"Nah, it was shite," he says candidly, glancing at the man's reflection against the moving landscape. "Don't know what it was like up Front, but back in the Tail? We din't even have fuckin windows to see out. Couple thousand people in a big metal box. Headcounts and protein blocks twice a day, and whatever pieces of junk nobody from the Front wanted, that's what we got."

The bitterness, the rage; they're muted by distance and time, but not gone, never gone.