 While stranded in a damaged shuttlecraft, Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty recall their Starfleet Academy Command School experiences with "The Kobayashi Maru", a training simulation where a cadet has rescue a crippled fuel freighter by that name from the Klingons, a no-win scenario where any course of action the cadet takes ends in failure.The purpose of the no-win outcome is to test the cadets' response to losing.The characters in the novel find themselves in a similar no-win scenario of their own.