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“It’s a leadership exercise,” says Hank. “Trust me. You’ll like it.”Scott shakes his head. “I don’t like surprises.”“You’ll like this one,” says Hank. “Danger Room. Kobayashi Maru. Execute.”“You son-of-a-bitch,” Scott yells after Hank as the doors close, but he’s not even trying to hide his grin. Whatever Hank starts to say back is drowned out by Uhura telling Scott that she’s picking up a distress call, and he settles back into the comm and tries to work out a viable strategy. Scott knows he can beat this. Beat Hank. He suspects that Hank’s expecting him to go for the Kirk solution, reprogram the computer; and that if he does, there’ll be an easter egg waiting; but he won’t, because Scott doesn’t cheat.The ship blows up. “There has to be a way past their shields,” Scott says.“Maybe if I reroute--” Sulu starts, before his console explodes in his face.The ship blows up. “What if we went through--” Scott begins.The ship blows up. “It is beatable, though, right?” he asks Hank.Hank raises an eyebrow. “It’s the Kobayashi Maru, Scott. If it were beatable, it wouldn’t be accurate.” Scott spends all night on the Memory-Alpha wiki. Invokes treaties, court decisions, points of honor and tradition.The Klingons laugh at him.The ship blows up. The correct decision--inasmuch as there is one--is to abandon the Kobayashi Maru in the Neutral Zone.It’s not an acceptable solution.The ship blows up. Scott’s new plan involves an elaborate ruse: the appearance of a surrender, while Scotty and a team of engineers beam over to the Kobayashi Maru with the parts it’ll take to get the freighter’s warp drive running again. A captured Constitution-class Federation ship is too sweet a prize for the Klingons to ignore, and the Enterprise is big enough that it’ll take time and most of the Bird of Prey’s crew to secure it. Scott, Spock, and Bones can set the self-destruct from anywhere on the ship, and then beam out before the Kobayashi Maru goes warp. It’s incredibly risky--even if Scotty can come up with a way to mask the transporter signals, and the Klingons search the ship in the exact sequence he’s hoping for, the timing’s going to be split-second.The Klingons pick up the transporter signal.The ship blows up. “You’re obsessing,” says Jean.He is, he knows. He’s been picking apart their last clash with Magneto, looking for something, anything, that might apply back to the Kobayashi Maru, when he knows it should be working the other way.“I don’t like problems without solutions,” he tells her.“Isn’t the solution to abandon the freighter?” she asks. “It’s a tactical call. You can’t save everyone.”Scott shakes his head. “I can beat this.” He can beat this. He knows he can.The ship blows up. “Can the Danger Room replicate freefall?” he asks Hank.“No,” says Hank, “But I doubt Starfleet Academy simulators would be able to, either.”“What makes you think this is about that?” Scott asks. “It could be for the team. God knows we jump out of enough planes.”Hank raises an eyebrow. “How many times have you run the program, Scott?”He makes a show of counting on his fingers, but he knows the answer already. “Eighty-six.”Hank’s other eyebrow goes up. “Scott, this isn’t sane.”Scott shakes his head. “That’s not the point.” The point is to save the Enterprise and the Kobayashi Maru--along with crews and civilian passengers--without starting or escalating a war.Scott tries ever diplomatic and strategic option he can think of.The ship blows up. “Why couldn’t you have given me Romulans?” Scott asks.“Klingons are classic,” Hank says, and because he’s read all the books, too, he adds, “And it means you can’t run the Peter Kirk solution.” The ship blows up. Scott can’t figure out why the Kobayashi Maru is getting so far under his skin. By any reasonable standard, he’d passed the test as-written a dozen times over before he’d even set foot in the simulation. In a life measured in hopeless fights and inevitable falls, he’s become an expert in minimizing casualties, picking himself up and brushing himself off, learning from his mistakes, living to fight another day. The ship blows up. Would Starfleet protocols account for mutant powers? Surely not, but Hank’s might. Scott gambles, beams over apparently unarmed, and takes out half the Klingon bridge crew before they take him down; at which point the simulation ends and he realizes he’s given them not only the Enterprise and the Kobayashi Maru, but a Starfleet officer as a hostage. The ship blows up. “I don’t get this,” Scott tells Hank. They’re sacked out on the couch, watching Wrath of Khan for the millionth time, Spock dying of radiation poisoning in the Enterprise engine room. “There’s no core meltdown in the Kobayashi Maru. How is that a solution?”“It’s a metaphor,” says Hank, which is about as useless as anything else. The ship doesn’t blow up, though--that happens later, in The Search for Spock. The ship blows up. The ship blows up. The ship blows up. On the moon, there’s no time to think about the Kobayashi Maru or anything else. On the moon, he wins the no-win scenario, beats the Imperial Guard, saves Jean, saves the world. In real life, the ship doesn’t blow up.Except Jean’s got a different solution in mind, setting them up like dominoes, waiting for them to fall so that she can play her endgame.The X-Men survive.The Shi’ar survive.Earth survives.Jean is dead; and Scott can’t see for a minute after the explosion, just lies there in the ruins of the chamber, mouth full of dirt and ash, the severed stump of their link bleeding out into his mind. Jean is dead; and he stands on Lilandra’s bridge, numb and reeling, as the Professor says something about nobility and sacrifice. Jean is dead; and all he can hear is Nimoy croaking out, “The Kobayashi Maru - what do you think of my solution?” The ship-- After the funeral, Hank finds Scott in the Danger Room, sobbing on the floor of the bridge. Comes in, wraps his arms around him, rocks him like a little kid while Scott says things neither of them can really decipher.“I’m deleting the program,” says Hank, when Scott’s calmed down a little.Scott nods. “It’s a stupid test.”“Yes,” says Hank. “It’s a stupid test.”“I’m so tired of losing,” Scott tells him.“I know,” says Hank, and they sit there silently for a long time, leaning back against the nav console, watching the imaginary stars.