred on their planet only two years before) and evidently suddenly decide to convert en masse to Surak's way of peace... or something like that, which is supposed to explain the total change from the Vulcans of Enterprise to the Vulcans as we know them from Kirk's time.