Kobayashi Maru

by Michael A. Martin

  “Sensors are coming back up,” Akagi said, coughing at the acrid by-products of the damped-down electrical fires that still lingered in the air.

  The ship’s ventilation system must be down, too, Hernandez thought, cursing inwardly. But she knew Columbia had to deal with issues even more urgent than life support.

  To Hernandez’s relief, the viewscreen lit up and displayed a three-dimensional tactical image of what lay above Columbia’s dorsal hull. The two Vulcan ships seemed to be doing nothing, though Hernandez was pleased to see that the warp-propulsion ring encircling the one they had fired upon appeared to be damaged and offline.

  “Transmit our bridge flight recorder files to Starfleet Command now,” Hernandez shouted to Valerian. “They need to know what the Vulcans are up to, in case they don’t give us time to send a report.”

  “I’m trying, Captain,” Valerian said. “Subspace communications seem to be working only intermittently.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Fletcher said as she wiped the sweat away from beneath her blond bangs. “Why would the Vulcans fire on other Coalition ships?”

  “Maybe they had intel that told them something about the cargo they were carrying?” Hernandez wondered aloud.

  “Maybe. But that wouldn’t explain why they fired on us as well,” Fletcher said.

  Hernandez’s mind reeled as she realized she had no answers. All she knew for certain was that this situation was not, in the words of members of a certain pointy-eared race, logical. Unless…

  “Unless the Vulcans aren’t the ones piloting those ships,” she said, her voice low enough that only her XO would hear. “What if the Romulans have learned to commandeer Vulcan tech, like they did with the Klingon battle cruisers at Draylax?”

  “Captain, sensors are picking up three more incoming ships!” Thayer shouted.

  Hernandez stared, slack-jawed, as the image on the viewscreen changed yet again.

  Dropping out of warp were two more D’Kyr-type combat cruisers, and one of the larger, better-armed Sh’Raan-class ships, which looked like a spear jammed through a hoop. The weaponry the newcomers carried between them would be more than enough to blow both Columbia and the remnants of the cargo fleet to little more than drifting trails of vapor in a few seconds, polarized hull plating notwithstanding.

  “Some days you just can’t win,” Hernandez said as she slumped back into her chair. Turning toward her XO, she said, “Better prepare to launch the log buoy, Veronica. While we still can.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  Enterprise NX-01, near the Gamma Hydra sector

  “SHUTTLEPOD TWO IS MAKING its final docking approach now, Captain,” Hoshi said.

  Archer nodded, rising from his command chair. “I’m going down to the launch bay to meet them,” he said. “You have the bridge, Hoshi.”

  The bridge was running with a skeleton crew at the moment; the most overworked of Enterprise’s personnel, including O’Neill and McCall, were taking well-deserved breaks during the outbound voyage, at least until the time came to bring the ship about deep in the Gamma Hydra sector, retracing the original patrol route back toward Earth.

  As he traveled down to E deck in the turbolift, Archer was glad that relatively few people would be around to witness the return of the stolen shuttlepod. No one had questioned him about it directly over the last few days, but by now scuttlebutt had placed T’Pol and Malcolm on any number of secret missions. He felt fairly certain that none of the crew’s guesses had come even remotely close to the reality, whatever that might actually turn out to be. He was eager to learn the truth himself.

  For the past several days, whenever he hadn’t been preoccupied with some emergency or other—his life-or-death duel on Qo’noS sprang instantly, not to mention painfully, to mind—Archer had mentally rehearsed what he planned to say to T’Pol and Malcolm once they returned. The chance that they might not make it back had been a variable he hadn’t allowed himself to consider; he couldn’t bear to dwell on the possibility that he might have lost two more of his most valuable officers and friends so soon after Trip’s “death.”

  But now, as his reunion with the two errant officers neared, he felt his anger being pushed into the recesses of his mind by a rising sense of relief; his momentary pleasure at that unexpected feeling calmed his soul. Whether the root cause was mere fatigue or an emotional ricochet off the ceaseless frustrations all the recent political uncertainty within both Starfleet and the Coalition Council had caused him, by the time he reached the entrance to Launch Bay Two he had settled into an almost Vulcan state of serenity.

  The hatch slid open in front of him, and Archer saw that Ensign Bougie was scuttling about outside the newly docked shuttlepod, making post-flight checks of the little ship’s outer hull and external propulsion components. The launch bay’s magnetic docking arm stood just above the shuttlepod’s roof, and the launch bay air seemed charged with expectation, along with the traditional chill it usually carried immediately after the bay had been repressurized.

  “Ensign, I’d like a bit of privacy to welcome my officers back aboard,” Archer said.

  Bougie looked up, apparently surprised and caught in mid-thought, his mouth twisted to one side. “Yes, sir,” he said finally, gathering his materials up quickly. Archer noted that he still used old-style writing implements and clipboards, checking off the items on his duty list manually rather than relying on computers and datapads.

  A few moments later Archer had positioned himself directly outside the shuttlepod, standing beside its stabilizer wing as he waited for the dorsal hatch to open. T’Pol exited first, followed by Reed. Both wore dark, tight-fitting but otherwise nondescript clothing, which was partially covered by loose Vulcan-style travelers’ robes.

  “Welcome back aboard Enterprise,” Archer said, inflating his words with an air of laconic drollness. In spite of himself, he was enjoying the look of discomfiture he saw on both their faces, especially Malcolm’s.

  “Captain, we can explain,” Reed said in a guilt-ridden tone, before T’Pol had even had a chance to open her mouth.

  Archer released a long exhalation through pursed lips. He wanted to ask after Trip Tucker, whose absence now seemed as conspicuous as a corpse at a funeral. At the moment, however, he was in no mood to hear what could well prove to be very bad news. Instead of saying anything, he opted instead merely to smile as he held both arms out before him, making the universal gesture for “give me a hug.”

  “You can save your explanations for later,” he said. “First, are both of you all right?”

  Reed stepped awkwardly into the hug, half embracing Archer while patting him on the back lightly, though just hard enough to force him to suppress a wince. T’Pol merely stood in place, looking nearly as awkward as Reed did.

  “We managed to make it back in one piece, with no scratches or dents, as has the shuttlepod,” Reed said in overemphatic tones as he pulled back just enough to make a close study of Archer’s bruised face. “Which is apparently more than we can say about you, Captain.”

  “Cracked ribs,” Archer said. “I had a mean encounter with a Klingon admiral, but I think he ended up looking even worse than I do. Long story, short ending.

  “Like I said, we’ll have a long talk later about what the hell you two were doing when you took that shuttlepod,” Archer said, trying to color his words with the same stern, scolding authority he remembered from the occasional childhood reprimands he had received from his father. “All I’m going to say on the subject right now is that I’m getting a bit tired of my most trusted officers deciding that the rules don’t apply to them. Finding a detour off the main road doesn’t automatically make it the route to take. And if my most trusted officers want to continue being my most trusted officers, they’d better have an explicit understanding that there will not be any more detours.”

  T’Pol raised an eyebrow. “Captain, you have my sincere apologies. Our actions were inappropriat
e and badly timed. I hope that you will allow me and Lieutenant Reed to make amends.”

  Archer turned and strode in the direction of the hatchway that led out of the launch bay and deeper into E deck’s interior, T’Pol and Reed following in his wake. “As far as anyone on this ship other than myself is concerned, you won’t need to make amends. Phlox is the only person other than the three of us who knows that what you did wasn’t authorized. Everybody else thinks you were on some kind of secret spy mission for Starfleet.”

  “Which is true, except for the Starfleet part,” Reed said, grinning sheepishly.

  Archer turned—a bit too sharply for his ribs—and growled, “Nobody else needs to know that. My log will show that T’Pol needed a lot of therapeutic meditation, and that you, Malcolm, were in your quarters recovering from the worst case of the Altairian quick-step in the history of human space exploration.”

  Reed made a face, but said nothing in response.

  “Captain, the ship that helped ferry us in and out of Romulan space was a Vulcan intelligence vessel,” T’Pol said.

  “I was wondering how you were going to manage to pull off that part of your plan,” Archer said. “You were flying a short-range Starfleet shuttlepod, after all.”

  “Apparently, a craft as small as a shuttlepod can escape detection even deep inside Romulan space so long as it calls no undue attention to itself,” T’Pol said. “Unfortunately, the only way we could discover that fact was to proceed with our plan.”

  “Gaining access to a Vulcan spy’s rather detailed Romulan star charts didn’t hurt either,” Reed added.

  Archer stared at him as the hatch that led to E deck’s corridors opened in front of them. “You’ve got maps?” The official Coalition maps of the Romulan Empire were astonishingly incomplete, cobbled together mainly by means of long-range scans. Archer didn’t know what good Reed’s maps would do anyone at the moment, but he suspected that they might become extremely valuable in the days ahead.

  Reed nodded, grinning an “aw-shucks” grin that he had developed after four years of close association with Trip. “I certainly hope those maps will buy us back some of the goodwill we’ve lost.”

  “I’ll consider it a down payment,” Archer said. “As long as it stays in trustworthy hands, and away from certain shady characters I could name.” The idea of having a resource that the mysterious black-garbed Agent Harris and his secretive Starfleet intelligence organization might lack appealed to him greatly.

  Reed swiped his index finger across his chest, miming the letter X. “Cross my heart, sir. This little adventure of ours had nothing to do with the bureau.”

  As they approached the central turboshaft, T’Pol spoke again. “Captain, while we docked with the Vulcan vessel, we also discovered some intelligence related to you.”

  “Me?” Archer said as he came to a stop just outside the turbolift door, which slid obediently open for him.

  She nodded. “We know, for instance, about the evidence you presented to the Coalition Council concerning the Romulans and this new ability of theirs to remotely commandeer Klingon vessels.”

  As the trio stepped into the turbolift, Archer said, “Good. That ought to make it easier to persuade the Council not to get caught up in the wrong war against the wrong enemy.” The doors hissed closed and Archer directed the turbolift to A deck, and the bridge.

  “Our understanding, at least from those aboard the Vulcan ship,” T’Pol said, “was that the Vulcan government may be far more inclined to accept your interpretation of the danger posed by the Romulans than are the other Coalition members.”

  “I wonder how much of that agreement stems from the relationship we know exists between the Vulcans and the Romulans?” Archer said. He knew that Reed had to know about that relationship by now; he couldn’t have undertaken an extended mission into Romulan space without gaining some exposure to the startling physiological similarities between the two races.

  “I am not sure, Captain,” T’Pol said with evident sincerity; Archer knew that this was an extremely sensitive topic for her.

  Noting they were about to reach the bridge, Archer pressed the stop button on the control pad. “Before we go any further, I want to cover the one topic we’ve all been avoiding since you two came aboard.” He wasn’t certain he wanted to hear the answer, but he had to know the truth. “How is Trip? Did you find him?”

  Reed nodded and displayed a sober expression. “We found him, and arrived just in the nick of time, too. Whatever these psychic flashes or connections that T’Pol has been having with our ‘late’ chief engineer, she was right; his life was in danger. After we helped get him out of the jam he’d gotten himself into, we offered to bring him back, but he refused. He felt he still had a mission to complete.”

  “Something about the Romulan warp-seven project?” Archer asked.

  “That is at least one of the objectives he appears to be pursuing,” T’Pol said, her voice dropping lower. “He had also gathered other information, which he passed on to us. It concerned the Klingon attack on Draylax.”

  “He found more evidence that the Romulans were behind what happened at Draylax?”

  T’Pol shook her head, looking almost wistful. “No, Captain. His Romulan intelligence contacts had led him to believe that the Klingons were indeed the aggressors at Draylax.”

  Archer was puzzled. “But we already know that can’t be true. How could he discover something that isn’t true, unless…”

  The answer to his question dawned on him before he could finish his sentence, and the idea chilled him to the core.

  “Unless he was purposely being misled,” T’Pol said. “Meaning that his identity as a spy may well have been compromised.”

  Archer shuddered, trying desperately to force his mind not to wander down the path it was already navigating. If Trip was indeed compromised, any information he was finding was likely to be tainted. And if he failed to pass along what was almost certainly disinformation concocted by the Romulan Star Empire’s intelligence services—or if he managed to discover that Romulus’s own spymasters were using him as a pawn in their game—then he was likely to end up in the crosshairs of some Romulan assassin.

  Archer knew that in the shadowy world of espionage, compromised spies frequently ended up very dead.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  S.S. Kobayashi Maru, Gamma Hydra sector

  KOJIRO VANCE TRACED the swell of the woman’s dusky-hued hip as she slumbered, his fingertip traveling over the exquisite area he had so recently ravished. She had tasted like plums, although he granted, in retrospect, that it might have been the liqueur they had consumed before they’d had passionate sex against nearly every flat surface in his opulently appointed quarters.

  Orana Shubé clearly wanted to go places on the ship, but Vance wasn’t certain that there was any place for her to go. After all, she wasn’t particularly intelligent, and her mechanical aptitude was laughable. He suspected that she would best serve him exactly where she was, in the captain’s bed. Or, perhaps, in the galley, preparing food for the crew and passengers. And, of course, the…temporary guests.

  Yawning, he clambered over his plaything and padded naked toward the shower, absentmindedly scratching his groin as he walked. Stepping into the shower, he mourned the days on Earth when he’d been able to enjoy real showers, with unlimited supplies of hot water. But on a fuel carrier like the Maru, carrying the huge quantities of water needed for such a personal extravagance was not something he could justify, either to his financial backers in the Tau Ceti system, or to the crew that would expect to share this amenity. And since the Maru is a retrofitted Klingon fuel carrier, he thought, having any luxury at all is, well, a luxury itself.

  He heard a chime at his door, and poked his head out of the shower stall. “Enter!”

  Jacqueline Searles, the chief engineer of the Kobayashi Maru, stepped into the cabin, first noticing the nude woman on Vance’s bed, then turning her he
ad just enough to ascertain that her captain was in the shower.

  “What is it, Jackie?” Vance asked, reaching for a towel.

  She made a face. “Whatever is in that cargo we picked up for the Horizon seems to be slowing us down.”

  “How is that possible?” Vance asked, spreading his hands wide and shrugging. The towel fluttered to the deck.

  Searles made another face and put a hand out as if to block her view of his nakedness as she turned away. He noticed that she seemed to object a great deal less to viewing Orana’s plump behind. “Would you mind terribly putting some clothes on, Captain?” Searles said. “I don’t need to talk to…all of you.”

  Shrugging again, Vance walked naked to his large wardrobe, which he opened so he could consider which of his many fanciful outfits he was going to wear. After all, if he was to be dealing with his…temporary guests again, he wanted to make the best of impressions, regardless of their present demeanor.

  They’d picked up the nearly two dozen new passengers nine days ago, along with their cargo, at Altair VI. The Earth Cargo Service freighter Horizon was supposed to have been the ship to ferry them, along with their equipment, from the Maru’s destination of the Sataghni II fuel depot in the near side of the Gamma Hydra sector all the way to the outskirts of the Tezel-Oroko system, deep in section ten. But the Horizon hadn’t been heard from in about a week, and Vance had agreed to perform the Horizon’s run—surreptitiously, of course—for triple his regular fee. Finding out a little bit about the sensitive nature of the mission had also been part of the bargain Vance had struck with his clandestine passengers.

  He’d kept the full facts about the mission, at least as he knew them, from his first mate, Arturo Stiles, a man whose pragmatism was matched only by his excitability. So far as Stiles knew, they were making an unscheduled but highly paid delivery, and that was all he needed to know for now. The unexpected windfall ought to have made the economics-minded Stiles very happy indeed.