No-Win Scenarios

A/N: I own nothing. The inspiration for this story was The Kobayashi Maru, by Julia Ecklar, which is # 47 on the Star Trek Original Series novels list. I'm just playing in Ms. Ecklar's world for this, modernizing it to fit the 2009 version. What she mentioned by way of this was a reprimand by a Starfleet Commodore of Chekov's actions during a similar scenario. All I can say is…..RAFO (read and find out) for Ecklar's version of events.

Also, in one of the early Star Trek Original Series books, there is a scene where the food replicator acts up. I took some liberties with that for a scene in this story—mostly to show that even in the 23rd century, technology still acts up!

Chapter 1

James Tiberius Kirk groaned as the klaxon sounded and Captain Pike's voice echoed through the Bloc K quarters and the rest of the Academy grounds. At 0300 hours, he'd barely had two hours' sleep. Bones would have his hide if he saw Jim without sleep another morning in a row.

The Saurian Brandy was pounding in his temples. Maybe going to that hole-in-the-wall pub outside the Academy grounds last night was a bad idea. Jim sat up and groped blindly for his regulation black underclothes, squeezing his eyes shut against the pounding headache.

"All Bloc K third-year cadets report to flight hangar one. Repeat, all Bloc K third-year cadets to flight hangar one," Captain Pike said.

Jim groaned again, clenching his head with both hands, willing the pounding to stop. He liked going to the pubs on Friday nights (in fact, if he hadn't developed that habit back in Riverside, Pike never would have met him and convinced him to enlist). How was he supposed to know that Starfleet Academy would spring a training simulation on the Bloc K third-year cadets bright and early on a Saturday morning?

But, hangover or no, he needed to get to the flight hangar. He reached to the bottom of his bed, where he'd set his cadet uniform the evening before, recognizing that the pub hop he was planning on would likely last into the wee hours of the morning. Jim winced, dropping his regulation reds as the headache intensified, and he gripped his head again. Unfortunately, the pressure of his hands wasn't keeping it at bay like it normally would have.

And yet, Jim didn't regret the Saurian Brandy, despite the discomfort he was in now. On Tuesday, he had spectacularly failed the Kobayashi Maru simulation for a second time. He remembered the pilot's console bursting into flame with an explosion of heat that had given even him, in his position in the captain's chair, extensive second- and third-degree burns that had landed him in Starfleet Medical Hospital for three days so the doctors could regrow his skin—his uniform had melted to him. He remembered trying to think through that pain and watching how the Klingon warbird had systematically targeted each of the Potemkin's weapons arrays on the bridge, and then how the Klingon commander had mocked him for dying without honor, and allowing his crew to die needlessly, and how all that meant that the son of George Kirk was the scum of the very soil the Klingons walked…

The cadet acting as his pilot that day was still in Starfleet Medical. Jim knew Gary Mitchell, was friendly with him enough to enjoy the company during last-minute study sessions when Bones wasn't off-duty. Mitchell didn't deserve that kind of fate.

Was he really half mad, as Bones insisted, to try to beat the sim? If he had failed the second round of the Kobayashi Maru so spectacularly, how would the third failure come? Would the entire mock bridge of the simulator burst into flame the third time? Would there be real deaths the third time?

Maybe that was why he wanted so desperately to try a third time to beat the sim. He didn't believe in no-win scenarios, even if they were just training simulations for hapless cadets. He owed it to Mitchell to make sure the next cadet in the navigation track didn't meet that same fate.

"Give it up, Jim," Bones had ordered yesterday afternoon when, after visiting Mitchell in Starfleet Medical's ICU upon being released himself, Jim had explained his need for a third try to the unsuspecting doctor-cadet. "You'll get yourself killed the next time. Mitchell is still in critical condition. I don't think he'll regain full use of his right eye. That fire burned him pretty badly."

Jim ruthlessly squashed that line of thought and ordered two apples and a cup of coffee from the replicator in his dorm room. He quickly pulled on his cadet red uniform and zipped the back of the boots, then grabbed the apples and coffee from the receiving tray in the replicator.

His roommate, Georg Andrekyovich, a second-year, cracked open one eye as the klaxon continued. "Good luck," the Ukrainian kid muttered sleepily. Jim hadn't told Andrekyovich about his spectacular second failure, but the kid was also friends with Mitchell, and moreover had probably wondered where Jim had been the last three days. He would have heard about it sooner or later, and his tone suggested that he'd already found out. "Meet you at dinner?" There was a tentative tone to his voice that not even his thick accent could hide; was Andrekyovich thinking that maybe the training simulation this morning would leave Jim, or others, in the same condition as Mitchell?

"Yeah," Jim said, stuffing an apple into his pocket and crunching down on the second fruit (he reminded himself that he really needed to put in a maintenance service request on the ancient replicator). Not wanting to meet Andrekyovich's eyes, he straightened his collar unnecessarily. "Meet you at dinner. Oh, and heads up-the replicator is mixing the flavours again."

He checked to make sure he had his comm and a PADD tucked into a zippered pocket (because the flight hangar destination meant a fairly lengthy trip, and if it was a Saturday morning Starfleet was using to stage a simulation, it meant at least two days away from the campus—how he was supposed to finish his report on Captain Archer by Monday was beyond him), then dashed out the door. The klaxon was alternating between the third-year cadet call to assemble and an emergency tone.

Yep, Jim thought as he rode the lift down to the ground floor of the dormitory, finishing the apple and making a face at the taste of rare beef that the replicator had somehow managed to insert into it, the only thing in the world that would assemble just the third-year cadets at the flight hangars would be a training sim. He grimaced, jogging through the foggy morning to the flight hangar. The third-year cadets would include Bones, and Bones was one unhappy man if he didn't get his morning coffee. Meanwhile, Jim downed his own coffee (which tasted like avocado—he really needed to submit that service request if that ancient replicator couldn't even get something simple like coffee and apples right). He was hoping that the coffee still contained enough caffeine to keep the Saurian Brandy from tap-dancing its way out of his head through his sinuses long enough so that he could actually think.

#

Jim met Leonard McCoy not far from the flight hangar. "Morning, Bones," Jim said sleepily, falling into lockstep with his friend.

"Morning," McCoy said, then got a good look at Jim's face and the telltale signs of not enough sleep. "Oh, don't tell me. You went and got drunk last night, not a full day after getting out of hospital. When will you grow up?"

"How was I supposed to know they'd spring a sim on us this early on a Saturday morning?" Jim whined. But in all honesty, he'd needed the distraction. He couldn't get the image of Gary Mitchell wrapped in bandages out of his head; the alcohol he'd consumed last night had helped with that. A little.

The caffeine was starting to take the edge off the headache, despite the flavour of the coffee, but he still wished the migraine-level pain could instantly disappear. "Besides, Bones, you should have seen the women there. Did you know that an Eshari'i female has breasts so long she can-"

"Never mind, I get the picture," McCoy grumbled, and gulped what must have been his second canteen of coffee that morning. Jim smirked; McCoy likely had a headache just as bad as his, but from the lack of caffeine and not Saurian Brandy that had a stronger proof than the best Russian vodka. But McCoy had, as usual, managed to remember his emergency medical kit.

"Long shift at Starfleet Medical?"

"Don't ask," McCoy all but snarled. "That commander who recruited me back in Riverside wasn't kidding when she said that Starfleet needed trained medical officers. I'm just a lowly cadet and still better qualified than half the doctors here. Head trauma patients at 0200 hours get old fast if Anderson is the only doctor on your floor. I swear, the guy is so incompetent it disrupts the entire cellular structure of the universe."

"Kirk, McCoy!" Pike's voice snapped. "Double-time it, you two, you're the last to arrive."

Jim jumped guiltily as Captain Christopher Pike emerged out of the fog in front of them. "Sorry, sir," he said quickly, crumpling his empty cup and tossing it into the nearest trash receptor. Good riddance to that awful coffee. He never had been a fan of avocados. Jim just hoped that the second apple stashed in his pocket was actually fruit-flavored. If it was flavored like plomeek soup, he might just puke on Bones and save himself the trouble of detoxing.

Pike took a closer look at Jim. "You okay after Tuesday's events?" Pike asked, concerned. Of course he would know what had happened in the simulator. He was the Commodore of Cadets. And Jim's academic advisor.

"I'm fine, sir," Jim said quickly.

"You just spent three and a half days in hospital," Pike said gently. "You sure you're up to this?"

"I'm fine," Jim said again, this time through gritted teeth. Wonderful—Pike had just confirmed that this would be a training simulation.

Pike gave him a long look, one he couldn't even begin to read with the Saurian Brandy addling his thoughts. Finally, Pike turned and led them to the hangar. McCoy gave Jim an equally unreadable look, which Jim ignored. He knew Pike had received a copy of the psych eval McCoy had written up on Wednesday after the worse of the burns had been patched up. Which McCoy had overseen.

Why was everyone treating him like he was made of glass? He had his skin back on in one piece with no Swiss cheese-style holes present, didn't he?

Jim and McCoy followed Pike into flight hangar one. A flurry of movement greeted them as the assembled cadets snapped quickly to attention. Jim and McCoy scurried to their own spots in the lineup.

"Welcome," Pike said, "to Flight Hangar One. This is the drop-off zone for your last group training simulation. In a few minutes you will all board shuttles. This training mission will take place on Earth's moon, at the utility base for the space station there, Alpha Base. We have been cleared to be there for 72 hours.

"This simulation is to directly test how well you each take command in a situation that might very well happen on a starship one day. In the absence of a bridge crew, for whatever reason, the chain of command is not always the best way to take charge of a ship without a captain. This simulation will test the resolve and leadership ability of each and every one of you.

"The scenario is as follows: You are crewmen on a space station. An explosion has killed off most of the senior officers who otherwise would have commanded you. There are civilians on board. There are people from other planets on board. There are children on board. There will be civil unrest; there will be plots against you by the civilians for the mere fact that you are Starfleet officers. Communications are down, so you have no way of contacting your fellow crewmen except face-to-face. Expect misunderstanding to occur. Expect mistakes to be made. And maybe, just maybe, one of your own is responsible for the explosion that took out your senior officers. The persons responsible could be one of you…..or is it just a malfunction? It is your job to find that out while at the same time ensuring that the civilians remain safe at all times. Medical cadets, you may either set up a triage station or accompany your assigned teams.

"The people on your shuttle will be your team. Work out your plans en route. Your comms have already been rendered inoperable, but maybe some of you will be able to patch something together."

Pike surveyed the assembled cadets slowly, making eye contact with each and every one.

"You will all be issued phasers permanently set to stun. This simulation begins…now.

"Report to the shuttles in your assigned formations. Good luck."

Pike stepped away from the podium.

Jim turned to McCoy. "Doesn't sound too bad," he said, cracking his knuckles. "By the way, you wouldn't have anything in your med kit for a hangover, would you?"