CHAPTER 9Survival
The march had been the worst yet, fully a hundred miles of slogging torment, and the swollen ball of Capella glared down from the heavens with an eye-searing splendour, sending ripples of heat rising from the gritty sand of the desert, sucking moisture from their bodies almost before it had time to form.
A hundred miles beneath double gravity, seventy hours of continuous advancing into the flaming jaws of hell, and at the end of it they were exhausted and on the verge of collapse.
Five columns set out from the settlement, almost the entire body of trained prisoners, and they had fanned out in different directions so that a tracked vehicle carried armed guards and supplies, and they churned ahead, dust pluming from beneath the wide tracks. They had slept little en route
