Kobayashi Maru

by Michael A. Martin

  Terix nodded with a grunt. “I’ll set us down in the rough country, there,” he said, pointing at a tactical schematic displayed on one of the console readouts located conveniently between the pilot and copilot stations. “Our landing site will be only two, perhaps three mat’drih from the dissident compound.”

  That’s maybe three, four klicks, tops, Trip thought after performing a quick numeric conversion in his head. Fortunately, neither the atmospheric composition nor the temperature would require either man to be burdened with heavy environmental gear during the hike to the dissident enclave. Hand-to-hand combat in pressure suits could be damned inconvenient.

  Terix set the Drolae down with surprising gentleness, and Trip was delighted to note that death had not begun to rain down upon them from their nearby target, or from whatever had created the orbiting ghost the sensors had thought they’d seen.

  Not yet, at least.

  “Can you handle a hand disruptor, Cunaehr?” the centurion said as he unstrapped himself from his seat and moved immediately aft toward the weapons locker.

  “I did a bit of hobby shooting back at the university,” Trip said as he undid his own flight harness and followed Terix into the rear of the ship. After watching the centurion open the locker and arm himself, Trip silently accepted the heavy silver pistol that Terix handed him.

  “This is the dangerous end, right?” Trip said, pointing at the weapon’s tapered, hand-length barrel.

  Terix only scowled, then checked and holstered his own weapon before handing Trip an empty holster belt.

  Again, no stun setting, Trip thought as he gave the weapon a quick once-over, making certain that the safety was on. He hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to fire one of these things in combat again anytime soon, though he knew that was probably far too much to hope for. After all, they were about to raid the stronghold of a cold-blooded killer who had already proved he had no compunctions about killing.

  Strapping on the holster belt, Trip thought, Let’s hope my old friend Sopek is getting careless in his old age and left a window open for us.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Shuttlepod Two

  SO FAR AS MALCOLM REED KNEW, the name of the aquamarine planet that turned slowly several hundred klicks below the shuttlepod had never been recorded on any Earth star chart. In fact, it was one of the farthest-flung worlds that human eyes had ever beheld.

  But if Commander T’Pol was right, another human may already have preceded him to this remote place.

  “How can you be so certain we’ll find Commander Tucker here?” Reed said.

  T’Pol raised an eyebrow as she regarded him with that damnably cool Vulcan assuredness of hers. “My intelligence sources have always proved reliable in the past, Lieutenant.”

  “I’ll grant you that the Vulcan transport vessel you got us docked with did a damned fine job of sneaking us past those Romulan patrols at Alpha Fornacis,” Reed said. Not to mention not reporting our whereabouts to Starfleet, he added silently. It was obvious that the ship in question had been up to something other than the banal tasks of moving passengers and cargo in order to operate with impunity—sometimes at speeds in excess of warp factor six—more than half a parsec inside territory claimed by the Romulan Star Empire.

  He still felt annoyed at having been confined to the shuttlepod for most of their three-day voyage, deprived of even the laconic company of T’Pol, who had been allowed at least partial access to the transport vessel that had carried Shuttlepod Two so close to its destination. But even the usually stoic T’Pol had complained about how little access she had been given to the all but invisible Vulcan benefactor whom her V’Shar contacts had persuaded to grant them covert passage into Romulan space. The Vulcans seemed quite intent on keeping a tight lid on whatever they were really up to so deep within the Romulan sphere of interest. This cloak of secrecy made Reed very nervous about whatever it was that the new, purportedly more transparent T’Pau regime on Vulcan might want to keep hidden from its Coalition partners. And those worries weren’t so much for his own safety, or even that of T’Pol, but for that of Trip. A second Coalition-based spy bureau blundering about here among the Romulans could well put Trip’s mission and life in jeopardy without meaning to do so or even noticing the damage they’d done.

  Of course, he was uncomfortably aware that the very same accusation could well be leveled at both himself and T’Pol.

  Putting those matters aside for the moment, Reed continued his conversation with T’Pol: “But the only confirmation we have that we might find Trip here, as opposed to any of a dozen other systems, comes from your…visions.”

  “I do not have visions, Lieutenant,” T’Pol said, her equanimity apparently shaken but little by Reed’s almost accusatory point. “But I remain convinced that I have achieved at least an intermittent telepathic link with Trip—” She paused, apparently catching herself in the act of revealing more than she preferred to reveal. “With Commander Tucker. There is ample precedent for such things, Mister Reed. The Aenar of Andoria, for example.”

  Reed still didn’t feel sufficiently convinced to be able to stop himself from subjecting T’Pol’s reasoning to another round of verbal destruction testing. “The Aenar are very strong telepaths, Commander. I thought the esper ability was restricted to touch in Vulcans.”

  “That is certainly true for the vast majority of us,” she said, reiterating a point she had made not long ago to Captain Archer and Doctor Phlox. “However, there have been exceptions. I have become convinced that the link Commander Tucker and I share represents just such an exception.”

  Knowing what he did about the neurological effects of the trellium-D to which T’Pol had once been addicted, Reed felt a good deal less sanguine than she apparently did about trusting her subjective feelings of certainty.

  “Please forgive me for saying this, Commander,” he said very gently. “But I think you’re putting a great deal of faith in what might turn out to be nothing more than a dream.” Or even some residual effect of trellium-D exposure, he thought, recalling T’Pol’s recovery from an addiction to the neurologically toxic mineral.

  She said nothing as she stared straight ahead at the planet.

  “It just doesn’t seem very scientific to me,” he said, uncomfortable with the spreading silence.

  Seeming to balance her words very delicately on a bulwark of nettles and brambles, she said, “I am a Vulcan, Lieutenant. And Vulcans do not pursue mere dreams across parsecs of interstellar space.”

  Never underestimate the power of dreams, he thought. Or nightmares.

  “Dreams. Visions. Gut hunches. Call them whatever you like, Commander,” he said with a shrug. “I just have to ask whether it’s entirely…logical for you to place so much trust in a phenomenon that neither of us can really look at objectively.”

  To her credit, the only sign of emotion she allowed herself to display was an inquisitive tip of the head as she turned to face him again. “If you truly harbor so many doubts about what we’re doing out here, then why did you insist on coming along?”

  Now that is a damned fine question, he thought; he had asked himself the very same thing more than a few times since she had first asked it just before they had absconded with Shuttlepod Two. In light of all the subspace chatter they’d subsequently picked up concerning the Klingon-Draylaxian conflict that had broken out since they’d left Enterprise, Reed could only hope that their current quest wouldn’t prove to be as barmy as it might now look to Captain Archer or the rest of his crew.

  “I already told you, Commander,” he said at length. “We both want to rescue Trip if he’s really in as much trouble as you say he is. Besides, I couldn’t just let you go off on your own.”

  The eyebrow rose again. “Even if this entire endeavor ultimately turns out to be—what is the phrase you humans use?—a wild goose chase?”

  He smiled gently. “Especially then.”

  After a pause, T’Pol said, “I am placing a great deal of faith in you as w
ell, Lieutenant. Specifically in your discretion.”

  “I thought I already proved how discreet I can be when I didn’t rat you out to Captain Archer,” Reed said.

  “Of course, Mister Reed. But that action only required confidence on a relatively small scale. In allowing you to accompany me on this mission, you are almost certain to discover one of my people’s most closely guarded secrets. And that knowledge will require a much larger degree of discretion.”

  Reed found it difficult to imagine the nature of any secret the Vulcans might be so intent upon protecting. Nevertheless, he shrugged and said, “I used to work for a bureau whose stock in trade was secrets. I think you can rely on me to keep mum when it counts.”

  A flashing light on the pilot’s console interrupted whatever she had been about to say in response. In that same instant, the shuttlepod shook violently before settling back to normal perhaps a second or two later.

  “What the hell was that?” Reed said as he consulted several conflicting sets of readouts that were vying for his attention across the copilot’s console.

  “We appear to have encountered an intense warp bow shock,” T’Pol said as her long fingers moved across her instruments with almost preternatural speed. “The phenomenon is very similar to a starship’s subspace wake.”

  Reed’s own subspace field monitor confirmed T’Pol’s observation a moment later. “That must mean we have company here,” he said. Though he had yet to locate any other vessel, either by eye or by sensors, his readings had revealed that the already fading subspace concussion fit a particular profile: that of a ship that had suddenly collapsed its warp field bubble, thereby dropping almost instantaneously from high warp speed back to the Einstein-mandated sublight velocities of normal space.

  Whoever’s behind the wheel on that ship has got to be barking mad, Reed thought, to perform a maneuver like that so close to a planet.

  “I still cannot pinpoint the other ship’s precise location or heading using only passive scans,” T’Pol said.

  “Maybe the planet’s gravity well tore her apart as she decelerated,” Reed ventured.

  She shook her head. “If that had occurred, then I should be able to detect solid and gaseous debris and hard radiation. Switching to active sensor mode and scanning.”

  Reed looked up from his console, and he was immediately transfixed by what he saw crossing the half-sunlit world below. “Wait,” he said, jabbing an index finger toward the forward transparent aluminum window. “Have a look at that first.”

  A bright orange line of fire was inscribing itself across the dark side of the planet’s terminator, extending at supersonic speeds a rapidly collapsing and steeply descending column of ionized atmosphere. The glowing, meteoric mass at the growing line’s forefront hurtled toward the side of the planet that presently stood exposed to the pitiless blue-white glare of this solar system’s primary star.

  Reed turned toward T’Pol, watching her in silence as she scrutinized the enigmatic trail of fire that bisected the planet’s skies. After a moment she checked a scanner readout on her console, and then swiftly rose from her seat to check a secondary monitor located on the port side of the cockpit compartment.

  As though responding to some inner will of their own, Reed’s eyes dropped toward the portion of T’Pol’s anatomy that was, for the moment, in closest proximity.

  He thought, She really does have quite a nice bum, doesn’t she?

  She turned toward him, abruptly scattering his already errant train of thought. His cheeks flushed with a heat born of something other than atmospheric friction.

  “The object is on a precise heading for the coordinates that my intel sources have provided,” she said, showing no sign of having noticed his discomfiture as she retook her seat.

  Reed wondered again about T’Pol’s intel sources, upon which they had both staked so much. How much did they know about Trip’s current mission, or that of Trip’s adversaries on this planet? Had the V’Shar allowed them to come here to aid Trip because the Vulcan spy bureau shared Trip’s goals, or were they motivated by something else entirely? Were they counting on T’Pol to remove a troublesome game piece from their chessboard?

  Or were they banking on the opposite outcome?

  Instead of raising any of those doubtless sensitive points, or launching into an infinitely recursive volley of questions, Reed merely nodded and began entering a series of commands into his console. “Plotting an intercept course, Commander. Passive sensors only.” There was no point, after all, in shouting their arrival from the proverbial rooftops, as it were, regardless of whether the new arrival proved to be friend, foe, or merely a large meteor or asteroid fragment that had chosen this particular time and place to cross the planet’s path.

  Judging from both the instruments and the evidence of his own eyes, Reed concluded that whatever was creating the pyrotechnics in the planet’s atmosphere was making an extremely bumpy descent. He braced himself to follow it down as T’Pol engaged the impulse drive.

  As the shuttlepod lurched into a motion that was almost but not quite in phase with that of his stomach, Reed couldn’t help but recall a recent, similarly harrowing descent through the much-thinner atmosphere of Mars. Moving surreptitiously, he reached beneath the copilot’s console even as the little ship began to bounce and shake in the planet’s steadily thickening blanket of air.

  He sighed in relief when his fingers brushed against the motion-sickness bag dispenser.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Sunday, July 20, 2155

  Qam-Chee, the First City, Qo’noS

  ARCHER PUSHED the blade through the air awkwardly, watching as his opponent jumped back.

  He might have felt a bit better doing the move if his opponent hadn’t been Corporal O’Malley, one of the two unarmed MACO troopers who shared the “preparation room” with him. The three of them had already had a perfunctory discussion about how little a Klingon “preparation room” differed from a jail cell on Earth. But since Archer had actually become very closely acquainted with a Klingon jail cell not so very long ago, he felt he could discuss the special nuances of difference with real authority. For one thing, during his current stay the Klingons had given him the use of one of their curved, arm-long swords; it was a wickedly sharp, two-sided, four-pointed blade known as a bat’leth.

  Archer had seen Klingons carrying these weapons, both here on Qo’noS and three years ago at the deuterium-mining colony on Yeq, where he and some of his crew helped a group of beleaguered miners repel a raid by Klingon marauders. However, seeing the half-moon-shaped weapon strapped to a man’s back or mounted on a wall was a quite different experience from actually handling one—or depending upon the odd-shaped blade in a life-or-death battle.

  He regarded the bat’leth that rested in his hands for a long moment, staring down at its double blades. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the purpose of the secondary pair of blades, the one whose edges lay closest to the weapon’s central handgrip. On top of that, the whole damned thing seemed a lot more cumbersome than a straight long sword, given that the bat’leth seemed to require a two-handed grip, making it much more a close-quarters weapon than a straight sword of comparable length.

  I guess it could be worse, he thought, imagining having to fight off the ravening, bat’leth-twirling Krell using the short Andorian Ushaan-Tor blades, another weapon he had never used but was forced to wield against Shran in a ritual duel.

  A man’s deep voice spoke from behind him. “I never thought I’d say this to a Tera’ngan, but it’s good to see you.”

  Archer turned to face the speaker, but it took him a moment to recognize the aged-looking Klingon who had evidently just entered the room. The man was missing an eye and part of one foot, and had lost a significant amount of weight, but after some initial doubt, Archer recognized him as the Klingon legal advocate who had defended him when he’d stood trial for allegedly dishonoring Duras, the former captain of the I.K.S. Bortas. For his efforts, the advocate h
ad been exiled to Rura Penthe for a year alongside Archer, who had been fortunate enough to escape confinement, unlike his hapless Klingon defender.

  “Kolos?” Archer handed the bat’leth to Corporal Ryan and rushed over to the older Klingon. “I didn’t expect…I didn’t think—”

  “You didn’t think I’d survive an entire year on Rura Penthe, did you?” Kolos said, interrupting.

  Archer returned the other man’s wry smile. “I don’t think I would have survived that.”

  Kolos smiled back, his sharpened teeth now showing dull edges. “I told you then that I had a very good reason to survive, Captain. Even if I am but one voice, I am still one voice that can call for honor to be restored to our people through justice rather than violence.”

  Archer motioned to a nearby bench, where he perched beside Kolos as the frail-looking Klingon sat. “Not to put a fine point on it, Kolos, but I sure could use that ‘call for honor’ today.”

  Shaking his head, Kolos looked at Archer with his one good eye. “Chancellor M’Rek is under heavy political fire from those who seek to take his position; your timing could have been worse, but not by much. I think that he truly means you no ill will, nor does he—or the Council—intend to go to war against the Coalition. But he and his High Council allies see the message you delivered today as an affront. And that cannot go unchallenged.”

  “But why was it an affront to them?” Archer asked. “If they’re telling the truth, there isn’t any harm in proving to us that somebody else was responsible for the attack on Draylax.”

  Kolos smiled. “Do you have children, Captain?”

  “Not yet,” Archer said.

  “Well, I have fathered many. And one thing I can tell you that I suspect is true of all cultures—Klingon, Tera’ngan, Andorian—is that when a child is embarrassed about something, he will fight all the harder to protect himself than if he is outright lying. Governments are not so different from children, Captain.”