"Are they shelling us?" Lieutenant Waldstejn demanded. "They can't be-that's from the west!"

Colonel Fasolini snorted. "When you've lived as long as I have," he said, "you'll learn your own artillery's just as dangerous as the other bastard's. But that was a spacer, and it's bombing us."

The two men were a contrast in more than age. Waldstejn was well above standard height, but he was willow thin. His brown hair was cropped short enough that the blond roots were visible, and he was inordinately proud of the narrow moustache which was within a hair's margin of being the width of his upper lip. Waldstejn's uniform was crisply new; he was Supply Officer, after all. He wore the garment with the brown-beige-gray pattern out, as being more suitable for the present surroundings than the brown-green-black camouflage to which it could be reversed. In his belt were holstered a two-way radio and a small pistol which he had never fired.

Waldstejn could have posed for a recruiting poster. Guido Fasolini, on the other hand, looked as grim as a gun barrel, even in his present rear-echelon billet. In the dim light seeping through the beryllium-filament roof, the mercenary's uniform looked muddy black. Under the direct sun it had been the same ragged mixture of buff and gray as the dust and dry vegetation of the immediate landscape. On a glacier, the fabric would have the hue of dirty ice. It would never look sharp, and it would never call attention to the man or woman who wore it.

Fasolini himself was stocky. Middle age had brought him a paunch on which only the harshest campaigning could make inroads. But the Colonel did not-could not-looksoft. His hair was black and greasy. It spilled from beneath his armored cap. His radio was built into the fibers of that helmet, leaving his crossbelt free for its load of grenades and a pistol-stocked launcher which no one could mistake as being only for show. Fasolini was clean-shaven, but his whiskers were a black shadow against the swarthy skin of his jaw.