The Romulan Star Empire

Overview

The Empire across the Zone in 2393 is not the one that returned in 2364, nor the one that fought beside the Federation against the Dominion. It has buried a Senate, survived a coup, and rebuilt itself on its oldest instincts: watchful, insular, and formidably patient. Romulan strategy on the border is built on cloaking technology, deniability, and the long game: they probe, they test, they gather intelligence, and they wait, forcing the Federation to react while committing to nothing they can be held to. A Romulan provocation is rarely a shot fired; it is a warbird sitting just on its own side of the line for a week, a “malfunctioning” buoy that drifts across, a distress signal that may be a trap. The goal is almost never to win an engagement. It is to learn how the other side thinks, and to be the side that understands the border better when the day finally comes.

Behind the military sits the Tal Shiar, the Empire’s intelligence service. It was nearly destroyed at the Omarion Nebula in 2371 and has spent the years since rebuilding, quietly and with something to prove. Its reach along the border is real, and its operations are never acknowledged. On this stretch of the line, dealing with the Romulans means never trusting that anything is what it appears to be, and never being the one who fires first.

The Empire in 2393

Fourteen years after Shinzon’s coup killed the Senate in its own chamber, the Empire has a government again, and it behaves like one that remembers how close it came to having none. The three years Romulans call the Silence, from 2379 to 2382, left noble houses and provincial governors ruling their own corners of the Empire while the Imperial Fleet held the whole together by refusing to take a side. The Restored Senate that first sat in 2382 is smaller than the old one and more afraid of its own security services. Under Praetor Sorrel t’Keleth it looked inward. Under Praetor Ardhal tr’Vesuin, since 2389, it has looked outward again, and the patrols that came back to the Zone are his. See Government of the Empire and History of the Romulan Star Empire.

Three questions shape how the Empire deals with the Federation now. The first is the Remans. The breakaway of T’Met, the Romulan response there in 2391 and T’Met’s admission to the Federation in 2392 are, to most Romulans, an insult that has not been answered. The second is Unification: Starfleet, after years of keeping its distance, now regards the Vulcan reunification effort as wise and quietly backs it, which the Empire reads as interference in its own affairs. The third is the Empire’s own stability. Splinter movements have come and gone, at least one of them with outside help, and every Praetor since 2379 has known that the Empire’s worst enemies may be Romulan. See The Remans, T'Met and Dissidents, Splinters and Unification. Much of what the Federation knows about the Empire’s conduct toward T’Met it learned through one ship; see The USS Ragnarok and the Romulans.

Reading this section

These articles are written from what the Federation knows, has assessed, or has been told, which is not always the same thing. Where a fact is assessed rather than confirmed, the article says so. The Empire acknowledges very little, and on this border the absence of evidence is often the evidence. For the line itself and the Federation side of it, see The Neutral Zone (2393), Starbase 234 and the Patrol Region and The Klingon Empire.