It was a perfectly solid plan, apart from being based on a completely faulty premisse, in bad assumptions, with active ignorance of available intelligence, while shutting out all subject experts from the planning process and assuming no counter action from the opposition.

Apart from that: solid.

In which the Senate embarks on a long lost dream, the worst organised black op in intergalactic history goes awry and why everything you thought you knew about Romulans and unification is wrong.

Also some guy named Spock shows up. He might be important.

The fateful first contact and the events leading up to it was the subject of chapter 3 of From the Ashes:

fallofromulus.weebly.com/chapter-thre...

As for her ancestry while there is definitely prejudice Sela’s career proves that it is definitely possible for people of mixed background to reach high positions within the empire.

True but also the diplomatic corps is something of a dead end. They’re constantly overwritten by the Tal Shiar or by senators who think they should handle every important negotiation themselves.

Her beta canon background is that she took the worst assignment on purpose to prove herself. I think she was an ideaslist, lots of those around in the heady days of the early Second Empire.

As an aside Cai’th’lin had partial human ancestry, from a grandfather who had been taken captive as a child on Deneva during the Earth-Romulan war. She would claim to be of Irish descent during her career though there is no evidence she was: her given name has its roots in Rihan for compassion.

Her reputal of her goverment's unification plan is one of the clearest evidence of wide-spread discord regarding the foreign policy of the late Third Republic. The fact that she did so and lived shows just how high that discord went.

By the 2360s she was considered the grandee of what amounted to the Romulan diplomatic corps and the head of the Committee for Interstellar Correspondence, the closest thing the Third Republic had to a foreign service think tank.

Chapter 22 – Declawing the Birds of Prey

The battle against the Birds of Prey was a grim business, and it wasn’t won by charm or personality – Vice Admiral Amelia Bridges

intheraptorsclaws.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/c...

Oh probably, but then again a good portion of the senate assume the Tal Shiar did him in so…

Somewhat though they are quite used to Cardassian intelligence playing hardball. But in any case, why worry about the lackey when you know who the master pulling strings are?

"We are facing a long and bitter war. But we shall met it, met it as we have faced every battle, every struggle, every challenge since we first time took our tender steps in the skies.

We are the Romulan Star Empire! And our shadow will blot out the very sun of Cardassia before we are done."