When Shepard said, "Shore leave on Tuchanka," nobody jumped. Mordin and Garrus wisely kept to their stations; the sight of a salarian or a turian on Tuchanka would have been welcome for all the wrong reasons. Most people didn't want to get their asses kicked, and there was nothing safe to eat or drink down there for non-krogans anyway. For an initial consultation with someone at Urdnot about Grunt's condition, Shepard wasn't interested in starting any trouble — but backup would still be nice. If no one showed up at the shuttle bay she'd probably page–

Thane. He was already there, suited up and ready to depart.

She smiled at him. He smiled back and bent his head in a slight bow.

Grunt said, "Hurry it up, you don't want to see me try to pilot this thing."

They boarded and Shepard took the helm.

The ride down to the planet was a bitch. Powerful winds buffeted at the shuttle, but Shepard tweaked some settings to compensate and the shuttle cabin ceased its jostling. Plunging down what seemed like an enormous pipe, the shuttle touched down in Urdnot Camp.

They occupied apparently the sole landing pad. "I guess they don't get too many visitors," she quipped, and popped the hatch.

The motley group looked tough enough that crushing them would be a hassle, but not so tough to be a tempting threat to engage. At least, that was what Shepard was banking on. A few shady looking krogan watched as they descended from the landing pad, but only one small delegation approached them.

"The clan leader is expecting you." One of them grudgingly threw his thumb over his shoulder to point roughly down a hall.

"Thanks," Shepard said, and he glared at her.

Tuchanka was a shithole: the stuff of postmodern apocalyptic fiction, all broken-down infrastructure and people living in camps carved out of the ground. Shepard used to enjoy reading that old literature, before knowledge of the Reapers made it too real to stomach. Emerging from the hallway into an open space, Grunt muttered, "This is my homeworld? It's barely fit to stand on. I never thought I would miss the tank."

Shepard clucked her tongue and gave him a consoling pat on the shoulder, which made him rumble with adolescent resentment.

Then, a red-armoured krogan pushed his way past a line of guards. "Shepard!"

Thane took a step closer to her — he must have read the stiffening in her spine as she braced herself — but the lumbering mass was moving in to clasp her arm, not crush her.

"Shepard, my friend. You look well for dead. Should have known the void couldn't hold you."

Shepard's mouth worked for a moment before blurting out, "Wrex…!"

"Welcome to Urdnot. Watch your step. Wouldn't want you to twist an ankle."

He climbed back up the rise of rubble to where a set of enormous pieces of concrete had been repurposed into a crude, yet unmistakable throne.

"You've done well for yourself," Shepard said, following him apace.

"Not for me, Shepard. For all krogan. Clan Urdnot is just the start. When I'm done, we will be one people again. But what brings you here? How's the Normandy?"

"Blown up in a surprise attack by a Collector ship. I ended up spaced." Shepard kept things curt, as befitting conversation with a krogan. Or so she hoped.

"Well, you look good. Must have been painful; but you're standing here, and you've got a strong new ship. Takes me back to the old days: us against the unknown, killing it with big guns… good times."

"I have a krogan on my crew," Shepard began, smoothly cutting off any opportunity for reminiscing. "He's having some anger management issues that even he finds unnatural. What's wrong with him?"

She felt Thane's eyes on her. He knows. But she kept facing Wrex, maintained a neutral expression.

Wrex leaned forward in his seat, and Grunt approached him.

Shepard took pride in Grunt's composure as he addressed Wrex on his Tuchanka throne — perhaps unduly, since she didn't really deserve credit for it. When Wrex asked him if he wished to stand with Urdnot, she was strangely pleased with the profound simplicity in his assent:

"It is in my blood. It is what I am for."

"Good boy," said Wrex. "Speak with the shaman. Give him a good show and he'll set you on the path."

Shepard nodded briskly. "We'll talk later." She took her squad in the direction Wrex gestured.

Thane walked close, by her elbow. "You didn't recognize him." The subharmonics of his murmur were only for Shepard.

She shook her head once, rough, almost like a twitch.

"Yet you knew his name."

She looked at him. His eyes were searching her expression. "It came eventually. Thane… I know a lot of things, but… I lost a lot more than Miranda's project reports would have anyone believe." She swallowed hard. "We can talk about this later. Let's focus on whatever this Rite is. I somehow doubt it's going to involve Bible readings and an open bar."

She left Thane puzzling over the reference as she bounded up the steps to the shaman's overlook.


Thane saw the grim set in Shepard's mouth before she swung her helmet on to brace against the harsh and radioactive Tuchanka winds. They would be stepping out of the truck soon to discover exactly what a krogan 'proving ground' entailed. Thane well knew a ritual designed to challenge a krogan stood a good chance of simply rolling over the average human or drell supplicant. He prayed that he and Shepard would prove suitably exceptional.

The shaman left them on a large, open-air dais punctuated by flimsy freestanding columns of loose metal that rattled in the wind. An enormous structure overshadowed them from the east: a huge tower that could only date to the ancient days when krogan were unified enough to undertake such a construction project. The tower was mechanical in nature, with evidently no interior. It was a superstructure to support a simple counterweight system.

"A maw hammer." Grunt's eyes glittered in recognition. "I was shown that in the tank. I know what it's named, but I don't know what it does."

It seemed that Shepard had a good enough guess of what they could be facing. Before leaving Urdnot Camp, Shepard had gone back to the shuttle to switch gear for the Rite, sight unseen. She returned with her custom N7 breather helmet and a heavy weapon. Thane did not see fit to question her decisions at the time, but realized now how justified her brief delay had been. He prayed the extra durability and firepower would be enough.

"Hit the keystone, Shepard. Let's get this started," Grunt entreated her, but she would have none of it. Thane tracked the ancient cabling running from the large green button, back and back to the base of the maw hammer. No, Shepard would take her time triggering that, and he agreed with her wisdom.

The Commander scouted the area, rapping on structures to test their texture and durability. She hopped down ledges to explore. She knelt at krogan corpses, the flesh desiccated and torn away by the harsh environment, impossible to date. She gathered what knowledge she could from their wounds, and fished resources from their pockets.

"Hit the keystone," Grunt repeated, impatient. Thane raised a warning hand to him.

Shepard scanned the skies, assessed the roiling clouds. She adjusted her optics to stare down a long channel at one corner of the dais.

Finally, she ambled back to the pair.

"That thing is going to summon the local fauna which gives this planet its lovely reputation," she said in the cool tone more native to the briefing room than to this howling windscape. "Conserve your clips, since we don't know how long we'll be here. They'll probably advance quickly, so keep an eye on your six and don't get overwhelmed." She was speaking mostly to Thane now. "For you and me, it'll be about keeping them off of us and killing them at range. You know how." He saw the smile in the corners of her eyes through the small window of her breather mask. He let his fist flicker blue in acknowledgment.

"Grunt," she said, clapping a hand on his broad shoulder. "Have a good time." With her other hand, she punched the green button.

The enormous ancient hammer fell, a massive weight sliding down the interior of the tower structure to ring against the ground, issuing a pulse that felt like it originated inside Thane's skull. Shaking it off, he unholstered his sniper rifle and scanned the perimeter through the scope. Their backs against the gate to the maw hammer complex, they could be approached on three sides by the enemy.

"Varren," he said with relief. "Two o'clock. In numbers." He hardly finished the phrase before firing off three quick shots into three varren skulls.

"Good. Starting us off easy." Shepard deployed a combat drone into the midst of the pack.

"I AM KROGAN!" bellowed Grunt, and tore off. The barrel of his shotgun crunched the vertebrae of the varren vanguard.

Mindful of the advice to conserve ammo, Thane employed his rifle's scope largely to improve the precision of his biotic attacks, enveloping a centrally-placed varren in dark energy before detonating it with a second sphere of light arcing from his palm. The resultant biotic explosion would send its neighbours scattered and hurt, slowing their advance. Shepard turned to face a second group, which approached from the south. Her SMG fired in neat pulses, obeying a rhythm of efficient execution. After the first varren shrugged off a plasma fireball, she switched tactics, painting them with cryo blasts and shattering them with the impact of a handful of SMG slugs. It was slow, however, and the varren were scrambling to her with the speed of starving beasts. One got too close, and she had to fire straight down to target the beast in the brain. She was beginning to give up ground, backing slowly to the north, to keep her knees out of the reach of the snap of varren teeth.

Thane holstered his rifle and palmed his SMG instead. With one hand free, he threw biotic energy in the direction of the nearest varren, bouncing them off the far wall and leaving them dazed for Shepard's execution. There. He'd bought her a few more metres.

Turning back to the original onslaught, Thane found Grunt wrestling one down, allowing a pack to break away and bear down on his position. He was able to take down two or three before finding himself attacked on three sides. A biotic throw battered one out of the way, but a second one had come close enough for him to hear the crack of its slavering jaw.

Then it suddenly jerked away. Shepard had grabbed it by the tail and swung it hard against a nameless metallic structure, firing three rapid shots into its eye after it bounced. The display of strength was incongruous with her slight frame: a combination of Cerberus upgrades and the servos of her armour, Thane guessed. Thane finished off the third varren with a swift kick to dislodge its jaw, and a biotically-enhanced fist to the brain. As one, he and Shepard braced against the rickety column, their eyes meeting. This is getting too close.

Her gaze went to the middle distance; she seemed to be listening. The howl and bark of the varren were closing on them. She picked her moment from some inscrutable knowledge, and swung out from cover to drop a combat drone above the very centre of the pack of varren, precisely as they grouped together to pass through the choke point between the hammer gate and a nearby column. The drone detonated, blasting them into the ground with enough velocity to crack their spines.

For nearly an hour, they fought off waves of the beasts, who must have been summoned from vast territories around the ritual grounds. Shepard cycled through a variety of attacks on each pack as they approached, each successive time refining the technique in ways that only a trained eye — and eidetic memory — could recognize. As a result, the lengths of the battles were inversely proportional to their level of exhaustion, leaving them worn but energized by the end.

Thane raised his eyes to his scope. "Looks like there are no more coming for now."

Shepard took stock. "Is any of that yours?" she asked of the apron of blood smearing Grunt's armour.

"Hah! Dog bites don't scare me," came his answer, which was apparently good enough for Shepard.

She looked Thane up and down, and nodded her head to him. He nodded back. It pleased him to share this wordless rapport.

"We're fine. Hit the keystone again! I'm ready for round two." Grunt's exuberance was rumbly and bloodied: he was truly the pinnacle of krogan youth.

Shepard shrugged smoothly and punched the button a second time. "Let's find out what's up next."

Thane felt the pinch of fluid in his lungs, but Shepard's endurance was unflagging. He was determined to keep pace.

The maw hammer rose and fell a second time, the waves of sound striving to stagger the sure-footed squad.

Unholy shrieking came rolling over the broken gates of the Tuchanka landscape.

"Klixen!" Thane heard in Grunt's cry the enthusiasm of an encounter with something of myth. He thought of young Kolyat, spying a fish he'd known only from edu-vids.

Shepard and Thane exchanged a glance. The name Grunt shouted meant nothing to either of them. She nodded to him again, with the eyes she had when she would issue a "stay sharp!" to any other squad. It warmed him that she felt no need to give him that warning.

The klixen were enormous invertebrate creatures cased in an exoskeleton, like villainous overblown crustaceans. They might have seemed at home on the murky seabeds of Kahje's most sinister trenches. They rolled towards them on tiny clicking claws, slower than the varren, but inexorable.

Grunt charged towards the nearest one, smashing it with his shotgun butt. The klixen flesh exposed underneath the shattered exoskeleton burst into vicious flame, eliciting a howl of pain and thrill from the krogan as the hide of his face was scorched.

"Fucking masochistic maniacs, these krogan," Shepard said with a note of fondness. "Let's not get too close. My complexion won't like it."

On two sides, queues of klixen encroached upon the pair. Shepard experimented with a plasma fireball: it singed the chitinous shell of one klixen, blackening its texture, although it did not slow its advance. Thane seized the opportunity and fired neat slashes of bullet holes with his SMG. Shepard's incendiary attack had rendered the carapace more friable, and it sloughed off with his precision gunfire. Shepard's own SMG rang out with the death blow to the beast's undefended flesh, and it collapsed into a smouldering heap. This method was effective, but the onslaught of varren had already put too much of a dent in their stockpile of thermal clips. It was not a sustainable strategy.

"You do those biotic combos, Thane," Shepard said to him as she moved past his shoulder. "It's far more efficient at range. I have my own idea."

With an eye to her, Thane resumed his previous strategy with the varren, exploding the approaching klixen with a steady sequence of matter destabilizing attacks and flanking gravitational throws. Their bodies flew into one another in an inferno of blue biotics and red flame. Peripherally, Thane saw Shepard examine one of the flimsy columns made of poles and flapping metal sheets. She knelt, watchful of enemies on her perimeter, and flipped a tiny torch from her omnitool, burning through the base of one of the poles and neatly severing it. She wrenched it free and weighed it in her palms, taking a step back, put off-balance by its unwieldy length. Angling it on the structure it came from, she sheared off the bottom third with the same miniature torch, and kicked aside the extra length of pole. She braced what remained in her hands.

Thane saw her intent, and felt a smile on his lips. This siha never ceased to surprise him.

Outstretching an arm like Amonkira, she issued another flaming arc from her omnitool, turning the nearest klixen's carapace into charcoal. Then, the pole came swinging around, smashing the klixen to one side and knocking it over, its exoskeleton shattering. The flames from its uncovered flesh licked harmlessly along the metal alloy. Not wasting the momentum, Shepard orbited the pole around her again, this time raising it above her to come crashing down in an execution blow of the klixen, who burst into sullen flames a polearm's distance away. She whirled to face her next opponent.

Her powerful longform technique lacked the grace of those trained in any one particular ancient martial art, but the flick and smash of the pole was efficient enough, and dispatched the beasts consistently. She hardly flagged as wave upon wave of scuttling monsters broke upon them.

"Is that it?" she asked, with some shortness of breath, when the klixen finally stopped rounding the tops of the dais steps. "I could do that all day."

"Thankfully you won't have to, Shepard." Truthfully, Thane felt guilty for his biotics at that moment — although they had spared his worsening lungs from further exertion.

"It always feels wrong to shoot an unarmed opponent." Shepard tossed her blackened staff to join the rest of the smoking wreckage. She stretched her arms. "Good warm-up, Grunt," she called to the krogan, who was glowing with delight under a layer of soot. "These things usually come in threes, isn't that right?"

It was a favoured cross-cultural joke among spacers that things usually did.

"Hit the keystone," Shepard said in perfect time with Grunt. She strode back to it and thumbed it once again.

The oscillating tones of the maw hammer's impact were a sense-memory Thane would not be returning to. It occurred to him that the staggering lower frequencies were probably lost on non-drell ears. He was still tilting his head in an effort to recover when he heard Grunt shout a single feverish syllable, and detected Shepard's cry to take cover.

There was not much cover to be had, so he found himself crouched beside Shepard in a nook carved out of the scarred stone of the maw hammer's lower structures.

He followed the angle of Shepard's narrowed gaze to see that the harmonics of the hammer drop had been more excruciating this time because the device had successfully summoned its namesake.

An enormous florid head wobbled atop a many-segmented body, like a nightmare of millipedes scaled up far, far too much. It reared up out of the sand, and Thane dreaded to think how much more of its demonic body was still buried.

"That's why I wanted to conserve ammo," Shepard muttered to herself. It was not horror in her eyes, or even surprise; just brief displeasure. Grunt ambled over to join them, after he was finished shaking his shotgun aloft and shouting joyous battle cries.

"What's the plan?" The krogan recognized her superiority even though this was allegedly his own test.

"Stay fanned out, take multiple angles of attack. It's big but it's still outnumbered." She looked between them with a steady, clear-eyed gaze. "Thane, you have agility and a big gun. Keep its attention. Grunt, you and I fire from angles. Let's try to decapitate this fucker."

Grunt pounded his fists together in acknowledgment.

Thane pondered his mortality. It was not the death he had planned for at the top of Dantius Towers, but it was an acceptable exchange for the experiences of fighting at Shepard's side for these past weeks.

Amonkira, grant that my feet be swift and my aim true. May I draw fire and never take it.

He pushed out from cover and faced the nightmarish beast.

His rifle's scope would be of negligible aid when he was dashing across the battlefield. With a target this large, he could fire from arm's length. The slugs may not do as much damage as a precision shot, but his custom shredder ammo stood a good chance of causing it pain. He stood in the centre of the dais, lifted his gun, and fired.

The maw howled, and Thane's keen eyes saw blood spurt from the centre of its pointed blue tongue. A perfect shot.

"You're supposed to be bait, not the tip of the blade," Grunt growled at him from his position further down the field. It was a grudging compliment.

Shepard shouted for Grunt's attention and gave the signal to load armour-piercing ammunition.

She was firing her SMG, but only, it would seem, to kill time between reloading her plasma attacks. The superheated flames were crinkling the maw's carapace much like the klixen's, and she sent combat drones to attack the spots weakened by incineration. She was focusing on a point just behind the maw's face, if it could be called that. Shepard seemed to be serious about the threat of decapitation.

Grunt focused his assault rifle fire on a symmetrical point on the other side, punching a smoking hole in the maw's chitinous shell.

Thane fired three successive shots into the maw's mouth, and he certainly had its attention. It screamed one last time, before a massive glob of fluid gathered in its mouth to be fired as a projectile towards its drell attacker.

Thane nimbly cartwheeled away on one arm, the sniper rifle tucked under the other.

He noted the brief lapse in SMG fire as Shepard watched for his safety.

Lifting his gun again, he fired another precise shot into the soft tissues of the maw's face.

It howled, lifted its blind gaze upwards, and shimmied back into the sand.

"Coward!" howled Grunt.

"Preserve your calm, Grunt," Shepard said with a touch of irony. "That doesn't feel like a retreat."

True enough, the ground rumbled as the maw swam through the dry Tuchanka earth. It was a hideous recombination of the drell homeworlds, old and new, to have an ocean of sand where giant beasts glide in three-space. The vibrations seemed to be coming from everywhere.

The maw crested again from behind the group, howling, and spat another acidic attack in Thane's direction.

He was less prepared this time, and dove towards cover which crumbled apart on the impact of venom. He leapt backwards to evade splatter, but another volley was already airborne toward him.

He heard Shepard's wordless cry of command, two crisp shouts — to whom? Saying what? There was little he could do from his position but tuck and roll, and hope he could get far enough away to avoid being melted. But a flash of orange before his eyes revealed the quick-as-thought deployment of a combat drone formed into a broad omni-shield on one side. Pellets of flash-frozen maw venom, hit with a cryo blast, shattered off the drone's shield and bounced to the ground. The drone fizzled out of existence, reappearing at its position by the thresher maw's head to continue firing at the singed and brittle chitin.

Thane brushed off the near-miss, and sprinted to more secure cover. The maw turned its rage toward Grunt. The krogan's chosen cover fared considerably better, but he was still shaking off splashes of acid eating slowly through his armour.

Shepard backed toward Thane's position, unhooking her particle beam from its holster on her back.

"You okay?" she asked him while sighting down the rifle's scope.

"Unharmed," he replied. She fired.

She also targeted the soft flesh of the maw's face, tracing the tongue and the interior of the horrific mouth. Her aim was excellent, but impatient; she did not wait to line up a perfect shot, but allowed the beam to catch up to its destination, pulling the trigger a split second early. It was the kind of imperfection, Thane realized, that would probably go unnoticed by most others.

She took a few bold steps forward, drawing up the angle of attack to punch through the back of the maw's throat, then abruptly shut off the beam. She rolled into cover opposite Thane.

He watched her curiously, then heard the mixed howls of the maw's death knells and Grunt's triumphant bellows. His assault rifle had landed the final killing blows.

Commander Shepard in action was a spectacle of balancing fierceness with restraint, balancing war with wisdom. Thane may be the best in the galaxy at bringing down a single organic target, but Shepard saw beyond the individual deaths laid out before her. She perceived the mission. By sheer force of will and the tactical application of genius, she moulded the mission into success: no, an elegant success. And as much as she was deadly on her own, she was an artist when in command.

Thane had often conceived of himself as a gun, paid by his employers to fire without opinion. But when he was wielded by Shepard, his soul sang.

Shepard smiled at Thane, and that was how he realized he had been smiling at her.