"Uh, sitrep is that we played dead after you went down; Saren thankfully didn't double-tap our corpses, just left us for dead; on the way out, he was on the radio with somebody telling them to set up some kind of bomb after he left the spaceport; I'm fine, medigel is great on second-degree burns, but Zanna seems to be mildly to moderately concussed and probably shouldn't be doing heavy biotics."

"What are you, my fucking dead mom?" the biotic in question slurs.

Do not grant angry people their premises. "He's a field medic who likes it when I don't get exploded. Speaking of which, bombs are bad. Let's go hack a bomb."

All aboard. Bye, corpse of a pretty cool guy who was going to take me under his wing.

Unfortunately for that plan, the monorail is full of geth preparing to evacuate the planet before they get nuked.

Unfortunately for that plan, the geth are clustered in such a way that Mort can hit them with an Overload-Incinerate combo and reduce them to slag. "This omni's probably fried after this mission anyway," he confesses, "might as well wring out a couple of overcharged blasts from it."

Mort fiddles with the monorail's drive console, and onward it goes, smelling like ozone and charred synthetics.

Zanna turns her rebreather on. "I'm blaming you if I puke," she tells Mort seriously.

"Have fun with that."

Commander Terentin sits down on top of a geth corpse. Surprisingly comfortable for a robot. Warm.

A small part of her brain that's more cutthroat and less woozy is enthused to have a Zanna weakness to file away.

Zoom goes the monorail. It reaches the spaceport in pretty short order.

Mort looks out cautiously before getting out. "It looks like most of the geth have already lifted out, thank God. We can find this bomb and get out of here."

There's a brief pause while Terentin sorts all of the dead people and ally weaknesses and various aches into their little compartments,

"Simple." She steps out ahead of Mort.

Now, if she were a bomb, where would Teddy be?

Mort helps the thinking process along with his omni-tool, which points them towards an open cargo bay. There is a nuke in there! Also, a large piece of Prothean technology!

"Oh hey, a nuke," he says. "Let me, uh, make that not a nuke, yeah?"

She does a sort of 'go ahead' gesture. Blind faith in Morty usually works. Any way to close off and secure the cargo bay once they're in it?

It's got a shutter door, which can be locked from the inside.

Zanna wanders over to check out the beacon. "So, all that trouble was for this thing?" she marvels. "Hardly looks worth it. It's kind of pretty, though, I guess..."

She leans in to get a closer look. 

The top of the beacon starts to glow. 

Teddy stands up from her door ministrations to see this. "Nope."

We are picking Zanna up and putting her someplace else.

Zanna is summarily lifted and put a few feet away, out of the beacon's line of sight.

Thus, Teddy is the one directly in front of it when it activates.

There's a bright flash of light, and suddenly, there's an enormous amount of information writhing into her brain all at once. A language - schematics for some vast machine - a warning, a terror, synthetic monsters devouring all thinking life in the galaxy. It's all fighting to get into her head at once, coursing through neural pathways not designed for this kind of strain, screaming into her long-term memory alongside her name and her mother's face and the feeling of a gun in her hands.

Distantly, Zanna is yelling. 

Compartments. Compartments, compartments, compartments. The sensation of shoving at a suitcase until it is forced to admit defeat and close.

Commander Terentin flexes her hand to find that the gun she feels in it is no longer there. The sensation stays even though she's staring at her open, empty hand. Flashes of death and fear try to reassert themselves overtop her palm, so she looks away. Behind her. Morty and Zanna, who is yelling... something? Trying to interpret the syllables threatens to reassert the vision. She burrows her eyes into Morty and points, arm spasming with stress and against whatever's holding her up, at the nuke. The order is in her eyes.

Then something, possibly some part of her brain, explodes. The yelling stops, which must be a good sign.

Something is beeping.

"Commander Terentin?" someone says in what is presumably an English accent. "-relax, dear. No abrupt movements."

Terentin's microexpressions: the relief unique to the unnuked; desire to abruptly move; decision to not abruptly move; annoyance at being told not to abruptly move after previous; obvious schooling of expression into something professional. (All of this without opening her eyes.)

"Yes, ma'am."

She lays peacefully on whatever it is she's laying on. She feels fine?

"Are Halliwell and the biotic woman that was with me alright?"

"They're entirely fine," Doctor Chakwas confirms. "Mister Halliwell was treated for his burns, and miss Shi was given a cranial injection which alleviated her concussion and knocked her unconscious, allowing me to pry you out of her arms so I could finally treat you. The hairline fractures in your legs healed up beautifully, and your biotically induced nerve damage was fairly simple to treat. Which made it all the more unusual that you remained unconscious for a full eighteen hours, completely unresponsive and with truly alarming brain activity. It only stopped a few minutes ago."

"Well you know. I'm always surprising people."

She sits up and

[DEATH]

and vomits.

"Oh God. I have a theory."

Dr. Chakwas hurries over, urgent but not distressed; with a wave of her omni-tool, she cleans up the worst of the mess and sprays the impact area with a pleasantly lavender-scented disinfectant. She generates a plastic basin on Teddy's bedside in case of further difficulties. "I'd love to hear it."

Commander Terentin explains, with a minimum of explosive hand gestures and coarse language, the fact of the geth, their zombie tech, the Prothean artifact, floating, awful fractured visions of myriad hellscapes, and the particular feeling of a boiling ocean being poured into the small ceramic cup of one's mind. (She gags only a few times and seems to regain composure as she goes on.) She figures this all accounts for any nega-comas she has had or might have going forward.

Chakwas takes notes on a datapad.

"My God," she says afterwards, somewhere between awed and grimacing. "I'd say it's a good thing your biotic detonated the beacon when she did - even if it was legally questionable, I value your brain remaining intact over any alien relic."

"Let's hope the Council sees it the same way," Captain Anderson says, entering the room. "I've got the reports from Halliwell and Shi, and now you're corroborating. Shi's testimony is worth as much as a concussed mercenary's ever is, and Halliwell has occasionally been... call it inconsistent... but you've got a spotless record. I hope that's enough to convince the Council. If it isn't... well, we'll figure something out. Saren has to be stopped."

Teddy lets him finish saying all of that before clearing her throat daintily: "Captain, please. Can't you see I'm discussing personal medical information with my doctor here?"

She heaves herself up onto her healed legs while everyone else appreciates her wit and good humor. It's breezy on the Normandy when you're in scrubs instead of armor. "If the Council doesn't take my testimony as fact then they should be recalled, or fired, or whatever. But they will. I'm very convincing, for one, and we also have the virtue of telling the truth about a completely inane situation. We'd be stupid to kill Nihlus or try to cover it up somehow, we'd be stupider to blow up a Prothean artifact unless it was actively killing me–" Teddy was handling it just fine but whatever– "and we would be truly stupid to try and pull something when the geth have appeared out of nowhere." Handshake offered to Doctor Chak? "So we're fine."