The sounds of heavy weapon fire at close range told anyone listening Shepard was on or near the main gun of some vehicle. "Shepard to Fleet—it's not a Reaper base! It's a live Reaper! Requesting immediate orbital strike!"

Traynor blessed Joker, more than once, that he had tapped the bridge into the ground team's helmet radios. He never stated a reason for it; he simply did it of his own initiative. Now, she was glad he had: it was faster not to have to relay what was going on and if there was a real Reaper down there—she'd wondered why there seemed to be no Reaper presence—Shepard needed her crew to have their A-game out and ready.

And, perhaps, it was easier to do that with Shepard shouting over the comms than Joker relaying her orders.

"Shepard. The quarian fleet is requesting confirmation that you are cle—" EDI began.

"We're clear! Fire!"

The sounds of massive projectiles striking heavy plating. How close was Shepard, anyway, if the sounds were that loud?

Fear began to claw at Traynor's guts. Was it like with a movie you could hear but not see? The gunfire and screams being so much worse compared to what they were when one had the visual component to make sense of the chaos?

"What was that? What did we hit?" one of the quarians demanded.

"Looks like one of you hit the firing chamber. Must be a weak point when it's priming."

"Dammit. It's too fine a target—jamming towers have us targeting manually. We'll never manage a precision hit like that!"

"We may escape before it recovers," Legion put in, its voice a softly distorted warble.

"Stop the rover! Stop the damn car! No, no, everyone stay put!"

"Shepard-Captain?"

"Legion, get them out of here!"

"Shepard, I'm questioning your sanity now!" Alenko called, tone full of unease.

"Seconded!" Vega agreed hastily.

"You're crazy!" Tali cried.

"Oh, trust me, I am at my sanest… I've got this! If that thing doesn't go down, we're all fragged! We can't run fast enough and if we do run the geth stay under Reaper control and the quarians are dead! Go on! Go!"

"This is Officer Vakarian," the owner of that name announced from his spot peering over Joker's shoulder. "Everyone into your safety harnesses."

"Cause it might shoot at us," Copeland hissed to Omri after the former mumbled a question. "Cause it knows she cares."

And Shepard wasn't much to reckon with on foot with a targeting gun, defenseless until the Fleet could do something constructive.

Traynor pulled her harness on, grimacing to herself.

"EDI! Patch every gun in this system into the Normandy's weapon system—I want this targeting laser synched up to the whole damn fleet."

"Understood. Done."

"Gimme the all-call."

"You now are on an open channel."

"Shepard to Fleet! I'm going to paint the weak spot for you. You should have been sent synch-up data for the Normandy's targeting system. Wait for my mark, then fire at will."

Several of the crewmen turned to one another, with varying degrees of disbelief or nausea. It was one thing to suspect what she was going to do…it was another to hear it confirmed.

Traynor felt inclined towards nausea.

"Come and get me, you son of a bitch…"

The Normandy abruptly banked hard, and Traynor found herself pushed into an awkward position, to the extent that she felt like she was simply dangling in her harness. From around the CIC came shrieks, yelps, shouts and, in several cases, simply maledictions aimed at the Reaper.

"It's just harassment fire," Garrus noted, as though it was not worth concerning themselves about.

"See? I told you!" Copeland crowed. Copeland had been spending more time around the turian as the tour wore on, and held Garrus in very high esteem. Apparently, they hadn't been discussing…whatever she'd assumed they'd been discussing.

Joker pulled the Normandy right again and Traynor squeezed her eyes closed. She gripped at her harness until the material cut into her hands.

She'd been helpless like this once before…no, she'd thought she felt helpless like this. The fact was that there was absolutely nothing she could do. She hadn't been harmed, she hadn't been paralyzed, she was simply stuck in a big bubble of habitable space inside the void of actual space an obscene distance from where the real fight was, and all she could do was listen because shouting wouldn't help…

Her eyes snapped open, the harness cutting into her palms even more aggressively despite the shakes now wracking her from fingertip to her very ears (or so it felt).

For a moment she wasn't sure if she was afraid or angry.

Then, in a split second, she decided she wasn't either. She was simply and totally enraged. Burning-in-the-gut enraged. Headache-inducing enraged—but never mind the headache because she didn't have a Reaper shooting at her with only standard-issue shield modules for company!

Stupid, mechanical alien squid-things…for a moment all she could think was how much she hated them. They'd killed her colony. They were killing so many worlds, and they were down there, now shooting at her and trying to kill her commanding officer…

And she was stuck, here, unable to do anything constructive and the thought made her see red. All she could think was she'd love to tear that stupid thing to pieces with her bare hands and melt the scrap down into the most harmless, non-threatening thing she could think of…toilet plumbing, maybe.

She wanted to rip those stupid things in half and watch them blow up! Weren't explosions therapeutic? Well, she'd find this Reaper exploding incredibly therapeutic. They could broadcast it all over the Extranet, the stupid thing exploding with dramatic music in the background…

The Normandy ceased to jerk about, as chatter indicated that the Reaper had its hands full with Shepard, aware that she'd been in deadly earnest about painting it manually…and apparently she'd had some luck with that.