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He turned away and went to the shuttered window. Outside the men of the camp were working as the sun shone balefully down. Most tended the neat rectangles of crops that littered the settlement, the brukweed that kept them alive. While some squeezed the fleshy stems for drops of sweet water, others carefully removed the leaves with a well-practised clipping movement. A group of younger men were digging deep under the sandy topsoil for the more fertile ground beneath. And there was Dwynaar, the grizzled old bird, hefting up the foul-smelling mud in an improvised basket and carrying it to different patches of bruk, piling it up around the base of each plant, then moving back to collect some more.

He coughed, noisily and turned from the depressing sight. These men were living from day to day just for the sake of it. But in that case, it wasn't really living, was it? It was survival.

He knew how they felt. Some men, surviving battle after endless battle and living through a whole parade of pointless skirmishes, became veterans.

He still felt like nobody, nothing. A set of responses, not a man. Just like those men out there.

Except that Tanhith was no longer scared of dying. He felt it in the warm, fetid air, in the dusty soil on his boots. This place welcomed death, it knew all about it. He thought of the burning birds, and of the old wishes for blazes of glory, for his name to be remembered in hushed tones. And now dreams of accidental death, or a quiet funeral pyre, burning in silence. A private death in nobody's name.

He turned back to the girl on the bed, and brushed a bruk leaf against her sun-reddened face. She troubled him, this alien girl from nowhere.

'How much glory is there in you?'

The door was kicked open with a rasp of metal on stone. In the doorway stood Felbaac and the ever-hovering Yast.

'Tanhith, you were meant to be with Maadip and Elb training group E.'

Felbaac wasn't bothering to hide his irritation, but equally Tanhith couldn't be bothered to disguise his lethargy. "Those men aren't interested, Felbaac. They don't care.'

'Then you make them care. We have to have a fighting force.'

"Then we should've got here a few years earlier. What have they got to care about?'

Felbaac strode over and almost spat out the words. "They've got the lawless swine who put them here to pay back. They've got the freedom of their people to fight for.'

'In other words, they've just got to care. Because you can't use them if they don't.'

Felbaac turned away. Yast hovered indecisively between the two men.

"This is a lost cause, Felbaac.' Tanhith gestured outside at the workers, then suddenly stopped, and drew himself up to his full height.'Ours is a lost cause.'

Felbaac spun round, surprise and anger flickering across his face in rapid succession.Yast stepped in.

'We all feel like that sometimes, Tanhith, we all do, with all that we've done.'

His voice was low and soothing, but his eyes flickered about nervously. 'But we must never voice those thoughts. We must never give in to self-pity.

There's too much at stake.'

Tanhith smiled, ignoring the smaller man. "These men won't fight for you, Felbaac. Look at the state of them.'

'By the deity,I'll make them fight!'

'Face it, your information was bad. A grade-one penal settlement for top political offenders?'

'And so it was.' Felbaac was on the defensive.

'Twenty years ago perhaps. When Somaath was barely starting out.'

'So why place them so quickly on Hirath? Cut off from the rest of the galaxy and policed long-range by approximate number only?'

'I imagine there was less of a waiting list back then,' said Tanhith drily.'Or perhaps they're here as a decoy precisely for men like you. Maybe that's why Somaath was never stupid enough to -'

Felbaac raised his fist and Tanhith instinctively backed away. Yast flapped his arms up and down between the two of them, and just then another voice rang out.

'Look, when you've finished beating each