Kobayashi Maru

by Michael A. Martin

  Sopek/Ch’uihv nodded. “Indeed.”

  “On the plus side,” Trip said, “I suppose I can assume that you’ve already told the V’Shar all about this remote-hijacking thing.”

  “Of course. And it is more properly referred to as the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system.”

  That’s easy for you to say, Trip thought as he tried to imagine wrapping his Alabama-Florida accent around that particular verbal mouthful.

  Aloud, he said, “I really should get in touch with my superiors about this, too. Just to make absolutely sure that the rest of the Coalition sees this threat coming.”

  The other man shook his head. “I’m afraid we need to maintain communications silence at present. At least until after I am reasonably certain that Valdore’s forces can neither listen in on us nor pursue.”

  That’s pretty damned convenient, too, Trip thought. He studied the other man’s face, but found it as inscrutable as that of any Vulcan he’d ever met. Well, I’ll know which side he’s really on after the first big Romulan military engagement with this new weapon goes down. If Coalition ships really do see this thing coming in advance, then I might be able to afford to trust this guy. But if the good guys end up getting caught with their britches down again, the way it happened at Coridan…

  He suppressed a shudder.

  Of course, it wasn’t as though he had a lot of alternatives at the moment to taking his captor’s words at face value. After all, challenging this man too much could get him just as dead as Phuong, any number of favors to friends of mutual friends notwithstanding.

  “I suppose you’ll have to put a lot of light-years between this ship and Romulus pretty quickly if you want to stay ahead of Valdore,” he said, eager to change the subject to something a little less volatile. “What’s your heading?”

  The other spy gazed contemplatively at a bulkhead as he considered how much to reveal on the subject. Evidently deciding that Trip was harmless to him now—or perhaps having concocted another convenient lie—he said, “We are presently making best speed for the Tezel-Oroko star system.”

  Trip had no trouble maintaining a blank expression; though he thought he might have heard that system’s name before, he assumed it was distant enough to lie beyond the “Here There Be Dragons” point on his mental star charts.

  “What’s at Tezel-Oroko?” he asked.

  “The intelligence services of both Vulcan and Earth are jointly constructing a covert listening post near the system’s edge,” the other man said. “Its purpose is to monitor military activity inside the boundaries of both Romulan and Klingon space.”

  “All right,” Trip said. “So why is this ship going there?” There I go, challenging this trigger-happy thug again. I’ve really got to watch that.

  Sopek/Ch’uihv did not appear offended in the least at the question. “A freighter that had been expected to bring some of the last technical components and other matériel needed to bring the listening post online is overdue. We are going to do whatever we can to assist the listening post’s crew in dealing with any related supply-line deficits or security problems.”

  Trip nodded in silence, a strange calm suddenly descending over him, displacing most of his earlier frustration and despair. He found the feeling remarkable, especially given that there was still a very good chance that he was soon to die among enemies—digested in the proverbial belly of the beast, no less—no matter what he tried to do to alter his circumstances.

  But damned if it doesn’t feel good to be charging off to do something, he thought. Actually performing a rescue instead of just waiting around for the cavalry to arrive.

  Unless, of course, Sopek had just handed him the Vulcan equivalent of what Trip could imagine his father calling a line of pure horse puckey.

  FORTY-ONE

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  Gamma Hydra sector

  JACQUELINE SEARLES DIDN’T KNOW PRECISELY what she expected the end of the world to sound like; but the continuous shuddering groan the Kobayashi Maru’s warp core sent through the fuel carrier’s entire structure sounded enough like a doomsday knell to convince her that the end had grown uncomfortably near.

  “Vance!” The rising din of the overstrained engines forced Searles to shout to be heard across the narrow expanse of the fuel carrier’s bridge. “The dilithium chamber’s getting too hot! I have to shut the whole propulsion system down!”

  “We have a schedule to keep, Jackie,” said Kojiro Vance, who seemed far too calm and collected to have a firm grasp of the current situation.

  Executive Officer Arturo Stiles, who stood beside the Kobayashi Maru’s eccentric master and commander, displayed a far better understanding of reality—as well as a good deal less equanimity. “What’s the point of keeping to the schedule if we don’t get where we’re going in one piece?” he said.

  The captain merely sat contemplatively in his worn leather-upholstered chair, stroking his chin as he weighed the dire warnings of his two most senior officers. For all Searles could tell, Vance might have been gazing into his closet and ruminating over which one of those damned pirate shirts he was going to wear next. She hated to think she might have no choice but to take command just to keep everyone aboard the Maru alive; there would be repercussions afterward, and the last thing she needed right now was to lose this job.

  Correction, she thought. The last thing I need is to get vaporized because my boss is obsessed with delivering the mail on time.

  Fortunately, Vance himself took that fateful decision out of her hands a moment later. “All right,” the captain said, his shoulders sagging despite the broadening effect of the epaulet-like decorations that adorned his blousy tunic. He fixed her with an almost pleading gaze. “Take us out of warp, Jackie. At least until you can sort out what’s going wrong back there.”

  Vance’s order had scarcely left his lips before the exec hopped over the railing that separated him from one of the boxy forward duty stations, where he assisted a junior male crewman in entering the appropriate commands into the console. The young crewman, an engineer’s mate named Simonson, looked as relieved as Searles felt; she wondered if he’d been about to stage a mutiny of his own.

  This wasn’t the first time Searles had justifiably feared that the alien contraptions she had reluctantly allowed into her engine room might do them all in. Secret Vulcan gadgetry doesn’t seem to come with a straightforward user’s manual, she thought, wishing Vance had never approached her with the stuff.

  “We’ll let her cool down for an hour or so before we try to bring the warp-power mains back online,” Vance said, addressing nobody in particular as he made the first verbal footprints in the bridge’s new-fallen blanket of silence.

  Searles noticed then that Stiles was staring at her, an urgent question burning in his dark eyes. The only answer she could offer him was a helpless shrug.

  “I’d like a chance to pick up the pieces back in the engine room first,” Searles said, casting her gaze back upon Vance. “Then we ought to decide how much downtime the main propulsion system is going to need.”

  Vance looked intensely uncomfortable with that, though he uttered nothing other than a muttered, half-intelligible curse. Why do ship captains seem to think we engineers can get them special waivers for the laws of physics? she thought.

  “Captain, I think you and I need to have a word in private,” said Stiles, his eyes hurling thunderbolts in Vance’s direction.

  “You’d better set the table for three, Captain,” Searles said. Looks like the jig is finally up, she thought, feeling a sense of relief at the prospect of no longer having to protect an awkward secret on Vance’s behalf. Vance should have let his first mate in on this thing at the beginning.

  Vance sighed and chewed his lip as he stared off into the middle distance. Then he looked up, first at Stiles, then at Searles.

  “All right. I owe the both of you at least that much.” He rose from his chair and made a grand “after you” gesture toward one of the two
doors located in the bridge’s aft section. “In my cabin, if you please.”

  Arturo Stiles couldn’t quite bring himself to accept the chair Vance had offered; until he’d had a chance to process the startling admission the captain had just made, he preferred to stand.

  “So we’ve really come all this way to help the Vulcans set up a military listening post?” Stiles asked, gesticulating as though his hands were semaphore flags as he stood between the two places where the captain and the chief engineer were sitting. “Just when were you two planning on letting me in on this? I’m only the goddamn first mate, after all.”

  Vance met Stiles’s roar with remarkable composure. “To be absolutely candid with you, Arturo, I wasn’t planning on letting you in on this. I would have been content to quietly drop off a few of the personnel we’ve been carrying as passengers, along with a number of sealed crates, once we finished the voyage to the outskirts of Tezel-Oroko. Then we would have quietly returned to our original itinerary, with nobody the wiser.”

  Stiles still couldn’t quite get his head around any of this. “But why keep it from me?”

  Vance flashed that damned insouciant smile of his, the one that said, Honey-this-isn’t-what-it-looks-like-even-though-you’ve-caught-me-red-handed-canoodling-with-an-Orion-animal-woman. “For your own protection, of course,” the captain said.

  “I don’t get it, Vance. You’re acting like a common smuggler. Have you gotten us involved in something illegal?” Stiles knew it wouldn’t be the first time his skipper had played fast and loose either with interstellar law or the UESPA regs.

  “Illegal and clandestine aren’t necessarily synonymous things, Arturo,” Vance said.

  “You just told me that the Maru is secretly transporting both people and matériel on behalf of the Vulcans,” Stiles said as he finally allowed his weight to land on the proffered chair. “Why would a race that can’t even tell lies need to use an old Klingon rattletrap like the Maru as a secret courier?”

  “Don’t be so naïve, Arturo,” said the chief engineer, crossing her legs on the low, lumpy couch near the desk behind which Vance reclined. “Vulcans lie like rugs, and you know it. They do it all the time; they just never got quite as good at it as we did.”

  Vance grinned. “And that fact may explain why humans and Vulcans seem to be so much stronger together than apart. It’s a perfect partnership of brains and guile.”

  Stiles could barely suppress a volcanic surge of anger as he hiked a thumb toward Searles. “You didn’t seem to have a problem letting our chief engineer in on the truth before now. And how did this Vulcan problem land in the Maru’s lap anyway?”

  Vance spread his hands helplessly. “The Vulcans probably didn’t think their own military or merchant vessels could maintain as low a profile as an Earth Cargo Service vessel could, what with the Klingons and the Romulans both so touchy lately about Coalition naval movements. So after the Horizon failed to make its cargo-pickup rendezvous with the Maru, it fell upon us to deliver what the Horizon would have carried to its final destination.”

  “And that meant we needed to make up for a considerable amount of lost time very quickly,” Searles said.

  “Right,” Vance said. “Unfortunately, this vessel’s maximum warp capability was simply not equal to the task.”

  That explains our sudden change to a hell-for-leather course all the way out to Tezel-Oroko, Stiles thought. He couldn’t help but wonder whether any humans had ever before ventured out so far.

  Or so fast.

  “So the captain felt he had no one to turn to except me,” Searles said. “If this, um, mission for the Vulcans was to stay on a completely need-to-know basis, that is.”

  Stiles thought he was beginning to understand the captain’s need for secrecy, though he still felt insulted and deceived—and perhaps even a bit betrayed.

  The exec cast a hard glare at Searles. “So how did you get this much giddy-up into an old bucket of stem bolts like the Maru, Jackie? Did the Vulcans help with that, too?”

  She nodded. “Vance’s contacts on Vulcan supplied the parts. I just turned the wrenches, with a little help from a couple of the experts bound for Tezel-Oroko.”

  The captain paused to clear his throat before he continued with the explanation-cum-briefing. “I had to resort to using certain…engine components that the Vulcan government had entrusted to me against an eventuality such as this one.”

  “What kind of components?” Stiles asked, his curiosity thoroughly piqued. He knew that the Maru would be able to make it the rest of the way to Tezel-Oroko in just a matter of a few hours, once her warp drive was back up and running; he’d never seen a human-piloted ship make that kind of time before, including Starfleet’s fancy NX-class jobs.

  Apparently responding to the blank look on the captain’s face, Searles glanced up at the ceiling as she began reciting her mental list of the ad hoc modifications her warp drive had undergone. “A new antimatter flow regulator. A dilithium matrix wave-guide like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Something called a flux capacitor. And a couple of other things I wouldn’t have recognized without a little help from one of our expert passengers.”

  Vance nodded. “One of the experts with pointed ears, that is. At any rate, I needed Jackie’s cooperation to get all the new drive pieces properly installed, along with the systems designed to monitor them.”

  Those propulsion widgets must have still been in their packing crates when those Starfleet engineers were crawling through the Maru’s guts, Stiles thought. He wondered how long Vance could have maintained his present cool demeanor had Captain Archer been the one challenging him with ticklish questions about secrecy, legality, and lies, Vulcan or otherwise.

  Then it occurred to him that Starfleet would probably pay handsomely for access to those secret Vulcan engine parts. Arrogant, condescending bastards that they were, the Vulcans had always done their damnedest to curtail such wholesale transfers of technology from their world to Earth. Stiles wondered if their nearly century-old de facto technical embargo against humanity was finally about to end.

  “No wonder those rabbit-eared elitists swore you to secrecy, Vance,” Stiles said. “I never met a Vulcan who didn’t at least drop a few broad hints that we Earth folk are still a little too wet behind the ears to venture out of our own solar system.”

  Vance made a noise of agreement. “If it had been up to the Vulcans, there’d be nothing in the Alpha Centauri system right now but ancient ruins and tumbleweeds. And the idea of humans flying a fuel carrier like the Maru under the flag of a settlement on Altair VI would be just another one of Doctor Cochrane’s pipe dreams.”

  Searles put a hand to her chin as her forehead crumpled into an elaborate frown. “Kind of makes you wonder why the Vulcans would lend us this stuff, even with their own experts aboard the Maru to babysit us.”

  “Something out here must worry the Vulcans a little bit more than the prospect of warp-six-capable humans does,” Vance said. “It would certainly explain why they’d want to set up a secret listening post to keep close tabs on it.”

  Stiles’s thoughts drifted toward his own half-formed nightmare images of the mysterious Romulans, shadowy mental pictures derived from countless stories and rumors of fearsome warships whose bellies were painted to resemble the blood-red plumage of predatory birds. The Romulans would be the nearest likely subject of any Coalition listening post placed in this sector. Regardless, the Vulcans’ decision to allow a human freighter crew to play with their supercharged high-warp goodies continued to puzzle him.

  His spine shuddered with the cold of the grave as the simplest possible explanation of the Vulcans’ largesse occurred to him: Maybe they really don’t expect us to survive any encounter with whatever might be lurking out here.

  A moment later, the Kobayashi Maru shook as though the Hephaestus of Earth’s ancient mythology had just slammed his hammer right into the ship’s vitals. Searles cried out as Vance’s office fell under a blanket of darkness. St
iles immediately experienced the stomach-churning freefall sensation that signaled the abrupt failure of the gravity plating. And he could hear Vance speaking in the darkness, his voice as understated as she had ever heard it.

  “Uh-oh,” the captain said.

  FORTY-TWO

  Tuesday, July 22, 2155

  Enterprise NX-01, near the Gamma Hydra sector

  SEATED AT THE DESK in his ready room, Jonathan Archer listened to the joint report from T’Pol and Reed in almost meditative silence. T’Pol wrapped up the brief presentation with a solemn dignity that Archer usually associated with eulogies.

  “By now,” she said, “Trip has already reached Romulus.”

  Where he’s probably already had to face whatever rough justice Admiral Valdore had in store for him, Archer thought. Though he respected Trip’s abilities both as an engineer and as a highly survival-adept Starfleet officer, he hadn’t been an intel operative all that long, and Archer knew that Valdore was no fool either.

  He despaired of seeing his friend ever again.

  “Unfortunately, our encounter with Trip didn’t change the Coalition’s current tactical situation in any way that really matters,” Reed said, looking nearly as mournful as Archer felt. “He still has to get his hands on workable warp-seven engine plans, though this may be simply because the Romulans themselves have yet to come up with a completely workable design. And his Romulan intelligence sources had him convinced that the Klingons were the ones behind the attacks against Draylax and our shipping lanes, rather than any Romulan culprits.”

  Archer nodded, becoming all but resigned to the bleak prospect of a hot war with the Klingons; it was beginning to look inevitable, despite the evidence Archer had found exculpating the Klingon Empire, which had no present hostile intentions toward any member of the Coalition of Worlds.

  But we just might kick over the anthill anyway, he thought. And touch off a conflict that will cripple most of two quadrants for decades, and probably kill millions of innocents on both sides. The Klingons will consider us shoot-on-sight enemies then, sure as gravity. And the Romulans will sit back and laugh through the entire bloodbath, waiting until both sides are too weak to stop them from swooping in to pick up the pieces….