CHAPTER 7Kill or Be Killed
They marched the next day, and the next, and the day after that. Long, seemingly pointless marches, the remaining thirty-seven men of the original batch, the tough and the fit, the ones who had recovered from the strain of early training and who had taken care when they drank. They marched towards the nightside and shivered with bitter cold, towards the dayside and sweated with searing heat. They had water on these marches, and food, and each man was loaded with his own weight of sand, the heavy packs cutting into tender flesh.
They slept deeply and ate voraciously and the clear glow of health suffused their skins and cleared their eyes. Muscles bulged where none had bulged before, bones stiffened beneath the action of the regular injections, and men who had be
