About an hour later, after the shuttle had landed in a large square in the middle of a military complex, the soldier next to the pilot turned to face them.
"Ladies, welcome to Highwater Base. Basic training begins as soon as you set foot on the ground. I wish you the best of luck because you're going to need it." He grinned diabolically. "AND NOW MARCH!"
Startled, Ellen grabbed her bag and almost stormed out of the shuttle, the others hot on her heels.
They found themselves in the middle of a large landing field that was very busy with many shuttles landing and taking off. Adjacent to it was a huge, open hangar, in front of which a large group of people in civilian clothes had already gathered.
"Ready?" Alex asked, excitedly wrapping an arm around Ellen and tossing her brown curls. Ellen laughed and twisted out of her grasp, accidentally bumping into Olivia and Lauren, who acted as if they were very upset about it.
"Shhh," Norah hissed at them, nodding towards the group at the hangar. "Behave. We're being watched."
"Yes sir, ma'am!" Alex replied, stiffening and walking foolishly for a few steps in that stance until the others caught up with her. They hurried to join the group of other recruits.
A broad-shouldered, crew-cut man with two broad scars on his left cheek greeted her with a narrow smile. "Ladies, I hope you had fun. If you would please line up…"
They hastily lined up neatly in the rows of five where the others had apparently been waiting for them. Ellen's heart beat a little faster with excitement. Today she finally opened the next big chapter in her life.
She glanced at Norah, who was standing right next to her. Her face, with high cheekbones, bright blue eyes and pouty lips, had a serious expression that complemented the tight bun she had tied her blonde hair into during the trip.
"Recruits!" exclaimed the uniformed man standing in front of them, and everyone turned to look at him.
"I'm Major Wells, commander of this base. My word is the law here, please remember that. I'm supposed to welcome you here and encourage you to do your best, but I won't. You are far too many for our liking and we will do OUR BEST to separate the wheat from the chaff. In a week, ten of you will probably have given up, three weeks later it will be half. And then finally, at the end of your basic training, you are left with a squad of 20 to 25 people who can then call themselves proud Alliance soldiers. But until then there are still three long, hard months."
A man came out of the hangar and stood next to Major Wells. He was no less tall, with a piercing gaze, a square chin and a shaved head. Ellen internally winced when his eyes met hers. She wasn't afraid of him, but he seemed very strict and authoritarian.
"This is Gunnery Chief Grayson, your instructor for the next few weeks," Wells continued. "You'll soon learn to hate him." He laughed a raspy laugh at that, while Grayson didn't bat an eyelid. "I'll leave it to you now, Jack."
Gunnery Chief Grayson nodded and walked slowly down the line of recruits. He stopped here and there to criticize someone's posture or inappropriate appearance. When he reached Alex, he raised an eyebrow.
"An expression of patriotism?" he asked critically.
Alex, a petite but wiry woman of asian descent, smiled sheepishly. Shortly before her departure, she had dyed a strand of her chin-length, black hair dark blue. Ellen wasn't sure if she had ever seen Alex embarrassed as she was becoming now.
Snorting, the Gunnery Chief walked on. When he finally finished his round, he stood back in front of the group and said in a full voice: "You will now receive your basic equipment and then you have fifteen minutes to settle into your quarters and change. Your first training session awaits you. Follow me!"
He turned abruptly and marched ahead with quick steps. Ellen and the others hastily followed him.
"This is going to be fun," Alex said with a low whistle.
"Did you expect something else?" Norah asked with a snort.
As they followed the Gunnery Chief into the hangar at a brisk pace, Ellen looked around curiously. To her right were a few shuttles being busily repaired by mechanics, and to her left a battalion of weary-looking Marines were yelled at by an officer.
"I'll give Alex half an hour before she does something that gets us yelled at as well," whispered Olivia, following Ellen's gaze. Olivia was the quietest of the bunch, especially since her parents passed away, but her few comments were mostly pointed and spot on. She usually wore her brown hair in a braid, and the alert gaze with which she always observed her surroundings betrayed her razor-sharp mind. However, she and Lauren had never been very interested in sports and thus not in the best shape, so Ellen worried about them the most.
"It'll be fine," Ellen replied. Her mother had told her a lot about her own basic training and how the more restless recruits quickly got too tired and worn out to get themselves into trouble.
Ellen eyed the other recruits around her curiously. There were about twice as many men as women among them. Most of the people were tall and slim in stature, only here and there someone looked a bit chubby or smaller than the others. That didn't surprise her, because there had already been requirements regarding the size of the applicants when they applied. They had to be sorted out right from the start because a lot of people applied for enlistment with the Alliance. Many young school graduates dreamed of flying through the galaxy on a ship and being able to explore the most diverse planets. However, this left few applicants for the military on Earth, which was another reason for setting the standards so high in the Alliance, as there needed to be soldiers to protect their homeland.
The recruits were led to several packed tables cluttered with Alliance-colored clothing, heavy boots, and backpacks.
"Right is for ladies, left is for gents," Chief Grayson said. "There should be something suitable for everyone."
Ellen hurried to the right-hand tables and grabbed a stack of t-shirts, sweatpants, and jackets in her size. Just as she found matching boots, they were snatched from under her nose by a woman with her hair cropped short.
"Hey, I saw those first!" Ellen said indignantly.
The woman rolled her eyes. "This isn't a sale, dolly."
Ellen was about to say something when Norah stepped between them and gave her a pair of boots. "Never mind, El, there are others. They just want to provoke you so you get kicked out on the first day."
"Ooh, the doll has a bodyguard?" the woman asked, amused. Ellen wanted to reply something snappy, but Norah held her back.
"Better leave it alone."
"Exactly little El, listen to what she says," sneered a second cropped woman who had joined the other.
Now it was Ellen's turn to stop Norah from rashly getting herself into trouble. She just pulled her out of the hangar behind her.
"What was going on there?" Alex asked wide-eyed when she also came out, but the question was not answered because Chief Grayson addressed them again.
"Over there," he pointed to a three-story, old-fashioned brick building about a hundred yards away, "is your apartment building. The women live on the first floor, the men on the second. The room divisions are on the doors. You have fifteen minutes to get changed and settled in, then I'll meet you back here."
The hallway on the first floor was a straight, wide corridor with no branches. Ellen had to walk all the way down the hall until she finally found her name on the door of the last room on the right.
"Thurman, I., Vonn, C., Webber, E." read a digital display that flickered slightly.
Ellen felt a little disappointed at being separated from the others, but immediately shook the thought off. The basic training wasn't a summer camp.
When the door slid aside with a whirr, Ellen found a rather sparsely furnished room. Plain metal bunk beds lined the walls left and right. The window in the wall opposite her was framed by two lockers, each with two doors. It wasn't much, but from what she knew from her mother's basic training stories, she would only come here to sleep because she would either be too exhausted or have no time for anything else.
Ellen threw her bag on the bed on the bottom left and hurried to change. Meanwhile, her two new roommates walked in, but to her relief, they weren't the two women from the warehouse. Ida Thurmann was a rather taciturn person, while Casey Vonn chattered excitedly the whole time and talked about her home. As Ellen slipped into her new outfit—a blue track jacket with the Alliance logo, a white shirt underneath, black boots, and black sweatpants—she took a closer look at the pair. Casey was tall, wiry build, and had red hair that accentuated her green eyes. Ida was just a little bit shorter, which was hardly noticeable due to her bushy, black hair. She looked no less fit than Casey, which impressed Ellen a bit. While she wasn't in bad shape herself from playing on her high school soccer team, she could have done a little more preparation.
"How much time do we have left?" Casey asked as she had just zipped up her sweatshirt. Ellen started to reply, but then someone outside yelled through a bullhorn.
"Recruits! If you're not down in one minute, you can run five penalty loops around the practice area!"
"We've only been here fifteen minutes and then something like that," Ida said, shaking her head, and went outside. As Ellen stepped out into the hall herself, she saw a couple of recruits rushing down the hall in panic.
In front of the door, like in front of the hangar, they lined up in several rows and waited. Ellen looked around and saw the other four from Havington, but they were all scattered.
"Recruits!" Gunnery Chief Grayson called. "We will begin your training with an athletic program to assess your fitness. We start with a simple march. In twos after me!"
They quickly got up and followed him. The Chief started at a leisurely pace, but quickly picked it up. Ellen found her rhythm relatively quickly and was relieved to find that she was still able to keep up. Beside her walked Ida, who hadn't even started sweating yet.
Grayson led them off the premises and into a forest. After about four hundred meters, a large pile of backpacks was waiting for them.
"Look, what do we have here?" the chief asked, mock-surprised. "Each of you takes one of the backpacks. You will find your field pack for the next few weeks in it."
Everyone grabbed a backpack as they passed. Ellen almost fell over on her side as she picked it up because it was damn heavy. Somehow she still managed to shoulder it and squeeze back into her place in the row.
For a while they moved through the forest at a fast marching pace. As if to show them how little he cared about the march, the Gunnery Chief whistled a merry tune to himself. Ellen tried not to show her exhaustion too openly, but sweat ran down her back and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep her breathing even. She noticed that those around her weren't doing much better. Even Ida beside her was panting with every step.
By now they must have been on the road for over an hour. Ellen's stomach had been rumbling for a while because the last thing she ate was her breakfast. 'One foot in front of the other, Ellen,' she said to herself, 'then you'll soon make it'. After another half hour they left the forest and returned to the base.
When they got back to the practice site in front of the residential building, everyone dropped their backpacks on the ground with relief. Norah and Alex joined Ellen, but they were all too broken to say anything. Ellen looked over at Olivia, who was just about to help Lauren stay upright.
"Drink a sip and line up," Grayson barked. Two grim-looking men in Alliance uniforms joined him.
Grumbling, the recruits rose again. Someone in the group called out, "We need a proper break!"
The chief stood directly in front of him. "What did you just say?"
The recruit shrank and muttered, "We need a break, Gunnery Chief Grayson."
Grayson grinned. "Take your backpack. You are allowed to take a break after you ran three laps around the square with it and caught up with the others. Corporal Dixon will supervise you. Does anyone else feel exhausted here?"
Perplexed, nobody moved, then they hastily stood up again.
"You have to understand one thing," Graysen said, raising his voice as he addressed the whole group. "Even if you have been on your feet for twenty-four hours, your enemy will not spare you, and that is what we must prepare you for. If you don't think you can do it, you can leave. It really wouldn't be a shame."
He slowly walked past each of them and looked him or her in the eye. "What about you, boy? After a march like that, could you stand up to a full-grown krogan?"
The person addressed made a face. "I don't know, sir."
Grayson walked on and finally stepped in front of Ellen. "Are you really sure you want to do all this? If you want to go, go ahead, there will be no punishment."
Ellen had feared he would single her out, but she had already thought of an answer. "It would be a shame not to at least try and do your best, Gunnery Chief Grayson, sir."
He then nodded appreciatively and stood in front of the group again
"We'll see if there's more behind the big words. Now position yourself in such a way that you have enough space, we'll do a few strength exercises now."
In Ellen's opinion, he had understated something with a few strength exercises. He had them repeat ten basic exercises over and over until some had to step aside to throw up, and Ellen was sure that if she had eaten more than a small bowl of cereals in the morning, she would have been one of them.
During their training, the chief and the other Alliance soldier walked through the ranks and handed out jerseys to eight recruits. Ellen didn't get any herself, but felt sorry for them, as she was sure it couldn't be a good sign.
"You can stop," Grayson finally said. They all stood up relieved. "For most of you, the first day here is over. Go to the canteen or rest. However, with eight of you we feel that you should work a little more. Those please stay here and carry on."
Relieved that Ellen had not received one of the jerseys, she massaged her burning muscles. Norah tapped her shoulder and gestured to the group that had to stay. Dismayed, she found Lauren among them. When she noticed her look, she gave her a weary smile and yelled with a thumbs up: "Leave me something to eat."
"Oh no, poor thing," Olivia said softly from beside them.
They walked into the canteen in silence. Ellen hardly noticed anything anymore, her eyes kept falling shut. When she finally had something to appease her hunger, she dragged herself into the shower and tumbled onto her bed with relief afterwards. It wasn't nearly as comfortable as her own at home, but still felt like heaven on earth at that moment. Ida also dropped onto her bed and moaned loudly.
"Hey guys!" Casey said as she burst into the room. "The recruits in the jerseys are back, and one of them has directly requested permission to leave the Alliance!"
Ida only mumbled something incomprehensible. Ellen feared it might be Lauren, but sleep overtook her before she could think about it any further.