A/N: Here we are. I can't believe we're at Chapter 6 already. I want to thank all the reviewers for your very kind comments - I'm sorry I don't have time to respond to them all individually like I should, but I do read them all, and all reviews are wonderful reviews and keep an FF author happy and typing. Just sayin'.
Disclaimer: Star Trek does not belong to me. I did borrow some of the dialogue from the movie's Kobayashi Maru scene, with much respect. I'm not making any money off of anything.
Beta love: mhgood is my beta, and if I could write a song, I would write her a song.
There was a point to the Kobayashi Maru, and Cadet Kirk was missing it. This was evidenced by his insistence on taking it a third time. This had required a special appeal and a meeting of the Cadet training board. Even Spock had questioned the logic behind allowing such a use of instructor time and academy resources, and he had raised his eyebrows rather higher than usual when the special request to allow it had come down from no less than Pike. What grudging respect Kirk had earned with his second attempt had been quickly overridden by the arrogance and ignorance made manifest with his insistence on a third.
And moreover, the instructor time spent was wasteful enough, but the students themselves were also involved--Nyota had had to leave his quarters early yesterday afternoon once she received word of her presence at the exam, as its administration forced her to reschedule her planned morning and afternoon in the comm lab. Evidently she had been especially requested, again. This time, she agreed to join without formal complaint, smiling wryly and saying that it would certainly ease the issue of scheduling dinner afterwards.
This did not stop her from registering informal complaints on the subject of the exam-taker himself, however. If possible, she felt even more strongly about the futility of this exercise than Spock did. Responding to the message, confirming her presence, she rolled her eyes.
"Gods, I hate him."
Free expressions of strong emotion were always interesting. "Why?"
"Profound, misplaced arrogance, mostly. He just thinks he's so...hot? I guess? Brilliant? I don't know. He has this fascination with learning my first name that he thinks is endearing. It's actually just annoying."
"...your first name?" His right eyebrow raised with the question.
She had left it at that.
Watching the cadet fail a third time held little interest; he concluded that his time was better spent watching the performance readouts on the monitor console in the back of the room, in order to facilitate his current goal of optimizing memory usage. He listened with less active attention than usual, hoping, idly, that whatever plan the arrogant command-hopeful had concocted for this, his third attempt, would at least be brief.
He allowed Nyota's voice to momentarily distract him from the moving readouts in front of him.
"We are receiving a distress signal from the USS Kobayashi Maru. The ship has lost power and is stranded. Starfleet Command has ordered us to rescue them."
She spoke in a tone that he recognized as not quite what humans would call sarcastic, but certainly mocking. He imagined her, turning wide-eyed to Kirk, delivering her line, and he could see, in his mind's eye, the look on her face. The vision pleased him.
Kirk's response did not. "Starfleet Command has ordered us to rescue them ...Captain."
If that cadet were ever promoted to captain, Spock decided, he would be forced to quit Starfleet. It would only be logical: he would not fit in an organization in which such an individual held a position of such power.
He reached to his right and tweaked, very slightly, the knob that controlled the simulation's speed. The cadet knew what was coming, having exhausted much of the space of the exam on his previous two attempts. There was no evident need to replay the events in the realtime the simulation typically called for and waste everyone's afternoon.
Someone else spoke. The voice was male, human. It sounded very slightly irritated. "Two Klingon warbirds have entered the Neutral Zone and are locking weapons on us."
"That's okay."
The incredulity inspired by this comment was audible. "'That's okay'?"
"Yeah, don't worry about it."
At least Kirk's classmates also understood the pointlessness of this exercise. He did not know who had spoken, but was pleased that someone in the academy besides his very sensible girlfriend--a word that rolled through his brain more slowly than the others, every time he thought it-- saw through Kirk's antics.
There were no antics on Vulcan; he was grateful for the Federation Standard vocabulary word. It was appropriate.
Spock had more carefully examined the cadet's records the evening before. It was true that, while behaviorally deficient and tremendously impulsive, cadet Kirk had a number of strengths, notably survival strategies, tactical analysis, and hand-to-hand combat. It was unfortunate that he could not be tracked into ground forces or infantry, at this point. His skills were wasted in the air, and in command training.
"Three more Klingon warbirds decloaking and locking onto our ship. I don't suppose this is a problem either."
"They're firing, Captain." Someone else, another male. Likely the tactical officer, whose voice perhaps sounded familiar. Was he a former student? If Spock were in the habit of cringing, the tactical officer's use of the honorific would have brought it out.
It was the next exchange, however, that piqued his suspicion. Kirk, finally, gave an order. "Alert Medical Bay to receive all crew members from the damaged ship."
"And how do you expect us to rescue them when we're surrounded by Klingons, Captain?"
Bless Nyota and her miraculous grasp of polite irony.
"Alert Medical."
There was something very slightly off about the cadet's arrogance. In previous administrations of this exam, Kirk had been brash, cocky, and he had clearly come with a plan. But he had not been nonchalant. Spock suspected, in a way that his teachers on Vulcan would have called illogical and his mother would call instinctual, that Kirk still had a plan, but that it did not involve tactical maneuvers.
He turned from the performance readouts to the primary simulation console, opened a terminal, and begin to enter his own commands. The conversation continued below him.
The first male voice continued. "Our ship's being hit. Shields are at sixty percent."
The Klingon's phasers seemed to have had a slightly stronger effect than usual. Perhaps accelerating the timeline affected the artificial universe's physics; Spock would have to investigate at some later time.
"I understand."
The simulation control officer to Spock's right appeared, inexplicably, bewildered. "Is he not taking the simulation seriously?" Some days, the minds of individuals of alien races were beautiful, boundless containers of interesting insights and new perspectives. Some days, any mind but a Vulcan mind seemed incomprehensibly simple. He would have to meditate on this particular manifestation of relativity when he returned to his quarters. Spock did not respond.
The voices from the simulation room continued; all but the "captain" sounded increasingly exasperated. The casualness of the exchange indicated either that the current speaker knew Kirk well, that morale was fading, or that the cadet in question required a reprimand on the subject of protocol for communicating with a superior officer. Even a simulation officer.
"Well, should we--oh, I dunno--fire back?"
Kirk was not helping with the illusion. "Naw."
"Of course not."
Was someone chewing? Spock refused to dignify the noise with a look. Instead, he scrolled through he debug log, scanning, methodically but quickly, for something, anything, out of place.
This activity was cut short by a sudden, unannounced reboot; the console flickered, went black, and reset. Spock noted the speed with which the settings were recovered; his engineering skills were not wasted on this particular program. But something was clearly awry; beside him, the performance readout blinked in protest.
Kirk responded at the same time that Spock's screen cleared. "Hmm. Arm photons, prepare to fire on the Klingon warbirds."
"Jim, their shields are still up!"
The stupidity of this statement caused Spock to mentally overlook the use of the "superior officer's" first name. Without looking, he knew that the shields were not still up. The cadet knew this too; one could hear the enjoyment in his voice as he chewed. From the crunching, Spock surmised that he was eating an apple.
"Are they?"
"No....They're not."
"Fire on all enemy ships. One photon each should do it. No sense in wasting ammunition."
In an effort to arrive at possibly positive aspects of the student's personality, Spock credited his--admittedly ironic--preservation of resources. This was rather overshadowed, however, by a pronounced attempt to suppress the stream of impolite Vulcan words that flowed through his mind. He initiated a download sequence of a snapshot of the Kobayashi Maru program binary to a PADD for ease of transport and analysis.
The tactical officer sounded amused. "Aye, sir. Target locked and acquired on all warbirds. Firing."
Spock heard, but did not see, the explosions of the warbirds. He turned to a third console to download every analysis program he could think of. He reflected on the skill that would have been required to reprogram the simulation in the 12 hours between the scheduling of the exam yesterday evening and its administration this morning. Perhaps Kirk was too intelligent for grunt work.
This did not render him suitable for an officer position.
"All targets destroyed, sir."
"Begin rescue of the stranded crew. So--"
The speaker, James Kirk, paused dramatically. Although he was engaging a powerful focusing exercise to block out the activity in the room around him and below, Spock could not possibly miss the cocky tone of the examinee's voice.
"We've managed to eliminate all enemy ships, no one on board was injured, and the successful rescue of the Kobayashi Maru crew is... underway."
Spock blinked, slowly, as Nyota often did, in an effort to control his irritation, before it got the best of him. He would have stayed there for the full 4 minutes required by his particular meditation practice, to carefully regain full control of his emotions, but the bridge controller behind him interrupted.
"How the hell did he beat your test?"
By implanting a subroutine somewhere. Clearly. But Spock did not know where, or when or how.
"I do not know."
But he would find out. Hopefully before dinner.
A/N: I think his girlfriend is beginning to have an effect on him, no? :-)