Kobayashi Maru

by Michael A. Martin

  The intercom on Archer’s desk whistled, presenting a welcome interruption to the captain’s gloomy ruminations. Toggling the channel open, he said, “Archer here. Go ahead.”

  “We’re receiving a priority communication from Starfleet, Captain,” said Hoshi, a note of urgency audible in her voice. “It’s Admiral Gardner.”

  “Thanks, Hoshi. Pipe it straight to my ready room, please.”

  Archer wasted no time activating the blank monitor atop his desk, which quickly shifted to the weary but hyperalert visage of Sam Gardner. T’Pol and Reed immediately began moving toward the ready room door to give Archer some privacy, but stopped after he motioned them to stay and positioned his monitor so that its visual sensor pickups showed the admiral everyone present in the room. The motion forced him to suppress a wince of pain, a reminder of his ordeal on Qo’noS.

  The silver-haired admiral noted the presence of Archer’s subordinates with a nod, and then focused solely on the captain. “Archer, you still look like hell,” Gardner said with a sympathetic nod before abruptly switching into his “all-business” mode. “Captain, the Coalition Security Council has been busy evaluating the evidence you brought back from Qo’noS. From where I’m sitting, it appears to have changed everything.”

  Archer forced himself to absorb this apparent good news with at least some degree of caution. “I hope that’s a change for the better, Admiral,” he said.

  Gardner nodded again. “It is. Because the Klingons have made no aggressive moves against us since you delivered their ultimatum, the Coalition Security Council has tabled all plans to adopt an aggressive defensive posture against the Klingon Empire. Even the hotheads on Andoria have agreed to hold their horses a while longer—unless they believe the Klingons to be acting in direct defiance of the ultimatum.” A small, relieved smile somehow slipped out onto the admiral’s otherwise granite-hard countenance, reminding Archer that few people are more reticent about wars than the hardened warriors charged with fighting them. “Well done, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Archer said. “Let’s hope we can keep the proverbial dogs on their leashes this time.”

  Gardner’s smile abruptly vanished. “We still may not have that luxury. Starfleet Command has just received word that Centauri III and the Calder II science outpost have come under attack.”

  “Do you believe the Klingons to be responsible for either of those attacks, Admiral?” T’Pol asked.

  Training his suddenly narrowed eyes squarely upon T’Pol, the admiral said, “Not as far as we can determine, Commander.”

  Thank God, Archer thought, though he remained uneasy. So long as the Coalition Council remained balanced on the razor’s edge of a declaration of war against the Klingon Empire, whose ships had already been proven to be vulnerable to hijacking by a hostile third party, he was certain he was going to continue feeling that way. He could only hope that the evidence that he and Phlox had found on Qo’noS would prevent the Council’s more hawkish members from going off halfcocked should the Klingons appear to have defied the Coalition’s ultimatum.

  “The Romulans must be responsible, sir,” Malcolm said. “It’s got to be the Romulans.”

  Breaking eye contact with T’Pol, Gardner shook his head. “We’ve found no definitive evidence of that either, Lieutenant.”

  “Then who is responsible?” Archer wanted to know.

  “Brief transmissions from Columbia and from personnel at Calder II have tentatively identified the aggressors in both attacks as Vulcan military vessels. The hostiles appear to have jammed outgoing communications in both locations before we could learn any additional details. Starfleet Command is trying to keep this information under wraps, of course, for obvious reasons.

  “But Command had to inform the United Earth Council.”

  “And they jumped to the conclusion that this was true?” Archer asked. “They’ve seen the Klingon recordings. How could they consider blaming Vulcan?”

  “Captain, I don’t need to remind you that many people have problems with the Vulcans. They have never understood why they held humanity back, insisting that humans were not ready to move into deep space.”

  Archer was having trouble accepting any of this. “The problems I’ve had with the Vulcans over the years have never been a secret, Admiral. But I can’t believe that Vulcan would ever—”

  “No, neither do I. But I answer to Earth’s government, as do you, Captain. However, it has been suggested that Commander T’Pol be relieved and confined.”

  T’Pol’s only response was to lift a single eyebrow in an evident gesture of defiance. Reed looked on in openly astonished silence.

  “With all due respect, sir, I’ll be damned if I’m throwing my exec into the brig….”

  Gardner held up a hand to forestall any further argument. “I said it was ‘suggested.’ While the Council believes their eyes, Starfleet believes there is a more devious force behind this. You’re not the only one fostering a new alliance; Starfleet shared all of this data with the Vulcans.”

  “Romulans,” Archer offered. Finally someone at Command was listening. “The Romulans may have just found a way to defeat us without firing a shot. All they need to do is drive wedges of suspicion between members of the Coalition. And the best way to start is to convince one Coalition world that another member has turned against it.

  “Admiral. Please don’t tell me that Starfleet has gone so far as to place Soval and his aides under arrest.”

  “Captain,” Gardner said in scolding tones. “Starfleet Command and the United Earth government don’t want this Coalition to come apart any more than you do. But Starfleet will have to enforce Earth’s decisions once they’re made”

  “Fair enough, Admiral.”

  “Let’s both hope that Earth understands that whatever’s happening at Alpha Centauri and Calder is probably analogous to what those rogue Klingon ships did at Draylax.”

  Archer nodded. “Enterprise is a lot closer to the Calder system than Alpha Centauri. At maximum warp we can reach Calder II in—”

  Gardner interrupted him again. “No. The Calder II outpost is small and almost entirely defenseless. There probably won’t be anything left of it by the time you arrive.”

  Archer glanced at Reed, whose rueful nod tacitly endorsed the admiral’s coldly factual tactical assessment.

  “Understood,” Archer said, facing his terminal again. “We’ll head straight to Alpha Centauri then, and do whatever we can to reinforce Centauri III’s defenses.”

  “Negative,” said the admiral. “Columbia is on her way, since she’s already in the Alpha Centauri sector.”

  Archer couldn’t believe Gardner wanted Columbia to face the threat alone. “Captain Hernandez deserves to have Enterprise at her back,” he said. “Even if we have to get to the party a little bit late.”

  Looking a little regretful, the admiral shook his head again. “No. I’m afraid another problem has come up. A…backchannel joint operation that Command has been involved with. And Enterprise is the only vessel currently in position to deal with it in time.”

  Archer closed his eyes for a moment and stroked his forehead, behind which a knot of intense pain—an agony utterly unrelated to the aftermath of his combat on Qo’noS—had begun to form. “Admiral, what could be a higher priority for Enterprise than what’s happening right now at Alpha Centauri and Calder?”

  Archer was glad he was already sitting down when he heard the admiral’s answer: “A fuel carrier called the Kobayashi Maru.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  S.S. Kobayashi Maru, Gamma Hydra sector

  JACQUELINE SEARLES TRIED not to think about how much freefall always made her want to puke.

  The Maru’s bridge was as dark as a proverbial tomb until the dim, red emergency lighting reluctantly flared to life. Searles breathed a silent prayer of thanks that the fuel carrier’s perpetually expense-averse skipper had finally heeded her repeated requests that he bankroll
the upgraded backup redundancies she’d installed late last year.

  Too bad he was willing to settle for the cheapo brand-X artificial gravity plating, though, she thought as her stomach lurched. Her gorge rose to a higher orbit as Simonson drifted into view; the young pilot’s neck was bent into an unnatural shape that vaguely resembled a question mark. She didn’t want to think about how many others aboard the Maru might have shared Simonson’s fate. Moving with cautious deliberation, she secured the dead man to one of the chairs at an unoccupied duty station and somehow resisted the urge to become violently ill.

  I must be in shock. Moving on autopilot.

  “What the hell did we hit?” Vance said as he launched his weightless form from console to console with surprising grace.

  Employing considerably less grace, Stiles clung to one of the ops consoles as though his very life depended on it. He pounded on its side, bringing it back to a blinking, flickering semblance of normalcy using a technique he liked to call “percussive maintenance.”

  “Dunno just yet,” the exec said. “But it’s for damned sure we didn’t run over a cat. Thank God you managed to get through to Earth on the compic, Vance.”

  A fat lot of good that’s going to do us right now, Searles thought. She wondered idly how many weeks it would take for a ship from Earth to reach this remote part of the Gamma Hydra sector.

  Orienting herself so that she faced one of the forward stations, Searles pushed off against a section of wall near the bridge’s ceiling. Her inner ear had convinced her body that she was plunging downward at breakneck speed, despite the evidence of her eyes, which confirmed that she was moving fairly slowly relative to the console.

  She drifted across the three meters or so of space that still separated her from the console, into which she slammed with a surprisingly hard and loud thump. Scrambling to avoid caroming off in some random direction, a slave both to microgravity and to her own inertia, she grabbed one of the console’s gravity-failure handholds—designed for this very sort of mishap—and began checking the internal com grid. The ship’s intercom network was pretty thoroughly jammed up, with upwards of three hundred people trying to call the bridge simultaneously to find out what was going on. Rebooting the console allowed at least a few individual voices to separate themselves from the background gabble of the rest of the multitude.

  “What’s going on in the rest of the ship?” Vance called out, cutting through the cacophony.

  “We have a lot of dead and injured in the passenger and crew areas,” she said, disabling the speakers to keep the horrific noise from drowning out all conversation on the bridge. A horrible bleakness shrouded her soul as she paused to speculate on whether the dead might be the lucky ones, with rescue such an unlikely option this far from Earth.

  “Those cloak-and-dagger Vulcan passengers of yours must be responsible for this somehow, Vance,” Stiles said, all but accusing the captain of blowing up the ship himself.

  “We’ve got massive hull breaches, Captain,” Searles said, interpreting the multiple alarms she saw on her console.

  “Drive status?” Vance asked with a note of hope that Searles wished she could share.

  Searles punched a button on the com console, nearly launching herself willy-nilly into the microgravity environment in the process. “Searles to engine room,” she said into the voice interface. “Engine room, come in.”

  Nothing. Just like the first attempt she’d made back in Vance’s office.

  Searles noticed then that the Maru’s exec was frantically entering commands into one of the adjacent bridge consoles. “Arturo, I’ve got to get back to the engine room. Find out if my people—”

  “It’s going to have to wait, Jackie,” Stiles said. “The hull breaches made the emergency bulkheads slam shut.”

  “Do we have any idea yet why this is happening?” Searles asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m still not sure about that. At least I don’t think we were fired upon.”

  “Why not?” Searles said, her brow crinkling.

  “Because if somebody had wanted to blow us to kingdom come with, say, a torpedo of some kind, then they probably already would have launched a second one by now, and finished us off already.” Stiles paused, frowning at his console. “Hey, why am I picking up such heavy graviton counts in here?”

  Searles shrugged. “Beats me. With the gravity plating offline, the graviton levels ought to be way below normal.”

  “Then the gravitons must be leaking in from outside the Maru,” said Stiles.

  Vance launched himself quickly into the space between Searles and Stiles, using one of the emergency handholds to bring himself to a stop.

  “The Romulans and the Klingons have gone to war a number of times over control of this sector,” he said. “And the Romulans have been known to use gravitic mines to defend their territorial claims.”

  “Gravitic mines?” Stiles said, an eyebrow raised.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Searles said, nodding. “They’re compact, high-yield graviton generators designed to focus the equivalent of huge tidal energies on a vessel’s hull, or on its spaceframe.”

  “What?” Stiles said, his eyes glazing visibly in response to her explanation.

  “Fancy bomb,” Searles clarified. “Make part of the ship go boom. Sometimes more than one part, and not always all at once.”

  “Oh. So we still might take even more damage from the same damned weapon. Crap.”

  “Could be worse,” Searles said. “If that mine had clipped one of our neutronic fuel tanks, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  The exec turned toward his captain. “Vance, you’re a gambling man. If you were handicapping our chances of getting rescued out here, how would you estimate the odds?”

  The orange “incoming” light on the com panel near Searles began flashing insistently at that precise moment. A calm, reassuringly competent-sounding female voice emerged from the hash of static that issued from the speakers.

  “Kobayashi Maru, this is Enterprise. We are on our way to your present position.”

  Searles watched as a broad grin spread across Vance’s face. “I’d say our odds just got a hell of a lot better, Arturo.”

  Searles allowed herself the luxury of hope, if only for a moment.

  Then she heard and felt the low rumble, which immediately preceded a great roar and a gale-force wind that slammed her backward into one of the battered monitors.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  Enterprise NX-01, Gamma Hydra sector

  AFTER ARCHER SIGNED off with Gardner and returned to the bridge, the Starfleet Academy cadets’ code for imponderable mysteries kept swirling through his mind.

  Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

  Mentally translating those time-honored military placeholders into less polite nonmilitary parlance, he thought, What. The. Fuck.

  “The Kobayashi Maru?” Reed asked from his position at the bridge’s tactical station. “I find it hard to believe that Starfleet considers that rattletrap a priority.”

  Seated in the big chair in the bridge’s center, Archer spread his hands. “That’s our mission, Malcolm. We are to guarantee that vessel’s safety, at all costs.”

  According to Gardner, Starfleet regarded the beleaguered fuel carrier’s mission as critically important to both of its covert sponsors, Starfleet and the Vulcan High Command—even if Earth now harbored doubts about its partnership with Vulcan. Recognizing how vital a secret listening post in the Gamma Hydra sector could be to Coalition security vis-à-vis both the Klingons and the Romulans—after all, both empires still occasionally fought each other for control of the region—Archer could find no reason to question the admiral’s orders, however unorthodox they might seem on the surface.

  He only wished he could help Columbia. Her captain and crew now had to face peril alone.

  What Enterprise needed was more speed, but Archer already knew there was no way to open the throttle any wi
der—not without transforming the starship into a light-year-long plume of ionized debris. The vibrations in the deck beneath his boots confirmed that Mike Burch down in engineering had already pushed Enterprise’s mighty warp-five propulsion system as far as he could.

  Archer glanced toward the portside communications station, where Ensign Sato continued her tireless efforts to raise the stricken freighter. “Kobayashi Maru, repeat your message, please. This is Enterprise. Repeat, we are on our way to your present position. Please confirm your status.”

  Archer leaned forward anxiously. “Travis, how soon will we reach the coordinates Admiral Gardner sent us?”

  Travis gave his chair a half turn away from his helm console and toward the captain. “We’re leaving Gamma Hydra, section fifteen, Captain. Entering section fourteen at coordinates twenty-two by eighty-seven by four. That still puts us nearly twenty minutes away from the Kobayashi Maru, sir.”

  Archer nodded to Travis, then glanced at Hoshi, who continued frantically working her console.

  “Anything yet, Hoshi?”

  “I’m relying on the computer to enhance the carrier signal, sir.” The youthful com officer’s usually smooth-as-porcelain forehead wrinkled slightly as she concentrated. She adjusted her earpiece and tried again to distinguish the cry of a single voice from the background roar of a cosmic ocean.

  She shook her head sadly a moment later. “I thought I had them for a moment, but the signal keeps degrading. Their com system might have sustained some damage, and I’m picking up a lot of interference on the other end—”

  A burst of fragmented voice commingled with a shrill squall of static interrupted her, the rush of noise pouring from the bridge speakers in a torrent. “—imperative! This is the Kobayashi Maru, nineteen periods out of Altair VI. We have struck a gravitic mine and have lost all power! Our hull is penetrated and we have sustained many casualties—”