Kobayashi Maru

by Michael A. Martin

  “What’s wrong?” Paul said. Apart from the obvious.

  “Almost had helm control rerouted and recovered. Then I lost it again. It’s like the Klingons have found a way to monitor everything we try to do, using our own systems against us.”

  Paul nodded. That was no doubt exactly what they were doing, though he was completely at a loss as to how to explain it. Fear gnawed at his insides, like an animal trying to escape.

  But he was no less determined to get his crew—his family—out of this mess.

  “You and Juan keep at it,” Paul said, trying his best to conceal his steadily increasing desperation. “Charlie…just keep pushing those buttons.”

  I.K.S. Mup’chIch

  “Control recovered,” Centurion T’Vak said, looking intensely relieved after several siure of genuine uncertainty.

  After the struggle he’d just witnessed, T’Voras wasn’t entirely certain that the centurion’s renewed confidence was justified. But he was nevertheless satisfied that today’s activities had garnered enough operational data to produce real, substantive refinements to the equipment. And he knew it would not do to linger here any longer than necessary, lest any transient vessel from Vulcan, Andoria, Tellar, or even Earth discover anything about the operation being conducted here today—or even begin asking questions about what a Klingon vessel might be doing so far from home.

  “Is the test data safely recorded, Centurion?” T’Voras asked.

  “It is, Commander.”

  “Very well,” T’Voras said. “Dispose of any evidence that we were ever here. Including the small distress beacon the freighter launched.”

  “Immediately, Commander.” T’Voras watched as the centurion deftly entered a series of commands into his primary board.

  T’Voras turned toward the young female decurion who was serving at the communications station.

  “Get me Admiral Valdore on a secure frequency,” he said.

  E.C.S. Horizon

  The deck plates shuddered even more violently than before, signaling further acceleration. The engine noise continued to increase along with it, rising to a nearly ear-splitting roar.

  “I dunno how, but we’re still gathering delta vee,” Charlie said. “Warp three point two and steadily climbing. Didn’t think this tub could go this fast.”

  “I noticed,” Paul said. “What’s our heading?”

  Charlie turned toward the center of the bridge. The harsh, ruddy-tinted shadows that fell across his face did nothing to soften the terror Paul saw etched across his usually placid features.

  “We’re locked on a ballistic course directly for Sigma Iotia!” he shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the ever-escalating whine of the engines.

  Sigma Iotia. The primary star of the world the Horizon had just departed.

  Paul Mayweather turned and saw Rianna Mayweather standing by his side. He could see from the haunted look in his mother’s brown eyes that engine control was a lost cause. There was no point in asking whether a warp-core jettison was even possible. Besides, the din of the engines had become so loud as to make conversation essentially impossible except in the form of top-of-the-lungs shouts. He took both of her hands between his own as he looked at the forward viewer.

  The dazzling golden-orange brilliance of Sigma Iotia overwhelmed the screen, prompting the automatic imaging system to damp the light down to a tolerable level. Paul imagined he could already feel the searing heat of the photosphere toward which the Horizon was falling at multiwarp speed. Time seemed to stretch, and he truly didn’t want to know precisely how many seconds remained to him and his crew.

  His family. Paul Mayweather gently put his arm around his mother’s shoulders. She had brought him into the world. Protected him from the occasional teasing of his older brother Travis. Taught him how to fly a ship. Comforted him after Jaliye had left him for another pilot.

  And now she would die beside him.

  He suppressed a morbid laugh as he drew some comfort from a final absurd thought: At least I won’t have to ’fess up to her about giving away that damned book.

  NINE

  Day Thirty-one, Month of K’ri’Brax

  The Hall of State, Dartha, Romulus

  ADMIRAL VALDORE FROWNED, his face creasing sharply.

  “What do you mean, you believe that it was destroyed?” he asked, displeasure fairly dripping from his lips as he spoke.

  The holographic image of Commander T’Voras didn’t blink, though Nijil did note that he cast a sidelong glance—presumably at some unlucky guilty party, or his corpse—before he answered. “It seemed prudent to destroy any elements that might relate to this attack. The log buoy was following the same general trajectory of the Coalition ship when we sent it into the sun. But unlike the ship itself, we were unable to ascertain either its destruction or its safety.”

  Nijil cleared his throat slightly, and glanced over at Valdore. They had worked together for so long on and off over the years that most gestures between them were unspoken, though Nijil was always aware of the need to appear appropriately obsequious before the admiral in the presence of lower-ranking officers.

  “Were the klivam sensors unable to target the buoy effectively?” Nijil asked. “I was under the impression, from your reports, that their ship’s sensor systems were rather similar to those of our own vessels.”

  The holographic T’Voras turned slightly to favor Nijil with his answer. “There is significant spatial debris obscuring close scans of the system’s sun. Once the Coalition ship entered the photosphere, we could not easily locate a device as small as a log buoy.”

  Valdore put his knuckles to his forehead, clearly vexed. “So, what you’re saying now is that the buoy might have been sent on an unknown independent trajectory, or it might possibly have dropped into the sun?”

  Now, T’Voras looked a bit more nervous. “Yes…The orders were…I was unclear on protocol, sir. In all of our previous attacks on the klivam vessels, we specifically jammed their communications and prevented them from sending out messages. It was…It seemed prudent to do the same here. And, if I may remind you, Admiral, every other aspect of this operation was a complete success.”

  Valdore leaned forward, sighing. “You do not need to remind me of anything, Commander. Nor do I authorize you to punish any of your crew for this…lapse in judgment. But to be clear, Commander, we undertook all our previous attacks on klivam ships for two reasons: to test the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system, and to seize some of their battle cruisers, both for technological study and covert sabotage.

  “You were engaged in both a technological test and an act of covert sabotage. The log buoy of the Coalition ship you destroyed would have furnished our adversaries with positive proof of Klingon aggression. It might even have been enough to spark a war between the Klingon Empire and this ‘Coalition of Planets.’ Instead, we are left with no proof of any Klingon attack.”

  “But the test of our tactical system on the Coalition ship went flawlessly, Admiral,” T’Voras said. Nijil imagined he could see beads of sweat appear on the commander’s heavily ridged brow.

  “That is the reason you do not face disciplinary action, Commander,” Valdore said, standing. “Yet,” he added, his voice lowering to a near growl. “The next mission you undertake will answer whether or not you have a future with…well, let’s just leave it at that.”

  As Valdore stabbed his finger down upon a button on the desk-mounted com system, the holographic T’Voras saluted nervously, but the salute wasn’t even finished before the image winked out of existence.

  “I don’t believe that Commander T’Voras’s error in judgment will create any lasting repercussions for your plans, sir,” Nijil said, hoping to soothe Valdore, whose head was bowed and shadowed.

  Valdore lifted his face, smiling. “Neither do I, Nijil. We still have other tests to conduct, and there will be more than enough time and opportunity to implicate the Klingons or, conversely, to convince the Klingons that the Coalition ha
s destroyed one of their ships. But Commander T’Voras had gotten a bit too cocky after our last several triumphs; I needed to remind him that he is fallible, and can be replaced.”

  Nijil nodded, smiling at Valdore’s cunning. Although he had designs on furthering his own standing in the power structure of Romulus, for now, Valdore was the right man to back. Of all the officers in the Romulan military, Valdore appeared to be the one who was most adaptable to changing technologies, and to the myriad possibilities of the future.

  Despite Valdore’s failure with the initial telepresence drone-ship remote-control units, which had required telepathic Aenar to operate them, the concept had led to this latest technological breakthrough. Nijil had been ecstatic when he’d been moved from the mostly stalled project charged with the creation of a functional large-scale cloaking device—a unit capable, in theory, of rendering even large war vessels effectively invisible to an adversary—to his present post. Despite the best efforts of some of the finest minds on Romulus, the power needed to cloak a large ship still invariably resulted in a complete loss of fuel containment—and therefore the utter destruction of both a test ship and a hugely expensive cloaking-device prototype. By contrast, the prospect of overcoming an enemy by using direct subspace contact to remotely seize his own consoles and control computers had proved to be a much more fruitful area of research.

  Nijil now felt extremely confident that the recent telecapture breakthroughs over which he had presided for the past couple of khaidoa had proven to Valdore that he had decided to back not only the right technology for the next war, but also the right technologist to bring the Praetor’s dreams to fruition.

  Now, after the convenient death of Ehrehin—at the hands of Nijil’s own agents, though no one seemed to have discovered this inconvenient fact as of yet—and the success of the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system, Nijil was all but certain that a place of honor in the annals of Romulan scientific and military history awaited him.

  Once his ideas had been thoroughly tested and properly deployed, of course.

  As had often been the case during the last few months he had spent both on and off Romulus, Trip Tucker was feeling exceedingly ill at ease. Playing his public role of the junior engineer named Cunaehr, he was attending the funeral services for Ehrehin i’Ramnau tr’Avrak. Trip had discovered only today that the old man had no surviving relatives; his five sons and one daughter had all been killed in action during various Romulan military incursions. This revelation certainly made Ehrehin’s having balked at completing his warp-drive project easier to understand.

  As he stood beneath the midday shadows cast by one of the great stone archways of Dartha’s ancient mausoleum district, Trip found he had little to do other than to concentrate on not making a public spectacle of himself. After all, none of his pre-mission intelligence cramming, or any of his other studies to date, had brought him up to speed on Romulan funerary customs, a fact that was especially unfortunate given that his covert persona was supposed to be quite familiar with all Romulan customs. Whenever he hadn’t been working alongside Ehrehin, Trip had spent a great deal of his time poring over Romulan texts, which he absorbed as quickly as he could translate them. He had even gone so far as to improvise a text-scanning-and-conversion device, which read to him aloud in standard English through the translation units the Adigeons had mounted inside his ears.

  Lucky for me there aren’t too many people here, Trip thought. Less than a dozen others had come to the crypt, and most of these were fellow scientists or lab assistants with whom Tucker was already familiar, having worked alongside them fairly closely for the past few months. A few uniformed centurions and other military officers were present as well, the most conspicuous of which was a tall, broad-shouldered brute who seemed to be scrutinizing all the mourners very carefully as they came and went.

  Trip recognized the man as the same brusque centurion who had been in charge of the security team that had come to Ehrehin’s lab after the Ejhoi Ormiin assassins had attacked. He had taken the lone surviving assassin away, promising to interrogate her. So what’s he doing here, giving the stink-eye to all of us? Trip wondered, his hackles rising.

  Trip watched as the others began to approach the raised granite bier upon which stood the half-meter-high ceramic tibulec vessel that contained Ehrehin’s mortal remains; per Romulan custom, the scientist had been cremated within an eisae—a single revolution of the imperial homeworld—after his death. Each person who approached the urn performed an intricate series of hand movements while simultaneously murmuring words that Trip interpreted as some sort of ancient prayer. He couldn’t see exactly what the other visitors were doing, or hear their words precisely, but the whole business strongly resembled the burial ritual he had learned a few months earlier, when he and T’Pol had interred the body of their infant daughter Elizabeth at the T’Karath Sanctuary on Vulcan.

  I should be able to fake my way through this easily enough, Trip thought, his confidence rising as his turn neared to mount the few narrow steps that led up to the highly decorated, tubular vessel. Despite his covert mission, he still had every reason to pay his heartfelt personal respects to Ehrehin—the man had saved his life and taken him under his wing even after discovering that Trip was actually a non-Romulan spy—and he needed to do whatever he could to send his fondest, most positive thoughts toward whatever afterlife Ehrehin might have anticipated. As he approached the raised bier, prepared to make a quick—but not too quick—run-through of the gestures and murmurs he’d seen the other mourners make, he redoubled his concentration on remaining as inconspicuous as possible.

  As he moved forward, Trip caught a flash of movement to his left, and his newly acquired confidence sank like a stone dropped into a canyon.

  “Please, feel free,” Ehrehin’s young laboratory assistant said, making an “after you” gesture.

  Centurion Terix studied the young man again carefully, just as he had done earlier in today’s animaur’olhao, the Ceremony of Respect. Something seemed out of place with the man, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The dead scientist’s assistant seemed nervous; perhaps the loss of his colleague was the sole reason for his apparent discomfiture, or maybe it was something else, something less than seemly.

  “No, you were closest to Technologist Ehrehin,” Terix said. “You may perform the rite of pizan’ris.”

  The young man seemed to swallow hard before he nodded and walked up the small steps that led to the tibulec of his slain mentor. His back angled away from Terix, he began to speak, his voice low, and his hands moving in the time-honored manner. Finally he quit speaking and touched his index finger and pinkie to the base of the tibulec.

  The gesture brought a rush of insight to Terix, as well as certainty about what he had to do next.

  As the assistant turned away and descended from the bier, he pulled up the hood on his mourning cloak. Terix looked over to Sweba, the uhlan who stood guard at the rear of the mausoleum district’s ceremonial arena; Terix jerked his chin up sharply, directing the uhlan’s attention toward the departing young man.

  After seeing Sweba’s curt nod of acknowledgment, Terix turned back to the tibulec and concluded the ceremony swiftly, using a fusing device and a military seal to specify that this vessel contained the physical essence of one who had given his life in service to the Romulan Star Empire and Praetor D’deridex. Although Technologist Ehrehin had a checkered past—like so many of the greatest scientific and military leaders of Romulus—his work and service had nevertheless furthered both the strategic and the tactical goals of the Empire, and the Praetor who personified her. And as he’d learned yesterday, the murder of the scientist had been far larger than the simple act of burglary that appeared to have precipitated it. Terix felt certain that Doctor Ehrehin had been a martyr to a conspiracy whose existence was known, as yet, to perhaps no more than a handful of others.

  Stalking away, Terix saw that Sweba had properly detained the assistant—a man whom Terix belie
ved was not who he pretended to be.

  “And what makes you so certain that this Cunaehr is a Vulcan spy?” Valdore asked, squinting up at Terix from behind his vast desk, atop which sat numerous reports and other paper documents. On the wall behind the admiral was mounted the dathe’anofv-sen—the Honor Blade—that usually hung at the admiral’s side.

  “During Doctor Ehrehin’s animaur’olhao, he performed several movements that I know to be specific to Vulcan tradition, rather than ours,” Terix said. He had hoped that Valdore would have received the news of this discovery a bit more favorably.

  “I had no idea you were so well versed in Vulcan traditions, Centurion,” the admiral said, lofting an eyebrow.

  The admiral’s stare made Terix feel like a bug in a jar. “I performed two covert intelligence missions there right out of the Academy.”

  “And you find this man’s…‘Vulcan movement’ to be proof that Cunaehr is a Vulcan? Have you interrogated him? Tested his blood?”

  Terix nodded. “We have interrogated him, sir, though not as thoroughly as we might without authorization from your office. Our admittedly cursory medical tests on him revealed that he has a very unusual mutative blood type, with traits common to both Vulcan and Romulan genetics.”

  Valdore held up a hand, palm outward. “Do not force further interrogation on the prisoner yet. Your…allegation may require further investigation first. Doctor Ehrehin was working on a very important project for the Praetor’s fleet when he died, a project whose ultimate goal remains unfulfilled. This Cunaehr may hold the key to reaching that goal. If you damage him, or do anything to make his mental state more…fragile than it may be already, you may seriously jeopardize that prospect.”

  “Then do you wish me to release him?” Terix asked. He had hoped for permission to use every tool at his disposal to extract the truth from the scientist, but it appeared that Valdore wasn’t about to grant him that.