We stood outside

In the banked up winter there beside the stopped and silent road train, in the hollow of this glacier track valley. The engineers were up ahead uncoupling the two unplugged tanks. A bunch of soldiers, wearing long felt tunics and with faces smeared with lard against the cold, were stood around, silent, bored and smoking those thin little cotton-tied cigarettes.

We were huddled together, not wanting to stray too far from the candle cast light out of the cabin door. Party man, Mocz's pretty bullet girls, another bunch of blurred face passengers who I don't remember now (all dead now), Bêbe, Fusel and me.

Ginger was in earnest conversation up ahead with the soldiers' boss (Captain? Corporal? Manager? I'm not a student of military hierarchy), with Mocz in lick-spittle attendance, fawning for the big soldiers with the big guns, who largely ignored him.

Mainly waiting then, in the cold which was not as cold as it should be (it was winter within the ice radius) and not as dark as it should be (there was a vomit orange glow behind, it's origin obscured by the dark bulk of the train).

I began to realise quite how ineffective our guns were (comfort blankets) when I checked out the soldiers' ordnance: big fuck off wide muzzled rocket launchers; or multi-barrelled perambulating gatling guns on rubber-wheeled trolleys, tended by two each of these lard-faced, felt-wrapped men.