‘Don’t give me all this “de-humanising” bullshit. Marines are there to fight and win wars. It’s a volunteer force, no-one makes them join. They don’t like it, they can quit. We’re in the business of killing aliens. We’re not exactly cagey about it.’
Marine Major Tim ‘Jaguar’ Johnson
The cold mountain air sang through the temple walls. Gia was wearing nothing more than a single strip of tape around her breasts and a pair of skintight olive-green shorts. She shivered uncontrollably, and her teeth rattled like marbles in a glass jar.
She was sitting alone in some kind of ancient mountain temple. The walls were mere ranks of pillars, completely open to the elements. Beyond, an endless range of mountains stretched into the distance, soaked in early evening sunlight. The sky was a deep, limitless blue, glittering with stars.
Her breath streamed away from her mouth in large clouds of white vapour. Her hands were wrapped tightly around her midriff. She had no recollection of arriving, and no recollection of sitting down. Peresvet and Aker were a distant memory. Although somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware that this was a VR simulation, for some reason it didn’t feel like it. It felt more real than any other VR program she’d been in. Certainly she’d never been this cold before.
Footsteps echoed off the cold stone. She gasped in a stab of icy air, her eyes searching for the source. A few seconds later, a man stepped into view.
‘Raman. I am Drill Sergeant Lambda,’ Drill Sergeant Lambda said. He was tall, muscular and black, wearing temperate combat fatigues and a blue beret.
‘I—’
‘Do not speak,’ Lambda said. The words were like a trio of gunshots. They echoed off the temple walls, until silence reigned. The wind moaned through the pillars. ‘What makes a good marine?’ Lambda asked after an interminable pause. ‘This is the question you will ask yourself constantly. It should be the first question on your mind when you wake up. It will be the last question on your mind when you go to sleep. Think constantly on how you can improve.
‘Over the course of the next ten months, I will test you. I will test you mentally. I will test you physically. I will break you down into your component parts, and I will rebuild you into a walking, talking, thinking UN Marine. There will be times when you hate me. You will hate the training. You will be freezing cold. You will be burning hot. You will be starving. You will be parched. You will endure agonies you didn’t know were possible. You will be shot. You will be killed. And every time this happens, you will want to quit.
‘To endure these hardships, there are three things you must bear in mind at all times. Number one: everything that we do here is done for a reason. If you are exhausted, it’s for a reason. If you are in pain, it’s for a reason. If you’ve been killed, it’s for a reason. Nothing is done for its own sake, ever.
‘Number two: once you are a UN Marine, you’re a UN Marine forever. You’ll join an elite order, a family of men and women who all have one thing in common: you all undertook, and passed, this training. It will be the hardest physical and psychological challenge of your life. You’ll have the respect of everyone you meet. Your name will appear permanently on the UN Fleet Register of Arms. That is, in itself, a prize worth fighting for.
‘Number three: this training is very difficult. It will place demands on you that you have never experienced before—or ever will experience. But, this means that when you come to fight, it’s got nothing on the training that got you there. We train hard and we war easy.
‘The Terran Hegemony Code binds me to inform you that much of what you will experience, in civilian circumstances, would be classified as torture. Since the Code states that no-one can willingly consent to torture by law, I am obliged to tell you that you are allowed to terminate the training at any time. I would encourage you to ignore this law for two reasons. Number one: as real as this may seem, and as real as the pain will be, it is a simulation at the end of the day. No lasting physical harm will come to you from any of the exercises you are about to perform. Number two: once you quit, you are permanently excluded from joining the UN Marines forever. You get one shot. We don’t take quitters.
‘A specialist VI will be monitoring the training round the clock. Your performance will be monitored constantly. Focus. Use your head. Dig deep. None of the tasks you will face are physically insurmountable. What will set you apart from UNAF is your state of mind.’
He stopped talking. Gia stared at him. She felt terrified and roused and exhilarated all at the same time. Part of her wanted to quit there and then; another part of her wanted to rise to the challenge. A bigger part of her still was freezing cold and desperate for some clothes.
‘I have told you everything you need to know before we begin,’ Lambda said. ‘There will be no questions. Stand up and proceed to the roof.’
Gia opened her mouth involuntarily to ask a question, but Lambda winked out of existence before she had the chance.
Shivering, she pressed herself to her feet and looked for an exit. At the front of the hall was a rectangular doorway, and a corridor beyond was flooded with natural light. Tentatively, she walked towards it. She dreaded what she might find on the roof. Suddenly it all seemed like too much, like she was in too deep. She felt like she had committed to something without properly thinking it through, and yet it seemed far too late to turn back. She was a victim of circumstances far beyond her control, too gutless to proceed, too frightened to quit.
It was with some semblance of automation, then, that she ascended the cold stone steps in the hallway until she reached the roof. There, commanding a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains, was a wide oblong of flat stone, bordered on all sides by a metre-high wall. A turquoise marker indicated where she should stand, and she walked towards it. The wind, now completely unhindered, scoured across the roof so that her skin went numb and her body grew painful from shivering.
When she reached the chevron, Lambda’s baritone cut across the wind like a holo voice-over. ‘Before we do anything, Raman, we need to change the way you think about your body. You’ve had it all your life, grown up with it, fed it, taken care of it, abused it. You’re used to thinking of it as yours. Now, it belongs to the Marines.
‘Your body is now a cog, a part of the green machine. It is not a thing for feeling, or experiencing; it is a tool. The body answers to your mind. Our bodies are important only insofar as they are carrying out the instructions of our minds.
‘This exercise will teach you to treat your body the way it needs to be treated: with distrust. You think you need your body, but you don’t. Your body will hold you back. Your body will tell you that you are tired. That you are hungry. That you are in pain. That you can’t go on. Your body is a liar.
‘Because your body is yours and it’s all you’ve ever known, your brain thinks you need it. That it is irreplaceable. It’s not. With modern military and medical technology, as long as your brain survives, you survive. The rest of you is as disposable as an empty ammo crate. You must come to accept that, and accept it quickly.’
In the distance, perhaps three or four kilometres away, a thin beam of light appeared, pulsing lazily.
‘I want you to describe what you see, and I don’t want you to stop for anything. Do not move. If you move, the simulation will reset, and it will keep resetting until you pass.’
Gia swallowed hard. She was too cold to concentrate, too numb to think of anything other than the warm folds of a freshly made bed or the steaming heat of a hot bath. And yet, from somewhere in her mind, like a buoyancy aid floating to the top of a silty lake, a single thought surfaced. I have already been in a war. I have killed provar. I have watched men and women and aliens die in horrible, violent ways. Whatever this training, whatever they throw at me, they can’t match the feeling of real combat. That was fear. This is just VR.
She gritted her teeth and focussed on the distant beam of light. At its base, she could just make out some vehicles. They looked to be alien, provar, judging by the livery.
‘I see two transports,’ she murmured. ‘I think—’
She was cut off by a zipping, whining sound that she knew straight away from experience to be the sound of incoming rounds. She whirled around, searching for the source of fire, and immediately a loud alarm sounded. Abruptly, she found herself facing back out across the mountains. The beam of light had shifted a kilometre to the left.
‘I don’t—’ she tried and flinched as another round struck the parapet next to her, hitting her with shards of stone like a handful of thrown gravel. An involuntary scream escaped her mouth, and another round hissed past her right ear. She threw herself to the floor, the alarm sounded again, and once again she was upright, facing out across the mountains. The beam of light had moved again.
She sighed angrily. ‘I see two alien vehicles,’ she shouted. ‘They are white and green.’ Something slammed into the back of her right thigh and exploded out the front of her knee, taking three handfuls of flesh and her patella with it. Blood leaked from the wound like a burst water main.
She stared wide-eyed at the ghastly injury for a matter of seconds, before she grabbed it with both hands, screamed, and collapsed to the floor. Abruptly, the alarm sounded, and she was back looking out over the mountains again, her leg intact. The beacon had moved.
She gritted her teeth. Lambda’s words echoed in her ears. The rest of you is as disposable as an empty ammo crate. You must come to accept that, and accept it quickly.
‘There are two ships,’ she said. A round zipped past. Another smashed into the parapet and vaporised in a puff of stone smoke. ‘One is larger than the other. They are both white and green.’ She was shouting now, anticipating the next wound. Her heart was pounding against her ribcage. ‘They look provari.’
It was worse the second time, because she had been waiting for it. This round chopped straight into her back and burst out her chest. She spent a second trying to hold it together, before screaming and collapsing in shock.
The exercise went on in this way for what felt like days. Each time she spoke, she would be hit. As soon as she had mastered being hit once, taking solace in the fact that, despite the very real shock and pain, it wasn’t real in a technical sense, she would be hit again. She would watch, screaming out the intelligence, as parts of her body were blown off by invisible snipers. She lost fingers, hands, wrists, arms, legs, lumps of neck. Each wound clotted quickly, as it would do in real life after she had received her advanced blood, combat conditioning and Mantix armour, but she wouldn’t regrow. If she lost her arm at the elbow, the bleeding would stop, but the arm would remain missing.
She did not become tired, or weak, and the pain did not lessen. She simply became used to it—or psychologically damaged to the point of ennui. The exercise must have reset hundreds of times by the end. On the last round, they opened up with a laser, carving big burning channels into her back, slicing off her legs, her arms, reducing her to a torso which they then blasted apart with hard rounds. Her primitive mammalian brain was screaming at her, trying to tell her that it was wrong, that she was about to die, that what she was experiencing so grossly offended the laws of nature that she needed to close down and expire. But as Lambda had promised, she remained very much alive and completely salvageable as far as the UN was concerned. Watching pieces of her explode eventually stopped being horrific and became de rigueur. She became detached. She started seeing her body as a lump of meat and sinew, which was exactly how the marines wanted her to see it.
After an eternity, the exercise concluded. One moment she was little more than a head and a bit of chest lying in a steaming pile of charred meat, the next she was fully intact again, sitting in that cold stone temple as if she’d never left it.
She stared straight ahead, a deep, pervasive calm settled over her, and an overwhelming feeling of relief and wellbeing. Even the cold didn’t seem to bother her any more. When Lambda’s footsteps echoed through the hall again, she didn’t look. Instead, she remained staring straight ahead.
‘It’s all just meat and bone,’ Lambda said, his voice ringing clear through the still, cold air. ‘All of it replaceable. None of it unique. Good work, Raman. We’ll proceed straight to the next exercise.’
The forest was full of corpses. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. All around her, leaning over her. Roots were hands, trying to snag her ankles; branches were arms; trunks were legs and phalluses and torsos. Their faces were stretched, elongated, twisted. Blood soaked the ground. The injuries were as repugnant as they were numerous. Stomachs were gashed open, leaking acid. Genitals and breasts had been cut off. Huge, mouldy lacerations marked limbs. Eyes were gouged out, fingers and toes removed.
She was running and screaming. Her legs up to her knees were caked in blood and mud. The corpses were calling to her, snatching at her, moaning like zombies. In her hands was a heavy lump of metal, vaguely reminiscent of a railgun.
Every corpse became someone she knew. They must have somehow jacked into her memories, raided her mind. The corpses of her family, of her classmates, of everyone she had ever known from Reya Vasar were there, their gangly, stretched limbs slick with fluids, their mouths flapping open and closed like suffocating fish. The noise, the moaning, grew louder and louder, until she stopped running and sat down, the squelchy earth soaking through her shorts, hands jammed over her ears, trying to drown out the sound with her own screaming.
Keep moving!
She started. She had no idea where the voice had come from. It had sounded like Lambda, but she couldn’t be sure. The suffocating groaning of thousands of corpses was sending her over the edge, threatening to overwhelm her senses. It was like being trapped in a surrealist painting.
Keep moving!
The voice sounded again. It compelled her forward like an exorcist purging a possessed, as real and physical as any corporeal shove.
Keep MOVING!
With a scream that was half terror, half frustration, she launched herself to her feet and broke into a wild sprint. ‘Fuck you! Fuck this place!’ I want out! She was so close to saying it. Every fibre of her body ached for it. But she didn’t. Just a few more seconds. You can quit in a few more seconds. Just keep going for now. See if you can beat it.
Her throat was raw. Still screaming, still crying, she dashed on madly, trying and failing to avoid the field of corpses and the endless horror of it all.
It was four months before she was even given a real gun. Having fired a ZPK assault-pattern railgun—and killed with it—the UN standard-issue railgun was always a disappointment, a heavy, large, clunky weapon that kicked hard and issued the loudest shrieking report she’d known a railgun to issue.
If the preceding four months had been one long and brutally psychedelic journey into her own mind, an exercise in total bodily and mental destruction and reconstruction, then the latter six were to be exactly what she’d always imagined Marine training would be like. She had undergone two weeks of UNAF basic on board the UNS Ramesses, largely formed of team exercises, range firing and obstacle courses, so she’d known roughly what to expect; now, the format was different, and the calibre of recruit was much more formidable, but it was still broadly similar.
She was no longer alone, now that the initial psychological exercises were complete, and they had all—probably a hundred or so recruits—been given a set of drab, olive-green fatigues to wear. Each man and woman was bruised or scarred in some way, too, including Gia. Her feet had been shredded, and her back, buttocks and legs bore severe laser burn scarring.
They were all grim creatures. Each had confronted and suffered through horrors unimaginably far removed from their comfortable UN lifestyles. Each had experienced four months of physical and mental trials in extreme conditions with nothing to clothe themselves in except fortitude and nothing to arm themselves with except perseverance. Even if the training were to end now, they would be permanently changed.
Gia could see it in each of them because she could feel it in herself. She felt calm, secure, strong, like someone had coated her in a sheet of steel. The drab fatigues she wore felt like unutterable luxury. Things which might have plagued her before—doubts, self-consciousness, body-consciousness—had evaporated. She had confronted and overcome her darkest demons. Her mental strength was unshakeable. Lambda had been right; already she felt like she belonged within a family of men and women, those who had undertaken this punishing regimen of training and who hadn’t quit.
They stood in an empty paddock of green grass, each holding a railgun, each staring straight ahead. After a short while, Drill Sergeant Lambda winked into existence in front of them.
‘Ladies. Gentlemen. Well done for making it this far,’ he said, giving them a single nod. ‘For each one of you standing here today, three more have quit. What you have proved so far is that you have the mental strength to endure the harshest of conditions. Well done. You are stronger than most.
‘What we must do now is test your ability. You are all mentally robust, but you are not good soldiers. Over the next six months, we will teach you how to be marines. How to fight and how to survive. You’ll learn how to take care of and fire a weapon, how to use Mantix armour, how to communicate with one another. You’ll learn the structure of the Fleet, of UNAF, ranks, about orders, your superiors, the history of the UN Marines. You’ll learn about the many enemies of mankind, what they believe in, what weapons they use, what vehicles and ships they use, and most importantly, how to kill them. You’ll learn about conventional warfare, Fleet warfare, asymmetric warfare, electronic warfare, hand-to-hand combat, zero-gravity combat… You will learn all of these things, and many more besides. You will become knowledgeable and adept. You will apply what you have learned from the last four months to combat situations. Those who pass the training are those who remember the lessons they have already learned; those who don’t, do not.’
He looked, it seemed, at each of them individually during a few minutes of silence, before grunting to himself. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We start with drill.’
They were taught everything Lambda had promised. The days quickly blurred into one. Each day would start with PT—more for the feeling of exhaustion, achievement and teamwork it instilled, rather than for physical improvement, since they were plugged into physique-enhancing regen pods for the duration of the training—followed by breakfast, a classroom session on theory, lunch, an afternoon of practical exercises such as range work or drone repair, more PT, then dinner, a final classroom session, then lights out.
They fired weapons endlessly, all on IHD deprivation. There was no targeting assist, no heads-up display, no exoskeletal auto-compensation. They fired at VR-generated provar, which screamed and exploded and died like the real deal. They started on rail shot and chemprop, then moved on to micromortars and quad-powered lasers, scatterlasers, assault plasma rifles and the heavy, blocky magma pulse. They learned how to call in and co-ordinate LOAS, too, something which awed the other recruits and barely fazed Gia given that she had been within a hundred metres of it in real life.
The technology of the UN way of warfare was staggering. Gia had been exposed to it during the invasion of Vonvalt, but she’d been almost entirely reliant on Zasha and others to actually employ it. Now she was expected not only to be able to know how it all worked, but to use it effectively in combat—and even repair it if necessary. The weapons they carried, the Mantix they wore, the drones they flew—of which there seemed to be a hundred different types, each with a hundred different abilities—were each so hugely complex it was too much to physically take in. The electronic warfare aspect, encompassing Long-Range Invasive Scanning, Short-Range Invasive Scanning, deadzones, ghost signals, junk chatter, Orbital Residue Signal Decay, Electronic Warfare Pods, thermal scanning, infrared, high-beam, low-beam, tight-beam, comms flashes, drone interference rays, signals warfare... it was difficult enough simply to wrap her mind around what each one was, let alone employ it successfully in the heat of battle. Now she knew why they had spent so much time getting her to stop worrying about her body and incoming rounds; she would be too focussed on effectively utilising all the equipment she had available.
After two months of learning and training, they began to undertake proper military exercises and war games. Although each single marine had so much firepower at their fingertips that they were effectively a small army in and of themselves, almost all warfare was still conducted at platoon level. They were taught the structure of the Marines, the Fleet, UNAF, the basics of SPECTRECOM, EFFECT and UNIS, and the ranks in each. They studied hundreds of engagements, from the Age of Contact to the Ascendancy War. They watched real holos taken from real battles in all their gory detail, and dissected each one to learn what had gone well and what had not, and always how to improve.
When all the theory was out the way, they took to the field. They were taught realities that Gia already knew: that Mantix, with its nanofibre weave and shock dissipater gel, was the only thing that could definitely stop rail rounds. ‘Don’t bother sitting there and trying to hide,’ Lambda growled, ‘your focus is always on movement, speed, evasion and engagement.’ Energy weapons were different. A quad-powered laser or assault plasma rifle could cut through Mantix like it was paper, so the focus was the opposite: take cover, call in LOAS, or mortar the enemy. It seemed that every weapon and every alien race demanded a different strategy.
They started on basic fireteam manoeuvres against rail-armed enemy, and advanced all the way up to Fleet-level exercises with drone cover, force shielding, LOAS support, a full mix of ranged and close-quarters weaponry, PRISM bunkers and city-level clearance. Like real life, every exercise was conducted on full pain mode, so every shot, every burn, every fall from a crashing Manticore was as visceral as the real thing. They exercised in the dead of night, in the full light of day, in the snow, in the desert, in a hundred different alien environments. The surprises were constant and disastrous: EMP blasts, nukes, enemy LOAS, MIDs or “Mass IHD Defaults”, unreliable intelligence… By the end, it felt as though they had undertaken every possible combination of operational factors in the galaxy.
Gia took to the training with a savage relish. Whatever the exercises could throw at them, it always paled in comparison to the real thing. Whenever she found she was exhausted, or in agony, or simply worn out, she remembered Reya Vasar, Operation Talisman, and putting a bullet through Executor yen’Ghadri’s head. Utilising those thoughts, and the Marines’ psychological training and her own reserve of grit from the Ascendancy War, she found she was able to steel herself against the harshest and most dangerous conditions and endure—even excel.
And finally came Purgatory.
‘Operation Venatak is the final exercise you will complete,’ the holographic representation of Drill Sergeant Lambda told them. He no longer shouted. After nine months and three weeks of training, those who remained—just under fifty—had earned his respect. ‘You’re not in the sync any more. This is the real deal.’
They were on board UNS Venatak, a decommissioned Fleet warship used exclusively for marine training on Peresvet. After a few days of getting used to their new muscular bodies, and firing real railguns on full IHD target-finding and exoskeletal auto-compensation on a range ten klicks north of the barracks, they had taken Manticores to orbit to board the Venatak and complete the final exercise: Purgatory.
‘Purgatory is hell,’ Lambda said, relishing in what was obviously a well-worn joke. ‘Here, you earn those stripes. Those of you who complete the training, who we don’t have to scrape off the hull or the rocks planetside, will become UN Marines. Those who bottle it, will not. This is the final test.
‘Space travel is a special kind of motherfuckery. Just think: travelling at point-one lights without force shielding, a particle the size of a grain of sand could obliterate an entire warship. Never mind your railguns and your Star Witch. Hell, I’ve seen a denser-than-usual gas cloud strip three centimetres of diamond armour plating from a cruiser with an FS malfunction. You know how long that shield was down for? Less than a third of a second. Space flight is not safe. Anyone who tells you it is is a liar and a fantasist—and an asshole.
‘Here on Purg, you will witness how unpleasant space flight can be, and why every other branch of UNAF thinks the Fleet, and the marines, are goddamn maniacs. There is no environment more hostile to life than space. Here, you will learn to survive on board a warship that is travelling at fractions of the speed of light. You will learn zero-G combat. And you will drop. ROI, that’s what we do. That’s what we are. Rapid. Orbital. Insertion. The drop. I guarantee every one of you will be carrying a full load of shit in your pants at the end of it.’ He paused, the holograph eyeing each of them. ‘You’ve all been briefed. You know what’s expected of you. Let’s begin.’
They spent three days manoeuvring through the tight corridors of the Venatak, learning the ins and outs of a warship, garrison duty, how to properly stow their equipment, how to eat, sleep and shit in space, what proximity alarms sounded like, and what to do and where to go when they heard one. The part Gia hated the most was open space work, leaving the ship itself to experience the unique sensation of being in hard vacuum, two kilometres from the Venatak’s hull, floating, spinning, screaming, with oxygen running out, in the unfiltered starlight of Peresvet’s sun. After that horrible initiation, zero-gravity CQC was nothing.
In truth, Purgatory seemed like one of the easiest parts of the training to Gia, precisely because she had already done it. She had already experienced the real, animal dread of being on a warship under attack. The Ramesses had been nearly obliterated by Ascendancy guns before she’d been forced to perform an emergency eject and ROI into a hot warzone. The marines-to-be around her performed the exercises with professionalism, but often looked genuinely alarmed—even frightened—when the hull rattled with simulated ordnance or the acceleration alarms went off. But for Gia, this was a re-enactment, a second-grade rehash of the real thing. As a consequence, she quickly developed a reputation for being a slick operator, a consummate pro.
‘Goddamn it, Raman, you know this shit like the back of your hand, don’t you?’ Lambda said to her after she exited the capsule following another acceleration alarm.
‘Yes, Drill Sergeant,’ she said, her voice emotionless, her chest swelling with pride.
‘Shit, I like your guts, girl. If Liz Aker hadn’t claimed you, I’d take you into combat myself.’
That earned her some jealous looks from the other marines. She ignored them.
‘Thank you, Drill Sergeant.’
‘Don’t thank me. Best in the unit is usually the first to die,’ Lambda cackled and ducked out of the sync room.
The ROI was the last exercise they had to undertake, a one hundred and sixty kilometre drop from the Venatak’s ventral side on to Peresvet’s northern uplands. They were fired from mass drivers one by one in bullet-shaped capsules, covering the distance in under two minutes. Gia knew she should have been scared, suspended in the womb of nanogel travelling at thousands of metres a second, but she wasn’t. As the cyclopean orb of Peresvet yawned ahead of her, she actually felt something approaching a state of serene calm overcoming her. In the absence of any appreciable movement, it was too breathtaking, too beautiful to be frightening.
The feeling was obliterated within seconds of hitting the atmosphere. She recalled now the horrifying, stomach-dropping feeling of vertigo as the pull of gravity took hold and the lander was battered by high-altitude winds.
Her HUD began to yammer with alarms. She was way off course. She thrashed in the nanogel as turbulence threw the capsule through the air. The airframe protested as a jet stream knocked her entire kilometres west of the landing zone.
She took manual control of the attitudinal jets, just like they’d been taught. The controls could not have been less intuitive. She eased it back east, trying to ignore the rattling of half-frozen slush against the hull and the ground rushing up to meet her at frightening speed.
The LZ was indicated by a pulsing green IHD marker. The capsule chimed with approval every time her vector lined up. She couldn’t keep the damn thing straight for more than a few seconds at a time—and accuracy was a big factor.
‘Come on!’ she screamed. Her pressure suit was a hot reservoir of sweat. Alarms assaulted her ears. She was still being thrown around by Peresvet’s hostile and unwelcoming atmosphere. Just a few more seconds…
The retro thrusters kicked in, as hard and powerful as a straight-up collision with the ground. The G-forces were astonishing. Her feet actually hit the bottom of the capsule, through the gel. There was nothing to do but brace now; any chance of realigning her insertion vector was gone the second those powerful Royce-Khan jets blasted on.
She peered through half-closed eyes at the target marker. She’d hit it within five metres—a near-perfect landing. Anything within fifty was considered well within acceptable parameters. Even a kilometre off could be fine, depending on the weather.
But five metres…
With trembling hands, Gia thumped the quick release and stepped out on to the firm, hard ground of Peresvet.
She was a marine.