Nobody had ever seen a live Romulan. It was very certain that 'Romulan' was not their name for themselves, for such fragmentary evidence as had been pieced together from wrecks, after they had erupted from the Romulus-Remus system so bloodily a good seventy-five years ago, suggested that they'd not even been native to the planet, let a lone a race that could have shared Earthly conventions of nomenclature.
A very few bloated bodies recovered from space during that war had proved to be humanoid, but of the hawklike Vulcanite type rather than the Earthly anthropoid. The experts had guessed that the Romulans might once have settled on their adopted planet as a splinter group from some mass migration, thrown off, rejected by their less militaristic fellows as they passed to some more peaceful settling, to some less demanding kind of new world.
Neither Romulus nor Remus, twin planets whirling around in a Trojan relationship to a white-dwarf sun, could have proved attractive to any race that did not love hardships for their own sakes. But almost all this was guesswork, unsupported either by history or by interrogation.
The Vulcanite races who were part of the Federation claimed to know nothing of the Romulans; and the Romulans themselves had never allowed any prisoners to be taken -- suicide, apparently, was a part of their military tradition -- nor had they ever taken any. All that was known for sure was that the Romulans had come boiling out of their crazy little planetary system on no apparent provocation, in primitive, clumsy cylindrical ships that should have been clay pigeons for the Federation's navy and yet in fact took twenty-five years to drive back to their home world -- twenty-five years of increasingly merciless slaughter on both sides.
Re: Star Trek: Picard
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