Chapter 19
Chapter 18
Stardate 57233
The M82 .50-caliber Special Application Scoped Rifle may very well be the best sniper rifle ever produced on Earth. Known in the old United States military as the M107, the M82 fires a 12.7-millimeter bullet at a speed of 2800 feet per second --- more than twice the speed of sound. The effective range of the weapon is 2000 meters, and the absolute range is roughly 7500 meters. The rifle weighs about 35 pounds fully loaded. With the right type of ammunition, it could blow a hole through an armored troop transport. And in the hands of an expert, it is an absolutely deadly piece of equipment.
Kitty was an expert.
She tucked the butt of the rifle into her shoulder and let her right cheek caress the stock of the rifle as she peered through the sniper scope. She had long ago traded out the standard Unertl scope for a Swarovski scope. The Unertl, she had found, was not properly aligned to the ballistics of the M82 and didn’t give her the ability to consistently and accurately engage targets at over fifteen hundred meters. The Swarovski, however, gave her clean shots out to almost three thousand meters.
Not that she needed the extra range. This shot was barely seventeen hundred meters out --- just about a mile. She could hit this target using the Unertl if she had to. But Kitty was a perfectionist and a professional. The Unertl scope was a less-than-perfect tool, and she believed in having the right tool for the job.
She looked through the scope. Gladiator was facing Picard and they were talking. Gladiator was clearly acting his usual haughty self as he made some point to the Captain. Both Picard and Lilandra looked pissed, but that was hardly surprising. In their position, she’d be a lot more than pissed.
Gladiator was still a little too close to Picard. It was unlikely that she would miss, but even if she nailed Gladiator, there was a good chance that the bullet would ricochet into one of the hostages. She needed Gladiator to move just a little bit. She would wait for her opportunity. She was patient. Most snipers were, and Kitty was a very good sniper. Everything was ready. Riker and his crew had done their parts well. Now she would do hers.
“Pryde to Enterprise,” she called.
“Enterprise here,” came Riker’s reply.
“I am in position.”
“Understood. We’re ready here as well.”
She continued to look through the scope. Picard was starting to reply angrily to Gladiator, and Gladiator was answering him. Picard was clearly agitated, but Gladiator had a look of smugness on his face. Then Gladiator shifted his weight slightly, turning his back to Kitty, and moved slightly to the right.
Kitty took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she spoke again.
“Execute.”
She squeezed the trigger.
*****
The one-and-a-half-ounce slug left the rifle at the speed of 2800 meters per second. It reached the target in just over half a second, almost four seconds before the booming sound of the shot reached the target.
Gladiator was unready for the shot. Had he been human, the shot would literally have cut him in half. But he was invulnerable, of course, so the bullet didn’t hurt him. But he wasn’t ready for it.
Had he been ready, he would have braced himself and set his footing to keep from being knocked off balance. But without being ready for it, he had not braced himself against the blow, and was consequently knocked over as it caught him right between the shoulder blades.
The second and third shots followed immediately on the heels of the first. Gladiator was unable to regain his balance and began to pitch forward. It was the fourth shot, however, that knocked him to the ground.
Once he was down, the shots didn’t stop. Ten shots caught Gladiator in the upper torso. He tried to squirm away to escape the shots that continued to drive him off balance, but each shot caught him square driving him to the ground with every impact.
Then it stopped.
Gladiator was angry. He had been attacked from behind in a cowardly attack. Worse; for all his vaunted invulnerability, those shots had tossed him around like a toy in the wind. He hadn’t been knocked off his feet like that in over two hundred years.
He climbed back to his feet and looked out to where the shots had been fired.
Pryde.
She wasn’t even trying to hide. She was descending from the top of one of the hills, dressed in her old X-Men uniform. She wasn’t trying to run away from him.
He looked on in shock for a moment as the insolent little whelp actually walked toward him. She intended to challenge him directly.
He shook off his shock.
The little bitch wants to meet me head on? Fine. I’ll give her exactly what she wants.
He went out to meet her, leaving his helpless prisoners behind.
*****
Well, here goes nothing, Kitty thought, as she discarded her now-empty sniper rifle. She was still armed, despite the loss of the big gun. Her sword and her XM29 assault rifle were slung across her back baldric-style. She had a pair of .44 caliber Berettas at her thighs in quick-draw holsters.
And she had an ace up her sleeve.
She wasn’t using more modern weapons, because even weapons that had been hardened against EMP effect had been known to go haywire when Kitty phased. And Kitty was about to do quite a bit of phasing.
The two approached each other, not stopping until they were mere feet from each other. For a moment, neither of them said a word, nor moved a muscle. Then Kitty broke the silence.
“Have a bad fall?” she asked, putting as much smugness as she could into her voice.
“You are a coward, attacking me from behind.” He was clearly livid.
“Yeah, and your little stunt of attacking my ship with a cloaked vessel, that was the mark of bravery, right,” she answered contemptuously.
He was growing angrier by the moment, and she decided to add insult to insult.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s not like a little role in the dirt isn’t an improvement for that uniform. Anyone ever tell you that you have the clothing of a primadonna and the hair of an A-Team reject?”
He scowled at the insults. “You think because you got lucky enough to knock me down once that you can face me head on, girl? You’re delusional.”
“Lucky?” she asked. “If it was luck, then I shouldn’t be able to do it again should I?”
With that, she drew her .44 pistols with the speed of a snake. Gladiator barely had time to register that she had moved before her weapons were pointed...
...directly at his crotch.
She fired. And she kept firing.
The metal slugs flew at a speed of over 800 meters per second and impacted in considerably less than a second.
It doesn’t matter how invulnerable a man is. If searing hot metal comes in contact with his privates at high speed, he will flinch.
Gladiator flinched.
In point of fact, he actually began to double over --- not in pain, because he was invulnerable ---but because that is what men do when high-speed projectiles fly at their privates. And in doubling over, he was drawn off balance again.
Kitty stepped forward and placed the muzzle of the gun in her right hand under Gladiators exposed chin. She pulled the trigger again and again.
The effect was like a solid uppercut caching Gladiator under the jaw, and his head snapped up and back. He rocked back on his heels. The gun in Kitty’s left hand followed up by firing directly into Gladiator’s face. Both guns blazed.
Gladiator fell back as if from powerful punches. He wasn’t hurt. But just as before, the bullets caught him off balance, and he was unable to resist as he was thrown to the ground onto his back. Kitty stepped up, placing one foot on his chest as emptied the rest of her bullets directly into Gladiator’s face. She stopped when the guns were empty.
“Lucky, my ass,” she said, laughing as she began running away. She headed into the jungle as Gladiator began to get up.
Gladiator heard her distant laughter as he caught a glimpse of her entering the jungle. He raged at her. “That %$@& bitch,” he yelled. “Twice! That’s twice she did it. I am going to tear her limb from limb!! I’ll eat her heart!!! I’ll rip out her throat. I’ll kill her!!!”
He stopped for a moment and considered the situation. She’s in the jungle, which means she can hide. But she can’t hide forever. She needs to save the prisoners. I know what her goal is. I know where she needs to be. If I lose track of her, I can always return to the hostages and wait her out. She has to come to me if she wants to rescue the hostages. She can’t hurt me, and she knows it. She took her best shot, and she couldn’t do more than knock me down. I can afford to track her through the jungle as long as I want, and there’s no risk of losing her. I won’t be able to fly. The jungle canopy is too thick to track her from the air. But I can track her from the ground.
He headed off to follow her through the jungle.
*****
Kitty led Gladiator on a merry chase through the jungle. Every time he seemed to get close to her, she pulled ahead again. For long minutes, he chased her, and for long minutes she stayed just ahead of him.
Gladiator watched as they came to a clearing. He saw Kitty jump over a patch of fresh dirt in the ground that was about fifteen feet long, just as he emerged into the clearing. Then she seemed to slow down.
Trap, he thought, as he saw the fresh patch of dirt. She put a trap-hole in the ground. But she didn’t hide it well enough, and I saw her jump it.
He got a running start and jumped the fresh patch of dirt...
... and fell into the real trap-hole just beyond the fresh dirt patch where he had intended to land.
Gladiator fell hard, twenty feet to the bottom of the hole. At the bottom of the hole was a puddle of some smelly disgusting liquid. He fell squarely into the puddle, and it soaked into his clothing. The stench was overpowering, and he gagged from it.
From above, he heard a girlish giggle. The bitch was laughing at him. At HIM. The most powerful man in the galaxy, being laughed at by a weak, cowardly little girl who attacks from behind and with low blows.
He got to his feet and began climbing out of the hole. As his head came out of the hole, he saw her squatting just out of arm’s reach, with a smug little grin on her face. Her sword was in her hand.
“I believe that’s three times, now, that I’ve knocked you flat on your ass,” she said. Her sword moved swiftly, as she sliced some of his Mohawk off.
His anger, as he realized she had just sliced off his hair, flew out of control. He continued climbing out of the hole, intent on pulverizing her into mulch. That’s why he never saw her sword move the second time.
The sword cut a cord buried under the leaves.
“You know what, Gladiator?” she asked sweetly. “You stink.”
Behind Kitty, a trap had been prepared by the crew of the Enterprise. A giant five-ton tree had been cut down and its branches cut off. The trunk of the tree had been cut into a giant battering ram and, using modern tractor beam technology, had been raised and tied to other trees in the area. The tree now swung like a pendulum. When Kitty cut the cord, she released the pendulum. It swung behind her back, aiming directly for her. But Kitty was phased. The battering ram-pendulum couldn’t hurt her.
Gladiator, who was half out of the trap-hole, wasn’t so lucky.
He never saw the pendulum coming at him because Kitty’s body blocked his view. And he was more than a little distracted with trying to kill her.
That was when the Hand of God slammed him right between the eyes.
The five-ton tree slammed right into his face. He flew backward from the blow, and landed inside the trap-hole, falling the twenty feet to the bottom, and landing again in the foul-smelling, sticky muck.
And this time, he wasn’t unhurt.
In fact, his ears were ringing quite a bit, and his head was pounding like a giant kettledrum. He put his hand to his mouth, and it came away with blood. He was bleeding.
He managed to get to his feet and look up. He again heard laughter, but this time it was more distant. She had moved away. Apparently, she only had the two tricks up her sleeve. He climbed up again.
At the opposite end of the clearing, Kitty unslung her M29 assault rifle. The M29 had been developed for the US Army’s Land Warrior program, and it had several advantages over older assault weapons. First off, it had thermal sights, optical sights, aiming lights, and a whole bunch of other goodies that rarely existed as an integral part of other assault weapons like the M16. Secondly it weighed only 14 pounds. A similarly equipped M16 would run about 20 pounds. Third, there was the ammo.
The M29 fired the same ammunition as the M16 with about the same effective range of 1000 meters: a 7.62 NATO round. But it also had a 20mm grenade launcher as part of the system that used a specialized round. The High Explosive Air Bursting (HEAB) round could be fired in several modes. It could be set to explode as much as a meter above the enemy in order to kill him while he is under cover. It could be fired to explode on impact, in order to maximize damage to soft targets. Or it could be set for delayed explosion. This would allow the grenade time to pierce the outer layer of a target area and explode inside. For instance, it could be fired through a window without exploding on contact so that it could give full effect on the other side of the window.
The M29 had proven to be a real force-multiplier during the latter half of the Eugenics war, and Kitty had fallen in love with the weapon. It had proven to be about five times as effective as the standard M16.
Kitty sighted through the weapon and aimed.
She fired a HEAB round.
The round exploded above the giant pendulum that had struck Gladiator, and the explosion severed the cords that held it up. It dropped like a rock right into the trap-hole.
Kitty heard a big thud, a splash, and a giant curse of pain from inside the hole.
She laughed again loudly and moved off into the jungle again.
*****
Kitty knew she was ultimately in a losing battle. All of the stunts she had pulled so far had succeeded in making Gladiator look foolish. But even her biggest blow so far hadn’t done much more than ring his bell a little. He certainly wasn’t significantly hurt. In the end analysis, every one of her traps was little more than frat-boy pranks; more annoying than damaging to Gladiator.
But what she was doing was a psychological ploy. She was attempting to crack Gladiator’s confidence. His confidence, his ego, was the source of his power. The surer of himself he was, the more powerful he became. Shake that confidence, and he grows weaker.
Gladiator’s confidence had clearly taken a blow. He was more tentative when following her through the jungle now. But even so, his strength and invulnerability were much too great for Kitty to overcome.
And soon enough, Gladiator would realize that.
There was no way for Kitty to win in a straight fight. But eventually she would be forced to face him in a straight fight. And she would lose.
There was only so long that she could keep Gladiator distracted from the hostages. He was angry with her, and frustrated at his inability to get her, and that was keeping all his attention focused on Kitty. But eventually he would get his act together, and he would use the hostages to his advantage. He would force her to fight him directly, or risk losing the hostages. She wouldn’t have the option of staying phased when fighting him. If she did, he would kill the hostages. She would have to attack him, and when she did, he would have her.
Her greatest advantage over Gladiator was that she was a real fighter, whereas Gladiator was a brawler. Not that he wasn’t good in a fight. But when a person is that strong and powerful, he rarely needs to learn technique. Gladiator knew how to throw a haymaker, and he knew how to use his strength and leverage to great advantage, but he wasn’t a real fighter.
Kitty, on the other hand, was a Grand Master, rigorously schooled in so many different fighting arts over four centuries that she had forgotten how many arts she knew. Her fighting skill was a part of her. She could counter any mere brawler who ever lived.
But Gladiator was invulnerable. Her best blow couldn’t do more than unbalance him or knock him down. She couldn’t beat him, even with all her skill. She knew that and accepted it.
She had known all along that this was probably a suicide mission.
She led him through the jungle. Behind her, she could hear him cursing incessantly. She led him through a particularly dense part of the jungle, her phasing ability serving her well as she phased through the brush with no effect to her. She heard him stumbling through the dense brush behind her as he tried to keep up.
They came to another clearing.
Kitty turned to face Gladiator as he stumbled into the clearing.
She looked at him and burst into laughter.
Gladiator was covered in a thick, oily, sticky substance that would not wipe off. The liquid bore a putrid stench that was tough to get used to. And as he had passed though the rough brush behind them, leaves, twigs, bugs, and other flotsam had stuck to the substance. In effect, Gladiator had been tarred and feathered.
He looked absolutely ridiculous. And he knew it.
Kitty’s laughter seemed to break something inside Gladiator. His face drew into a look of extreme, insane anger, and he wanted nothing more in the world than to kill Kitty Pryde with his bare hands. Preferably slowly and in a manner that caused extreme pain.
He began to move toward Kitty, fury evident in every move. Then he saw Kitty draw her sword and slice through a nearby vine.
He froze and covered up, bracing himself for another trap.
Nothing happened.
“Made you look,” Kitty said with an evil grin on her face.
Gladiator charged her with an inarticulate roar of hate and fury. His right hand aimed a powerful blow at her head.
Kitty sidestepped the blow and aimed a kick at his right knee. He stumbled a little and tried to backhand her. She phased through the blow and then poked him in the eyes. He howled in anger.
Kitty spun away and began running away from Gladiator. He followed closely behind her, just out of reach. She ran toward a huge tree, and then ran up the side of the tree, flipping backwards behind Gladiator. Gladiator kept going, and his huge punch connected with the tree, cracking the tree trunk. Kitty landed behind him and immediately jumped again. She landed a two-legged drop-kick in Gladiator’s back, slamming him into the tree. His head connected with the tree with a loud crack. Kitty landed on her back but flipped up to her feet with a kip. Gladiator’s back was to her, and she took the opportunity to kick him behind the left knee with a Muy Thai-style leg kick. Gladiator’s left knee collapsed under him, and he dropped to his knees.
Kitty ran off and headed into the jungle. Gladiator climbed back to his feet and followed hot on her heels.
Kitty gained a bit of distance on Gladiator once they were in the jungle again. She touched her comm-badge.
“Pryde to Enterprise.”
“Riker here,” came the response.
“Status.”
“Two more minutes.”
“I’m heading back to the landing site. Tell the team to expedite.”
“Acknowledged. We’ll wait for your signal.”
Kitty changed course, and Gladiator followed in a blind rage.
*****
Several minutes later, Kitty was back where it had started, at the site that Gladiator had held the hostages.
Gladiator was hot on her heels, and Kitty had to move fast to avoid him. But then he stopped and looked around. He realized the hostages were gone and turned a furious look toward Kitty.
“They’re gone, Gladiator. It’s over,” she said to him.
“You- you- you cheated,” he accused.
“They’re aboard Enterprise now,” she replied.
“But I had sensors... security measures...”
“That’s what took my security team so long to get them out. They had to locate and deactivate your alarms.”
“You! You’ve ruined everything!!” he bellowed. “You’ve destroyed the Empire!!!”
Kitty shook her head. “There will be an alliance, Gladiator. The Shi’ar will survive.”
“LIAR!!! I’LL KILL YOU FOR THIS!!!”
He charged her.
Kitty wasn’t quite as ready as she should have been. She had been hoping to talk Gladiator into giving up. She should have known that he was probably beyond that, but she had to try. And because of it, she wasn’t ready for his charge.
He tackled her and they both went down. Kitty tried to squirm away. She almost got free, sliding out of his grip, but he got hold of her ankle. She cried out in pain at the strength of his grip.
He lifted her by her ankle and threw her into an outcropping of rock. She hit hard and slid down the side. He was on her again almost immediately, grabbing her by the left arm and slamming her repeatedly to the rocks. She screamed as she felt the arm snap. She managed to squirm away from him for a moment, crying out in agony as her left arm hung limply at her side.
Gladiator watched as she slid away, an insane grin on his face. “How do you like that, bitch? Get used to it because I’m going to do it again and again.” He began rounding on her as she backed off, taking his time. “I’m going to kill you slowly...urk.”
He gasped as Kitty stopped backing away and instead took two rapid steps toward him. Her left foot snapped out in a side-kick that caught Gladiator in the throat. His hand flew to his throat as he tried to breathe, and he dropped to his knees.
He must be weaker than I thought, Kitty thought. A blow like that would never have hurt him before. But she saw that he was recovering quickly. Anyone else would have already been dead, but Gladiator kept on coming.
She tried to follow up with kicks and punches to the head. But Gladiator waived an arm like a worried bear, and Kitty went flying away from him, landing in an agonized heap several yards away and clutching her broken arm.
Kitty reached for her comm-badge. “Pryde to Riker, execute Arclight. I say again, Arclight, Arclight, Arclight.”
She took off the comm-badge and began running toward Gladiator.
He stood his ground, waiting for her to come to him.
Kitty leaped at him, right foot extended in a flying side-kick.
He waited for her to come, braced to take the blow.
The moment before her foot contacted him she phased right through him. As she came out the other side of him, she attached the comm-badge to the back of his uniform, unnoticed.
Then she ran like hell back into the jungle.
“Coward,” Gladiator yelled after her. “Come and face me like a warrior. You can’t escape me. I’ll follow you wherever you run. I’ll find you, no matter where you hide. You’re mine Pryde...”
That was when the Hammer of God slammed him right between the shoulder blades.
*****
Many people considered Gladiator to be unbeatable. He had, in fact, not been beaten in battle in over 400 years. There was no enemy he could not defeat, no power in the galaxy that he couldn’t resist, and nothing that could match his strength.
Those people had never encountered the power of a Sovereign Class starship.
Kitty and Riker’s plan had been for a security team to release Picard and Lilandra while Kitty was distracting Gladiator. They couldn’t be simply beamed out because of the transporter bafflers that Gladiator had installed which prevented the use of a transporter in the area directly surrounding the hostages. The security team needed time to get in on foot, get past Gladiator’s sensors and security measures, and Kitty’s mission was to give them that time. She had done so to perfection, with the help of the booby traps that had been set by her and the Enterprise security teams. That portion of the plan had worked to perfection.
But Kitty had contingency plans as well. If for any reason the security team was unable to get the hostages out before Gladiator returned to the landing site, Kitty was to call for heavy artillery. Enterprise would fire its weapons directly at Gladiator. The problem was that there was no way to be sure that the Enterprise’s weapons wouldn’t kill the hostages or the security team or Kitty. For that reason Kitty devised a plan of putting a homing beacon on Gladiator that the weapons would be guided directly to. The homing beacon was Kitty’s comm-badge. Once she called for fire, the ship’s guided weapons would be home directly in on that comm-badge, no matter where it went.
Enterprise carried some very heavy weapons indeed --- weapons designed to destroy Borg cubes and Jem Ha’Dar warships. The weapons were the most advanced that Starfleet had ever developed. They included five photon torpedo tubes, each capable of firing a 4-torpedo burst, two rapid-fire quantum torpedo launchers, and twelve phaser arrays capable of a total output of 85,000 Terawatts.
Even Gladiator couldn’t withstand that much firepower.
The first burst caught him squarely between the shoulders. It was a photon torpedo, not a quantum torpedo, so the effect was only about half as bad as it could have been. But the second blow to hit him was a quantum torpedo.
The effect was like nothing he had ever felt before. The amount of explosive energy that slammed into him was beyond his worst nightmare. Gladiator had successfully survived nuclear explosions at ground zero. This was worse.
Much worse.
And it didn’t stop. After those first two blows, he was slammed alternately with photon and quantum torpedoes as well as phaser blasts. It went on and on for what felt like forever.
The last thing that Gladiator though before losing consciousness was, that bitch did it to me again...
*****
Kitty was only about a quarter mile away when the first blast came in. The ground around her heaved and shook from the power of the explosions, worse than any ground quake she had ever experienced. It went on for what seemed like forever, and Kitty was tossed around like a rag doll, screaming in agony as her broken left arm was tortured.
The heat blast from the explosions washed over her, and she did her best to phase through the worst of it. But she was tossed about like a piece of straw in a hurricane, and her arm hurt, and finally she lost consciousness.
*****
She woke again moments later lying on her back, against a tree.
She had obviously been slammed into the tree because her ribs seemed to be broken. It hurt to breathe and to move. She wanted to just lie there.
But she got up. She pulled her sheathed sword off her back and used it as a walking stick. Slowly and carefully, she made her way back to the landing site.
She found Gladiator.
He was face down on the ground, unmoving. His clothing was completely destroyed, and he was bleeding in several places. His body was smoking, and there were clearly burns over quite a bit of his body.
She approached him slowly and cautiously. She kneeled down beside him, and using her good arm, she turned him over to check him. She put a hand to his throat to check his pulse.
Gladiator’s eyes suddenly opened, and he grabbed her by the throat, pulling her to the ground onto her back.
She tried to fight back, but he climbed on top of her, straddling her. His hands were around her throat, strangling her, squeezing tighter and tighter. His face was a mask of insanity. He was clearly very weakened --- he hadn’t crushed her throat --- but he was still strong enough to kill her.
She bucked under him, trying to dislodge him, but he didn’t budge. She slammed her good hand into his face, and tried to gouge his eyes, but he was maddened beyond pain, and so this had no effect. She cast her hand about looking for a weapon. Her hand closed on a rock, and she slammed it into the side of his head, once, twice, three times. On the fourth time, his eyes seemed to glaze over a bit, and he began to bleed from where she struck him. Then Gladiator let out another bellow of rage and punched her in the face, again and again.
Kitty’s face was a bloody mess, and now Gladiator was strangling her again. She hit him with the rock again, but he began slamming her head into the ground as he strangled her, and she dropped it. Her vision was hazy, and she was seeing double. And she couldn’t get any air.
He continued slamming her head into the ground as she cast around again for another weapon. Her hand closed on a familiar shape. Her sword. She slammed it into Gladiator’s body again and again, but with little effect. Gladiator tried to pull it away from her, but he succeeded only in removing the sheath. The sword was drawn, and Kitty tried to cut him with it. But his strength seemed to be returning, and it had no effect.
Gladiator was laughing now, sensing victory, as Kitty grew more and more desperate for air. She was beginning to lose consciousness, and her lungs were in agony. As were her arm, her face, her ribs, and her head.
In a last act of desperation, Kitty swung the sword at Gladiator and phased at the same time. The sword phased into Gladiator’s body.
Kitty let go.
Everything stopped.
Gladiator looked down in shock at the sword buried in his body, through his heart, lungs, and spine. He looked at Kitty and tried to draw a breath, but his lungs no longer functioned. His hands moved to the hilt of the sword, and he tried to remove it, but it was a part of him now, bonded to his body at the molecular level.
He had time and air enough for one word. “Impossible.”
Then he fell over on his side.
He died moments later.
Kitty drew an agonized breath. Her head was swimming. She tried to lift her head, tried to get up, but the world grew dark....
*****
“Captain. Captain Picard. I found them.”
“My God, look at this...”
“Gladiator is dead.”
“She stabbed him with a sword? If a sword works then why not a phaser?”
“Whatever she did with that sword, she didn’t stab him. I don’t know what she did, but it isn’t pretty.”
“She’s alive, Captain! I don’t know how, but she’s alive! I think she can hear us...”
“Enterprise, one to beam directly to sickbay.”