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The shuttle hurtled toward Tuchanka as Shepard paced back and forth. "What is a turian troop doing down there, Garrus? Why are they on krogan soil at all?"

He shook his head. "I don't know any more than you do, Shepard. I'm surprised Wrex didn't rip the Primarch's head off and tear the answers out of his brain bit by bit."

"He wanted to," she said grimly, "and I'm not sure I would have blamed him."

"It's bad that Victus's son was in charge of whatever they were doing when it all went south. Promoting family without merit can bite you in the ass. A turian's leadership ability must be without question, and that includes how they've raised their children."

She studied him. "Is that why your father rides you so hard?"

"Part of it. Part of it's that I'm an insubordinate maverick." He shrugged. "I am who I am. I've learned to live with it, my father will have to as well. Assuming we all make it out of this."

Shepard was sorry she'd mentioned it. She knew he worried about the lack of news from Palaven in general and his father and sister in particular.

"But the Primarch knows the dangers of putting his son in charge of a sensitive mission when he's not ready to handle it as well as anyone," Garrus continued. "So it's strange that he would have done it."

"Unless the mission is so sensitive that his son was the only person the Primarch could trust," EDI suggested.

"What could be that sensitive?" Shepard wondered.

It wasn't clear what the mission had been when they landed—but it was immediately obvious how badly it had gone. Turian wreckage was scattered along the way to the main beacon where most of the platoon was trying to hold out against the Reaper forces, and there were several turians who would never live to go back to Palaven.

Garrus's silence grew more grim as they drew closer, and by the time they reached Tarquin Victus and his men, Shepard could tell her old friend was trying hard not to tackle young Victus and take the cost of the mission out of his hide.

"Commander, my men and I are in your debt," young Victus said, coming toward her party. "Thank you for saving so many."

"What happened here?" she demanded, almost as outraged as Garrus.

One of the other turians grabbed Victus by the collar. "He screwed up!"

"Stand down, soldier," Victus ordered. He kept his cool, Shepard noted.

"These men are dead because of him!"

"I said, stand down."

Shepard got between them, pushing them apart. "I just saved all your asses, so everyone just calm down." The soldier walked off, shaking his head and grumbling, and Shepard turned to face Victus. "Exactly what happened here, Lieutenant?"

"I made a bad call. This is all on me. I chose caution and clever tactics over a head-on attack, and my men paid the price. We could see the Reapers were blocking our intended path. Staying on course guaranteed heavy casualties. So I chose a safer route, but it took us low through these ruins. When we encountered resistance, there was no room to maneuver. Suddenly we were in a fight for our lives, and a lot of my men lost that fight."

"Owning your mistake takes guts," Shepard told him, "but you have to get over it and move on."

He nodded. "Of course." But she wasn't sensing the resolve in him that was needed to get the mission back on track, and his next words confirmed it. "Our mission has failed. Once we stabilize the injured, we'll head back to the fleet."

Garrus was suddenly next to Shepard, every line of his body bristling with outrage. "You're abandoning your mission?"

"We're down over thirty men! It would be suicide!"

"What exactly did you come here to do?" Shepard demanded.

Victus hesitated, but he wasn't getting out of this without telling her, and he could clearly sense that. "There's … a bomb on the planet. We were sent to defuse it."

"A bomb? How big a bomb?"

"Big. Enormous. It's a planet-killer, put here as a fail-safe. And now … Cerberus has it."

Shepard was shocked. If Wrex found out about this, that would be the end of any chance of the krogan helping against the Reapers, and without the krogan … "Lieutenant, if Cerberus has that bomb, you have to finish your mission. You have no other choice."

"Haven't these men sacrificed enough?"

Rage swept her. Had this boy not seen what the Reapers did to Palaven? Did he not know what was coming? But before she could say anything Garrus stepped between them.

"Lieutenant, this kind of sacrifice is the hardest to ask for, but your men signed on for it, and so did you. They're turians. They know what they're here for."

Victus turned and surveyed his men. "They won't follow me. Even if I wanted to finish the mission, they don't."

Shepard understood why the Primarch had sent his son for this—a mission this sensitive, he needed someone he could trust absolutely—but the boy had not been ready. Not even close. He was going to need help. "It's your job to make them want to. Inspire them! Threaten them! Whatever it takes. Lieutenant, if Cerberus succeeds in setting off that bomb, the Reapers divide and conquer us. We have this one chance to prevent that—and your men need to do it."

Victus looked at her, then he nodded and took a deep breath and turned to his men. "Get up! We have a duty to perform, and court-martial, death, and dishonor await anyone who balks. We are turians! We finish what we came here to do, or we die trying!"

The men looked at each other, muttering, and Victus marched into the middle of them. "Get your asses in gear! Let's move!"

At last they nodded, reaching for their gear. Shepard nodded at Garrus and EDI, and they followed.

It was a tough fight to get to the bomb site, and an even tougher one to clear Cerberus out of it. Victus went immediately to the console, starting the programming to defuse the bomb, and his sure fingers at the controls told Shepard another reason why his father had put him in charge.

She lost sight of him for a bit while she focused on keeping the Cerberus troops off him. When she finally had a glimpse of him, he was climbing the sides of the massive structure of the bomb, hanging on with one hand while he manually removed the head from the bomb. It shifted alarmingly as he did so, the structure destabilizing more with every piece he removed from it, but he hung on grimly, continuing at his task until it was clear that it was too late for him to jump free. The bomb crumbled into the crater, Tuchanka was safe, and the Primarch's son was buried with it forever. But he had completed his mission.

"Victory … at any cost," Garrus said softly next to her. "Pride … and grief. The best a turian parent can hope for."