Kobayashi Maru - Michael A. Martin [2]
Even though the SImyoH s artificial gravity had gasped its last shortly after both her main and backup life-support systems had flickered out, YaVangs combat pressure suitnow home to the only thing that still breathed aboard his vesselseemed to grow heavier and more oppressive with each passing kilaan . YaVang 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 batleth alone.
YaVang felt certain that he already would have joined his officers and men in death but for the dying Qrads persuasive argument that the SImyoH s commander had to remain behindaliveto 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 deaths 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 kilaan s accumulated until they had become a full DIS one complete turning of QonoS upon its axisYaVang occupied himself by finishing his systematic destruction of what remained of the SImyoH 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 SImyoH, still showed no sign of having noticed that YaVang had dispatched his ships log buoy several kilaan s ago. Using only the strength of his muscles, he had pushed the buoy out an airlock on the SImyoH s port sidewhich faced away from the RomuluSngan and set the dark, unpowered device on a slow, tumbling trajectory into infinity, away from both the SImyoH and the RomuluSngan ships immediate line of sight. He could only hope that the buoys 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, YaVang 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 ships exterior demonstrated that the taHqeq had finally decided it was safe to come aboard. As YaVang stood in the cruisers 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 suits 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 didnt pose enough of a threat to warrant waiting any longer.
Whichever way the RomuluSngan had done the math, YaVang was determined to teach the enemy a very painful and very sanguinary lesson about the foolishness and lethality of overconfidence.
YaVang 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