Kobayashi Maru Read online

  “—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—”

  Despite the layers of distortion imposed by both distance and disaster, Archer immediately recognized the English-accented voice on the other end of the channel as that of Kojiro Vance, the flamboyant master of the S.S. Kobayashi Maru.

  “Kobayashi Maru, this is Enterprise,” Hoshi said, her fingers entering commands at a brisk pace as she tried to isolate and enhance the tenuous subspace lifeline she had just reestablished. “Please confirm your position.”

  “Enterprise, our position is Gamma Hydra, section ten. Hull penetrated. Life-support systems failing. Can you assist us, Enterprise? Can you assist us?”

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0174-2

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-0174-4

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  For Jenny, James, and William, for helping to stave off the “no-win scenario.” And for my niece, Becky Estepp, for continuing to kick ass and take names among the high and the mighty in pursuit of justice for autistic children and their families everywhere.

  —M.A.M.

  I dedicate this volume to Chip Carter for transporting us into the Star Trek universe with the fastest approvals known to man, and for sending our careers into warp speed. Long Live Bo’Q!

  —A.M.

  I am a man whom fortune hath cruelly scratched.

  —Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 5, Scene 2

  For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

  —George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Middlemarch

  The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.

  —James Douglas Morrison, Robert Alan Krieger, Raymond Daniel Manzarek, and John Paul Densmore, “Roadhouse Blues”

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  This story is set in the middle of 2155, shortly after the founding of the Coalition of Planets (Star Trek: Enterprise—The Good That Men Do). The fledgling Coalition was born out of the actions of Earth’s Starfleet, who brokered several treaties between the founding members, proving that Earth was ready to join the interstellar community (the fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise).

  PROLOGUE

  The Year of Kahless 781

  The Klingon-Romulan border

  YA’VANG, HOD of the Imperial Klingon Battle Cruiser SIm’yoH, studied the main viewer in silence, watching with fatalistic equanimity as the winged specter of death stalked ever closer.

  RomuluSngan, Ya’Vang thought, nearly overwhelmed by his feelings of contempt. Cowards, accomplishing by sabotage and ambush what they never could through honorable combat. Given the improbable pattern of malfunctions that had cascaded through virtually every system aboard the SIm’yoH over the past kilaan, those green-blooded Ha’DIbaH could only be testing some subtle new weapon of war—a weapon that appeared to leave its targets essentially whole, yet largely nonfunctional.

  Ya’Vang was therefore unsurprised when the other vessel came to a sudden relative stop off the SIm’yoH’s starboard bow, scarcely a thousand qelI’qams distant. Despite the swirling emerald-and-ocher-tinged eddies that marked the boundaries of the SuD’eng Nebula, Ya’Vang could see that the hostile’s weapons tubes were still hot. What remained of his own crippled vessel’s tactical systems could detect no sign that the other ship was attempting to establish another weapons lock.

  If only as much remained of our weapons systems, Ya’Vang thought, his fists clenching involuntarily as the moment stretched into a seeming eternity.

  “Why aren’t the RomuluSngan finishing us off?” asked Qrad, the callow young gunnery officer who had just taken over the duties of the SIm’yoH’s first officer, Ra’wI’ Qeq, whose corpse had recently joined the many others that still lay scattered about the smoke-filled, ozone-redolent command deck. Despite his disconcertingly smooth forehead and his lowly enlisted rank of bekk, Qrad had commendably risen to the occasion this day.

  Using the back of his gauntleted hand to wipe away a crust of congealing blood from the crisped flesh of his chin, the HoD squinted into the main viewer. Though the attenuated cloud of gas and dust that marked the SuD’eng Nebula’s ragged edge obscured portions of the hostile vessel, there could be no mistaking the dark, threatening markings that adorned her nearly flat belly. They were the shameful stigma of a lowly carrion-eater rather than the proud striations of an honor-worthy predator.

  “Isn’t it obvious by now, Qrad?” Ya’Vang growled. “Those petaQ want to take this ship.”

  “But they have not yet boarded us,” Qrad said as he consulted the readout on a slightly charred nearby console. “Our intruder alert system still functions well enough to confirm at least that much.”

  Ya’Vang nodded, grateful that not every sensor system aboard his damaged vessel had suffered the same fate as the now-defunct autodestruct mechanism. Dealing with this treacherous adversary would have been much simpler were it still possible to blow up the SIm’yoH with a single command. Or even to manually trigger an abrupt explosive release of the warp drive’s supplies of antimatter. Unfortunately, Chief Engineer Hojlach had jettisoned the entire supply of fuelstocks in the interests of safety after the SIm’yoH had been essentially crippled by the cowardly RomuluSngan ambush.

  The overly cautious engineer’s corpse was presently tumbling through the void, following roughly the same trajectory as the precious supplies of positive Hap and negative rugh particles that he had squandered.

  “Those RomuluSngan taHqeq need not board us in order to triumph, Qrad,” Ya’Vang said. “At least, not before our life-support system fails entirely and the cold of space claims everyone aboard this ship who yet lives.” He paused, peering toward the com consoles. “Are they still jamming our communications?”

  “They are, sir,” Qrad said, his bizarrely Tera’ngan-like brow wrinkling in barely contained frustration. “They must expect to simply bide their time and wait us out. They will win a coward’s victory, and we can do nothing to prevent it.”

  An idea occurred to Ya’Vang at that moment, like a thunderbolt hurled by one of the long-ago slain gods of Qo’noS.

  “Perhaps, Qrad,” he said. “But we need not make it easy for them.”

  Even though the SIm’yoH’s artificial gravity had gasped its last shortly after both her main and backup life-support systems had flickered out, Ya’Vang’s comb
at pressure suit—now home to the only thing that still breathed aboard his vessel—seemed to grow heavier and more oppressive with each passing kilaan. Ya’Vang struggled with mixed success to avoid thinking about his asphyxiated crew, some of whom had expired in hard vacuum, the one foe that no Klingon warrior could hope to best by the bat’leth alone.

  Ya’Vang felt certain that he already would have joined his officers and men in death but for the dying Qrad’s persuasive argument that the SIm’yoH’s commander had to remain behind—alive—to surprise the RomuluSngan when their boarding party finally came to call in person. He clung to no illusory hopes of escape or of overcoming his enemies’ superior numbers. But he hoped, at least, to fall in honorable battle rather than meeting death like a spring bregit in some fetid, fear-redolent abattoir while his foes quietly bided their time and waited him out. Only by forcing death’s hand could he hope to redeem his fallen crew members, all of whom had died as a consequence of perfidy rather than of battle wounds; they deserved seats in Sto-Vo-Kor at the right hand of Kahless nonetheless.

  And, more important, he might yet succeed in keeping his ship out of RomuluSngan hands. Failing that, he could at least make their acquisition of a Klingon battle cruiser a very expensive proposition by taking as many of the fatherless bIHnuch with him when death finally claimed him.

  As the passing kilaans accumulated until they had become a full DIS—one complete turning of Qo’noS upon its axis—Ya’Vang occupied himself by finishing his systematic destruction of what remained of the SIm’yoH’s computer banks, rechecking the traps he had so laboriously set throughout the ship, and sitting quietly before a darkened starboard viewport, through which he studied the RomuluSngan vessel.

  The enemy ship, which remained motionless with respect to the SIm’yoH, still showed no sign of having noticed that Ya’Vang had dispatched his ship’s log buoy several kilaans ago. Using only the strength of his muscles, he had pushed the buoy out an airlock on the SIm’yoH’s port side—which faced away from the RomuluSngan—and set the dark, unpowered device on a slow, tumbling trajectory into infinity, away from both the SIm’yoH and the RomuluSngan ship’s immediate line of sight. He could only hope that the buoy’s chances of being picked up would prove somewhat better than his own chances of survival. Otherwise, no songs would be sung of what was about to happen here this day. No statues would be raised in his honor, or ships marked with his name.

  After having waited an entire DIS for them to make their move, Ya’Vang felt only relief when the green-blooded scavengers pounced at long last. The reverberating clangor of external grapples engaging and hull-penetrating breach pods fixing themselves to the ship’s exterior demonstrated that the taHqeq had finally decided it was safe to come aboard. As Ya’Vang stood in the cruiser’s relatively narrow boom section, roughly equidistant between the bulbous forward command deck and the wide engineering section that lay aft, he could only wonder whether or not his pressure suit’s stealth functions had obscured his presence from the boarders sufficiently to allow him to surprise them, or if they had detected his stubbornly persistent lifesigns through his suit and decided that he didn’t pose enough of a threat to warrant waiting any longer.

  Whichever way the RomuluSngan had done the math, Ya’Vang was determined to teach the enemy a very painful and very sanguinary lesson about the foolishness and lethality of overconfidence.

  Ya’Vang heard a muffled explosion that momentarily rang the hull like a bell, followed almost immediately by another. Fallen bits of conduit that lay in the corridor shifted in the induced breeze, which was swiftly stanched by the harsh clang of a fast-closing emergency bulkhead. Hull-breaching charges, he realized, fore and aft. He reflected contemptuously upon the exaggerated sense of caution of the boarders, who were clearly unwilling to risk transporter ingress to a vessel whose internal configuration was no doubt still largely unfamiliar to them.

  It will remain unfamiliar to them, he thought, raising the long-barreled disruptor pistol he clutched in his vacuum-gauntleted right hand. So long as air remains in this suit, and breath in my lungs.

  A swiftly moving shadow cast against the ship’s dim emergency lighting suddenly drew his attention aft. The approaching party’s booted footfalls echoed loudly through the otherwise silent vessel, the sounds seeming to originate in the direction of the engineering section, from which the most recent explosion had sounded. His training instantly taking over, Ya’Vang flattened himself against one of the narrow corridor’s walls and watched as the initial shadow lengthened and resolved itself into multiple shapes, all of them vaguely humanoid. A pressure-suited figure stepped directly into view, immediately followed by at least two more.

  Arm raised, Ya’Vang stepped forward abruptly and fired. The foremost of the approaching raiders doubled over the fireball that suddenly threw him backward into his fellows. The Klingon maintained a merciless fusillade, taking full advantage of the element of surprise.

  He heard a footfall behind him and whirled toward it. The sudden heavy impact against his chest threw him supine to the deck an instant before he felt the fierce heat penetrate the charred front of his pressure suit.

  RomuluSngan disruptor, he thought as he realized that his own weapon had somehow slipped from his grasp, no doubt because of the ungainly bulkiness of his gloves.

  Despite the tumult of running booted feet all around him, Ya’Vang noticed that the hum of his helmet’s air circulation system had ceased. That meant that his final signal had been transmitted. The dead-man switch was to engage either when his suit’s life-support system failed, or the moment his lifesigns ceased to register upon the suit’s internal monitors. The trap he had so laboriously set over the past DIS had been sprung at last.

  And the motherless carrion-eaters had done it themselves.

  The deck shuddered and rattled as the individual charges, adapted for their current purpose from the SIm’yoH’s armory, began detonating in series throughout the battle cruiser’s superstructure. Within but a handful of lup, very little of the ship would remain intact, to say nothing of the misbegotten mu’qaD who had dared to try to take her.

  Ya’Vang bared his teeth in a warrior’s grin as several RomuluSngan converged upon him from both directions, their weapons raised and poised to fire once they all had gotten out of one another’s line of fire.

  The deck plating sheared away beneath their boots and Ya’Vang’s back.

  Freefall. Airless space penetrated Ya’Vang’s body like countless icy blades. His last breath rasped in his chest like dry leaves, and he methodically emptied his lungs, just as his training demanded.

  The Klingon captain awaited death calmly. Today, after all, was indeed a good day to die, for he had prevented a hated enemy from acquiring one of his people’s mightiest battle cruisers intact. And he also may well have booked passage for himself, as well as for his entire crew, aboard the Barge of the Dead, bound for eternal Sto-Vo-Kor.

  But even as tumbling debris and oblivion took him, he wondered what fate might befall his beloved Empire the next time a treacherous, dishonorable attack such as this one were to occur.

  After all, whatever else the contemptible RomuluSngan might be, they were nothing if not tenacious….

  ONE

  Thursday, May 22, 2155

  Enterprise NX-01

  “ADMIT IT, JONATHAN. You’re already at least as bored with this mission as I am.”

  Unable to deny his fellow NX-class starship captain’s assertion, Captain Jonathan Archer smoothed his rumpled uniform and leaned back in his chair with a resigned sigh. Porthos, whom Archer had thought was fast asleep behind him at the foot of his bed, released a short but portentous bark, as if voicing agreement with the woman who looked on expectantly from the screen. Archer turned away from the lone desktop terminal in his quarters just long enough to toss a small dog treat to the beagle, who immediately became far too preoccupied with the noisy business of eating to tender any further opinions.

  “My feelings real
ly don’t matter all that much, Erika,” Archer said to the image on the terminal. “And frankly, neither do yours. This was Starfleet’s call to make, not ours.”

  From across the nearly six-parsec-wide gulf of interstellar space that currently separated Enterprise from Columbia, Captain Erika Hernandez punctuated her reply with a withering frown. “All right. Who are you, and what have you done with Jon Archer?”

  His lips curled in an inadvertent grin. “I’m just an explorer, Erika. I don’t make policy. And I don’t like babysitting Earth Cargo Service freighter convoys any more than you do. But you’ve got to admit that there have been enough attacks on the main civilian shipping lanes over the past few weeks to justify keeping Earth’s two fastest and best-armed starships out on continuous patrol, at least for a while.”

  She shook her head slightly. “Maybe. But not indefinitely. And certainly not if you’re interested in treating the underlying disease instead of just the symptoms.”

  Archer couldn’t really disagree with that either. The past six weeks of mostly uneventful patrol duty, spent endlessly covering the same roughly twenty-light-year stretches outbound from Earth, followed by a virtually identical inbound course which intermittently brought Enterprise and Columbia together from opposite directions, put him in mind of the ancient Greek myth about a man whose misdeeds had earned him the divine punishment of rolling a huge boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat the process endlessly after reaching the summit and seeing it roll down again. Archer sometimes half-seriously considered asking Starfleet to send the new NX-class starship Challenger, still under construction in the skies above San Francisco, to relieve him—after rechristening it Sisyphus, of course.

  But he knew better than to think that either he or Captain Hernandez could do much to change the minds of Admirals Gardner, Black, Douglas, Clark, Palmieri, or any of the rest of Starfleet Command’s determined brass hats. After all, each of them had shot down essentially the same argument Erika was making today when Archer had first brought the topic before them weeks ago.