Born to a family of plebeian farmers on the temperate planet Trieste, Marlowe’s companion, Pallino, never intended to enter the military. At the time of his birth, the Cielcin Wars were only newly started, and the Sollan Empire had yet to institute its policies of levee en masse. Pallino might have expected to live his life on Trieste and die a peasant farmer. But he was not conscripted. He volunteered. There were many such volunteers in the early centuries of the war, men who enlisted for the good of the cause. For Earth and Emperor. For the glory of mankind. It is possible that Pallino was one such man, but the documentation on Trieste itself—most of it consigned to microfilm deep storage, the originals long-since destroyed—tells a different story.

The seizure of land by the planet’s baron for the purposes of developing infrastructure. Financial troubles. Pallino of Trieste is noted to have had three sons by a native woman, Luca (no family name). All evidence points to the man being one of those snidely called mercenary by the more patriotic soldiers: a man enlisting for the Emperor’s coin. The pay was better in those days, before the levies, and to all appearances Pallino of Trieste took the pay for his wife and sons, who appear to have moved to Ison, the planet’s capital, after his enlistment. In the city, Luca appears to have taken a job as a clerk. To all appearances, she never remarried, and of Pallino’s sons, none ever left Trieste, with two taking employment in factories in the city, and the third entering the civil service. All three were dead—and Luca, too—by the time Pallino reached basic training on Zigana.

After Zigana, Pallino went on to fight in several engagements—first at Sulis—before aging out of the corps. As often happens with such discarded soldiers, Pallino was deposited at his first port of call. But rarely do such men ever return home (and indeed, studies have shown that those that do have poorer outcomes in old age than those that remain on some other world). For Pallino, that world was Emesh, a hot, wet planet of the Norman Expanse, where the tropics are drawn at lines of 38 degrees latitude. There, his coin spent, Pallino did what most men in his position end up doing: he enlisted in the Colosso, an old soldier, in the hope of earning enough coin to earn some kind of retirement. It was in the Emesh Colosso that he met Elara, an Emeshi native woman a little less than half his standard age. The two were an item, and remained an item when both of them elected to join Hadrian Marlowe on the quest for Vorgossos in ISD 16172.