The Kobayashi Maru Read online

  "Jim?" McCoy's voice, concerned and frightened, came from the doctor's seat.

  "I'm here, Bones. I'm all right." That was a lie, and Kirk knew his voice said as much.

  "That was damned stupid, Captain!" McCoy began, but Kirk cut him off: "What happened up front?"

  "Doctor!" Kirk heard someone stumble over the pilots' seats on their way toward the door. "Doctor McCoy? Are you all right?" It was Chekov.

  Kirk could hear McCoy cursing to himself. "Just fine," McCoy growled. "What about you? What the hell happened up there?"

  "I'm fine, sir," Chekov reported hastily. "But it's Sulu—he's hurt!"

  "Nobody move!" Kirk heard his order stop Chekov only two steps out of the cabin. Beyond the navigator, Sulu moaned softly, and Scott spoke to him in low, soothing tones. "Nobody's going anywhere until we've got lights," Kirk said.

  "But, Jim—!"

  "Bones, you can't do anything in the dark!" Kirk twisted about to look back toward the pilots' hatch, forgetting for the moment that he couldn't see anyway. He allowed himself the luxury of an unseen grimace when his knee sang out in protest to the motion. "Scotty?"

  "Right here," the engineer answered from near McCoy's seat.

  "Jesus, Scotty!" McCoy cursed. "You scared me to death!"

  "Sorry, Doctor."

  "Have we got lamps in the storage cabinet?" Kirk asked, still bent over his throbbing knee.

  "Aye," Scott said. "About a dozen. But I'll need some extra hands. Come on, lad—" This apparently to Chekov. "—I think we're the only two still standing."

  Kirk sat in tense, painful silence, marveling at how easily he could track their progress in the total darkness. They spoke quietly in the back for a few moments while Scott jimmied open the cabinet, then a fat finger of light sprayed down the center aisle as the first of the emergency lamps was activated.

  "Thank God something still works," McCoy muttered.

  Then the wait began. Chekov helped Kirk back to a seat while McCoy tended to Sulu. Kirk tried putting weight on his leg only once, then was forced to apologize when that nearly toppled both him and Chekov to the deck. Chekov set about placing lamps throughout the shuttle while Scott shut down the main engines—they were no longer producing anything but noise and would never propel the shuttle another meter. McCoy immobilized everything possible on Sulu, using everything he had on hand, then enlisted Scott and Chekov to help him strap the helmsman into a second row seat. McCoy would have preferred to lay Sulu out flat, but the only space long enough was the center aisle, and that had to be left clear for repair access. Better that he was secure in a reasonably guarded location; they still didn't know how long they would be out here.

  Chekov tried signaling the Enterprise until it became apparent no one could hear him. Even so, he didn't give up until Kirk told him to. Helm responded to prodding, but was useless without information from the navigational computer. Navigations was destroyed; Scott salvaged what he could from the front to start work on restoring their heat and light. Chekov was left with the radio, an all but hopeless job; Kirk was left to watch McCoy care for Sulu. And to worry.

  Sulu's valiant action to fire the engines and blast them free of the mine undoubtedly saved the shuttle from immediate destruction. He'd been forced to unbelt to reach the controls, however; while Kirk was thrown against the bulkhead in the passengers' cabin, Sulu suffered a similar fate up front. The result was a shoulder which hung at an agonizingly wrong angle until McCoy eased it back into place. Torn cartilage, McCoy told Kirk. Severed muscles, damaged nerves. All of it, no doubt, reparable in a starship's sickbay; all of it hopeless in a heatless, lightless, airless shuttlecraft. Kirk watched McCoy wind what seemed like kilometers of translucent bandaging about Sulu's still form, binding his arm fast to his side. Like a butterfly in a cocoon, Kirk found himself thinking. Or a fly wound up in a spider's web, waiting for the inevitable.

  He looked around the crippled shuttle now, wondering how long Spock would search before declaring them dead.

  Sulu's voice interrupted Kirk's reverie. "Do you know what this sort of reminds me of? Only a little," the helmsman amended, "but it still reminds me."

  Kirk hoped it wasn't anything too dreadful. "What?"

  Sulu smiled weakly, and, even though he was ashen, his eyes glittering with pain, the smile brightened his face. "There was a simulation our class ran in command school, where a ship had been disabled by a gravitic mine—"

  "Not just your class." Kirk grinned. It was supposed to be kept secret—how else could each class's response be an honest one?—but under the circumstances…"All of them."

  Chekov groaned inarticulately.

  "I remember too. The Kobayashi Maru."

  Sulu tried to nod, winced graphically, and instead said, "That's the one." His smile didn't fade.

  "What's a Kobayashi Maru?" McCoy asked.

  "It's a torture device," Chekov volunteered unhelpfully from the front, and Kirk laughed. McCoy glanced up at the hatch, then back at Kirk, looking all the while as if he thought they were trying to pull something over on him. For Kirk, that somehow made it funnier.

  "It means 'the ship named Kobayashi in Japanese," Sulu tried to explain. "That was the name…of the ship, I mean."

  "It was a command scenario," Kirk went on, taking pity on the doctor's obvious confusion. "A command cadet is placed in charge of a simulated starship, then forced to make a decision regarding the rescue of a Federation fuel carrier that's been disabled in Klingon space. The name of the carrier in the scenario is Kobayashi Maru."

  McCoy snorted and sat back in his seat. "So what's the big deal about this test?"

  "It was a no-win situation," Kirk told him. "No matter what you did, or how hard you tried, you always lost. All the possible decisions were wrong."

  McCoy turned, his face a study in indignant disbelief. "Well, that sounds bloody unfair!"

  Everyone in the shuttle—even Sulu—laughed.

  Kirk said, "That was the whole point, Bones."

  McCoy gave up in frustration and settled back into his seat. "I don't understand."

  Kirk couldn't help feeling sorry for the doctor, who couldn't realize why his bemusement was so funny. "It was a character test," Kirk explained. "Intended to find out how well you respond to losing."

  McCoy surprised Kirk by laughing aloud. "You must have flunked that one royally!"

  The captain feigned insult. "On the contrary—I actually scored rather high."

  "Oh?" McCoy drew back in mock surprise. "I can't wait to hear this!"

  Kirk was startled to discover that, even after all this time, the very thought of his private battle with the simulator made him blush furiously. He resisted the temptation to squirm in his seat. "It's a long story, Bones…"

  McCoy's smile only widened. "We have lots of time…Besides," he added, more reasonably, "it'll pass the hours."

  The hours they had left before rescue or death. That it would. Kirk's inclination to keep his youthful follies hidden warred with the stronger instinct to somehow serve his men even in this limited capacity. Indeed, if this were not their final wrestle with the Kobayashi Maru, what was? At least it was apropos.

  "I'm not supposed to tell anyone," he said by way of final resistance.

  "Our lips are sealed," Sulu promised solemnly, still smiling. "Right, Pavel?"

  Chekov stuck his head into the passenger compartment briefly. "I wouldn't even tell my own mother, sir."

  "I'll hold you both to that," Kirk promised as Chekov disappeared into the pilots' hatch again. "Because if anyone ever tries this stunt again, Starfleet will know where they got the idea…!"

  Chapter Two

  THE NO-WIN SCENARIO

  CADET JAMES T. KIRK sat cramped inside a rec hall reader terminal, elbows on knees, fists balled up beneath his chin. Thumb-high people scurried about the screen in front of him, running first forward, then backward as Kirk changed the tape's direction with a single whispered word. An on-screen explosion splashed the cu
bicle with light; darkness rushed in again just as quickly, this time claiming the screen image as well. Only the words KOBAYASHI MARU TEST 463981-009 COMPETE brightened the black screen, and then only briefly.

  I lost.

  The thought struck Kirk with numbing incredulity, just as it had five times before. After being accepted into Starfleet at a younger-than-standard age—after testing at the top of his Academy class every single year—Starfleet stuck him in a twelve-meter diameter simulator for less than five minutes, and he failed so miserably not even his classmates had the ill grace to laugh. He signaled the reader to replay the tape again as impotent fury burned his disbelief away.

  "Such tenacity should belong to an Andorian, James Kirk."

  Kirk jerked upright. Outside the doorway to the reader, Lieutenant Commander Constrev's pale blond hair was the only thing visible through the dark.

  "It is after student curfew," he continued complacently. "You should be in the barracks."

  Kirk had engaged in late-night discussions with Constrev too frequently to believe the computer expert would report him now. Turning back to the reader and the frantic scenario again filling the tiny screen, he dropped his chin into his hand again. "I wanted to see this one more time." I want to figure out what the hell I did wrong…

  Constrev folded his legs beneath him and sat on the floor outside the cubicle. "The Kobayashi Maru?" Kirk flicked a startled glance down at the officer, and Constrev smiled. "It is now almost midnight. I think you have reviewed this tape more than once."

  Kirk fixed his attention on the viewer again before Constrev commented on his surprise; he didn't like it that the lieutenant commander could read him so easily. "I'm…timing it." He tried to make the admission sound casual. "And I wanted to study the details."

  "I see." Constrev watched the screen with him for some time. "Once, nearly fifteen years ago," he remarked, as if Kirk had asked him for the statistic, "a student made the Kobayashi Maru test last eleven and one half minutes. My commanding officer, Admiral Howell, told me this," he added parenthetically. "No one has done so since then. Why do you feel the need to succeed where others failed?"

  Kirk felt the blood come up into his face and, this time, didn't stop the outburst that followed. "Because I was stupid! It took the Klingons less time to destroy me than it takes me to tell about it!" His hands twisted into fists without his thinking about it; he jammed them against his thighs to keep from striking something within the cubicle. "I'm good at strategy," he insisted, his voice so soft it was almost a groan. "Damn it, Constrev, I'm a good commander!"

  Constrev nodded sagely. "Perhaps the Klingons are merely better."

  "No." The very thought was too frightening to contemplate. If the Klingons were "better" in this simple classroom exercise, what would they be like out in the real world? "It's just a computer," Kirk finally stated defensively. "I should have been able to beat it."

  "Just a computer." Constrev's thin laughter fell dead in the bigness of the empty rec hall. "All the more reason why you could never have beaten it."

  Kirk fixed him with a wary frown.

  Constrev smiled. No one could discuss the intricacies of computer psychology with as much glee and expertise as Constrev; Kirk sometimes thought binary mental functions were his friend's sacred call. "Computers cannot be indecisive," Constrev told him. "Computers can think faster than any biological organism currently known. Computers take their knowledge base from the knowledge of all species, not just from the knowledge of one man's experience. They are smarter than you, faster than you, more patient than you."

  "They also can't feel," Kirk countered. He didn't like being compared to a machine, particularly when the comparison was unfavorable. "They have no instinct—they have no heart!"

  Constrev smiled pleasantly. "So you believe spiritually superior biological creatures should triumph over electronics."

  Kirk turned back to the reader without dignifying the sarcasm with a reply.

  "You should read your philosophy, James Kirk. Earth's Agrippa teaches that all beings are microcosmic representations of the universe around them—a being is born, and grows, and dies. So the universe was once born, grows old, and will someday die. Your failure in this is only a representation of how all things—great and small—suffer failure, until the end of eternity. Accept this, and go on."

  Kirk watched as flame swallowed the Potemkin's bridge for the sixth time that evening. He wasn't really interested in what Agrippa thought of the Kobayashi Maru—Agrippa's grade didn't depend on it. "How microcosmic can we be," he asked Constrev irritably, "when individual men die every day, but our species continues to thrive?"

  "In the end, entropy claims even the most thriving species. We all fail in the end."

  Kirk slapped off the tape player with an angry swat of his hand. He'd had too much of philosophy for one night. "Good night, Constrev," he announced shortly.

  Constrev stood without protest. "Good night, James."

  It was like a bad nightmare.

  Smoke obscured Kirk's vision for the second time in as many weeks. Fans roared into life overhead, swirling back the gray-black cloud like a curtain as the simulator cracked open with a loud, hydraulic hissss. The students scattered throughout the ruined bridge set looked around in embarrassed confusion. Their grime-smeared faces and averted eyes tore at Kirk's already guilty heart.

  I failed them.

  He stared fixedly at the navigation-helm console as Admiral Howell stepped onto the bridge. Howell—his dark eyes glittering with sympathy—paused in the arc where the viewscreen once hung, and announced, "The simulation is now over."

  Almost as a single body, the cadets exhaled in relief. Kirk couldn't help but marvel, even through his despair, that one calm voice could reassure an entire bridge crew following such a total disaster. He envied Howell that steadiness—a steadiness he was once vain enough to believe he possessed himself.

  "You will have thirty minutes to clean up and organize your thoughts," Howell continued, apparently oblivious to Kirk's humiliation. "We'll meet in Kare Conference Hall at ten o'clock to review your performance. Dismissed."

  The cadets filed off the simulator in groups of two and three. Still shaken, their movements too quick and broad, their voices too hushed or too loud, they abandoned Kirk without a backward glance. As well they should, he thought bitterly. A second class of cadets, a second starship, a second Kobayashi Maru. A second failure. It terrified Kirk to think this might be the beginning of a trend.

  "Are you going to join the rest of us, Cadet Kirk? Or wait here until the maintenance crews, sweep you away?"

  Kirk flashed a look at Howell's smiling eyes, then forced himself not to look away again when he realized he was blushing. "I was…reviewing my performance. I think I'm ready to leave now."

  Howell waved Kirk back into the command chair when the cadet started to rise. "Reviewing your performance?" the admiral echoed when Kirk stopped and looked at him, but refused to sit back down. "Didn't you get enough of that the other night?"

  Kirk snapped his mouth shut the moment he realized it was hanging open. "Constrev—"

  "Told me nothing," Howell finished for him. "But I know the tape of your last Kobayashi Maru was checked out overnight, you were late for bed check, and Constrev showed up at my office late—and sleepy—for his duties the next day." He stepped forward to lean across the navigation console, chin in hand. "Mister Kirk, do you realize your reaction time to this test was well above average for this kind of encounter? Both times."

  Kirk felt his face redden again. "I didn't bother to time myself, Admiral." That wasn't entirely true: He had studied his first scenario enough to know it took him four minutes, thirty-seven point zero three seconds to die. He thought it took a little longer this time, but he wasn't sure.

  "Both times, you executed flawless approaches. You deviated from the books when applicable, and your crew gave you admirable assistance—especially considering that none of them has actually served o
n board a starship." Howell cocked one eyebrow and gave Kirk a curious grin. "I didn't expect the Reinhold pirouette this time. I'm not even sure that's possible with a Constitution-class ship. But Admiral Walgren gave you points for trying. He isn't an easy man to impress."

  "I lost my ship." The words crept out of Kirk before he could stop them. An agony of shame at his lack of control made him turn to examine the shattered bridge around him. "I lost my crew! Twice…"

  "You did everything you could."

  "I should have done more."

  Howell shrugged with such infuriating calm that Kirk wanted to hit him. "Maybe. But it wouldn't have made any difference."

  Kirk started to protest: He'd studied the great commanders since he was a boy—he knew that Korrd, Garth of Izar, or Shaitani would have wrenched victory from the jaws of even this defeat. God, it was Shaitani he'd tried to emulate in his first scenario, and even then—

  Even then, he'd failed.

  And that was impossible.

  Staring into Howell's seamed face, Kirk looked for some confirmation of what he'd already intuited. He didn't understand why, but he knew now. Knew, and hated Howell and all the others for forcing him to face such a scenario.

  "You planned this," he accused in a quiet voice. "Both times, you knew I was going to lose."

  "I know everyone is going to lose." Howell pushed himself upright and matched Kirk's glare. "It's the nature of the game, Mister Kirk. No one wins."

  Howell didn't seem angry at Kirk or Kirk's newly discerned knowledge. So the ensign didn't interrupt him when he continued.