"They are a strong point, indeed, Terence — life lacks spice without them. It's like meat without salt." Shavash swung his hand sharply.
"When you convey our demands for negotiations Terence, don't forget to stress that they should take place at the highest level. The Federation president will head the Galactic delegation and I will head the Weian one."
"You are both nuts," Bemish muttered glumly. "Damn the day when I thought that you, Shavash, were a normal official only because you took a lot of bribes."
X X X
Accompanied by Kissur, Bemish walked down the main spaceport building. It was in somewhat better condition than he had expected — he saw even occasional unbroken bottles in the bars. The floor had been cleaned recently and the main hall's announcement board still carried the old slogan "Long live the party of people's freedom."
The building had suffered several millions worth of damage but Bemish, surprisingly, didn't really care. Really, yesterday morning he had been sure that they would fire meson artillery directly at the construction. What was a torn apart monitor next to a SpaceExtra stand after that? Ashinik, Ashinik! Did you think that after demanding Kissur's appointment to the first minister that the latter would hang you on a tower crane in twenty four hours?!
"Where are common zealots?"
Kissur ran his hand across his neck. Bemish realized why the floor had been recently washed.
"How many of them were here?"
"It was no more than a hundred," Kissur lied coolly.
"Bullshit! There were more than two thousand of them!"
Kissur shrugged his shoulders.
"Can I see colonel Rogov?" Bemish asked.
They walked up a motionless ascender to the second floor and entered the air traffic control room.
The colonel lay on the table. Somebody had placed a white pillow under his head, crossed his hands on his chest and placed a funeral wreath made out of white flowers. It was an Alom burial custom for warriors.
"Have they killed him?"
"He was a real warrior and he didn't need another's hand to pull the trigger," Kissur answered.
Bemish shifted the wreath up and saw a barely noticeable hole at the colonel's temple under large whitecandle petals."
"Should I have done the same?" Bemish asked.
"You are a businessman. It's not yours."
Bemish lowered the wreath silently and left the room.
Kissur stayed for a moment to rearrange the flowers correctly.
"I am glad that there are still warriors left on Earth," Kissur said.
X X X
It proved impossible later to find out how many zealots had been killed that day accordingly to Shavash's and Kissur's orders. It was absolutely known that not a single zealot present in the spaceport during the night of ninth had escaped it alive.
Shavash and Kissur always claimed that it had been about one hundred to one hundred fifty corpses. They were interested in bringing the estimated number of "lunatic maniacs" down. Accordingly to Bemish's calculations, at least three thousand zealots crowded in the spaceport when the whole thing started. They had all been let inside the buildings and on the landing field. Most of these peasants had never seen before wondrous buildings of glass and steel where staircase moved on their own and announcement ran across the ceiling, where they couldn't even squat in a corner to take a crap. Few of them walked away, returning to their homes, on the second day of their stay in the spaceport, especially since "yellow coats" blocked the roads. It became clear why Kissur had let the passenger hostages go — he didn't want any witnesses around and he didn't want them to get in the way accidentally.
Later, Bemish dragged some details of the massacre out of his own employees. Everything happened only after the paratroopers had come in. There were two thousand of Aloms in the spaceport and there were two trained supermen per every unarmed peasant. They killed the zealots with knives and bare hands; they didn't use any firearms or lasers. They were not afraid of noise, especially since lasers didn't make any. However, they were afraid of damaging the equipment and they didn't want a laser ray, for instance, to jab into the floor and leave a trace that they would not be able to hide afterwards. They accidentally killed a dozen personnel including the head technician of the heating systems. He was the only heating systems tech left in the spaceport and they almost got themselves into a crisis. Thankfully, a commando sergeant figured the system out.
Then they performed the great cleaning of the building — they washed the floors, scrubbed guts of the walls, checked everything mercilessly — so that, God forbid, somebody's brains would not get stuck in a bar behind a box with salted peanuts.
They dragged the corpses away to the landing field, opened the thermoconcrete up and burned the hell out of everything with modern weapons
— neutron guns and annihilators. Not a speck was left of the corpses and the ground was baked for two hundred meters down into a glass pancake… Then they sealed thermoconcrete back up and everything was tip-top. They threatened the personnel to cut their families down to a fifth removed degree, including children in their mothers' bellies if anybody spoke an extra word to the media. One hundred fifty people were all. You could count them — all the stiffs were present, lying in a neat pile next to the cargo terminal…
Concerning commandos, it was discovered that there were twenty six hundred three Aloms and eighty six Earthmen in the division. Sixteen Earthmen were officers. The most interesting part of it was that while all non-Aloms had the opportunity to leave, some of them stayed. The colonel and two more officers shot themselves and sixteen Earthmen, desperate adventurers joined their comrades and went to Kissur the White Falcon. In spite of the official Federation language being the only one allowed spoken in the army, they had picked up some Alom on the way.
They took Bemish on a brief trip around the building that belonged to him. At every corner, he saw people wearing Federation military uniforms and babbling in Alom. In the air traffic control office, he saw a small group of personnel that were so sleep deprived that they were no longer frightened of anything. The guards walked Bemish to a car that stood on the landing field with the engine already running and politely suggested to him to get out of there.
Bemish silently climbed into the car and pushed the accelerator. One after another, the gates on the landing field opened, letting him through. Bemish drove down the same road that they had taken yesterday bringing him in.
Rice fields still glistened in the sun and olive trees still stood along the old road. The soldiers and the zealots had torn all the fruits off breaking the branches in the process. Olive trees were always planted along the roads — road dust covered fruits forcing them to ripe quicker.
A fighting banner of the White Falcon clan and a standard of the Empire were swaying above his villa. Bemish kept going forward.
Kissur, however, still didn't have that many soldiers and it looked to Bemish like they were mostly concentrated in the spaceport. Few posts were present on the road — they were constantly on the line with the headquarters. Next to the turn leading to the villa, Bemish noticed a dozen commandos.
A line of "yellow jackets" and Empire troops started soon after, a kilometer and a half away from the villa. Journalists lingered behind them.
The soldiers at the road block waved their hands and their assault rifles at him. A studded chain lay across the road, Bemish slowed down, turned across the chain and waited — a large pack of policemen, journalists and Earthmen was running towards him.
Strangely, there were many more journalists this time and Bemish could only blink at the camera flashes. The reasons for that were pretty simple. Most of the officials that had tried to keep the media away were now in Assalah.
"Are you all right, sir?" a guard asked. Another clicked the gun bolt. The assault rifle in his hands gleamed in the sun reflecting rice fields and clouds turned upwards down.
"Yes," Bemish said climbing out of the car. Five minutes later, a police
helicopter with a yellow band on the side — the symbol of the Department of Serenity and Justice — was flying him to the capital.
The helicopter landed next to the sovereign's palace, right at Seven Grains Hotel. Here, the highest provincial functionaries used to await their award or execution; here, the head of the sect that wanted to make peace to Earthmen had been killed eleven months ago.
A whole flock of journalists rushed towards Bemish. The first among them was a guy wearing a square pattern sleeveless shirt. This guy had written a while ago that the Assalah Company director hadn't been proficient in Weian and had mistakenly taken metaphorical "demons" for a literate statement.
"Is it true that the Federation troops switched their alliance to Kissur?"
"It is true," Bemish replied.
"Why?"
"The division was 90 % Alom," Bemish replied. "At the same time, there was not a single Alom officer in it. So, the Federation soldiers decided to fight for the man who belonged to the clan that their ancestors swore fealty to. They didn't want to fight for the people that paid them three hundred credits a year. I was told that the other commando divisions had the same number of Aloms in them."
"About ten members of the emergency committee ended up in Kissur's hands. Kissur demanded their arrest and execution. What happened to them? Is it true that Shavash is dead?"
"Shavash is quite alive," Bemish said. "His quarrel with Kissur was an utter fabrication. He called the Federation soldiers in to provide Kissur with troops."
Everybody gaped — they didn't know anything yet and Bemish was the first one to openly state what had happened.
"What about the zealots?" a journalist shouted, "Are they also in?"
"No," Bemish said.
"The fight between Shavash and zealots could end only with one of the sides being destroyed. Once the Federation soldiers had switched their alliance to Kissur, he used them to exterminate the zealots. I saw the sect's leaders hanging on a cargo crane with my own eyes."
It was astonishing that nobody asked at that moment what happened to the rest of the zealots. Somehow everybody decided that "the extermination of zealots" was limited only to the execution of a dozen leaders.
"What does Kissur want?" somebody shouted. "They demanded that the corrupted government to step down and now half of the corrupted government is hanging out in Assalah! What's gonna happen next?"
"Kissur has no more demands for his own government," Bemish explained. "Kissur would like Weia and the Federation to conduct talks about their future relations. The negotiations are to be held at the highest possible level."
After this brief but shocking interview, Bemish entered the hotel where they were already waiting for him.
In the Hall of the Gifts from Afar, a table made in the shape of a grape bunch stood on gilded legs that resembled ram's hooves. At this table, provincial governors had officially delivered gifts to palace department heads. Now twenty people sat behind it. Bemish recognized half a dozen of them — Federation envoy Severin, general Stesh, the deceased Giles' boss, ex-first minister Yanik and a couple of high Weian officials. The others were Earthmen — five senators and three people with general insignias.
"They flew in here without troops," Bemish thought about the people in military uniforms. "They don't make generals out of Aloms, they only make soldiers out of them."
Bemish's story about his stay in the terrorists' nest was heard out in dead silence.
"Are you sure that there is not a single zealot left in the spaceport?" envoy Severin asked again.
"There is not a single alive zealot present," Bemish assured him.
"But it totally changes the situation," a delegate said. "We wouldn't have been able to conduct negotiations with zealots. Shavash's presence changes the picture. He is a normal person…"
"Shavash is a normal man, isn't he?!" Bemish shouted. "Would, in your opinion, a normal man get three thousand people together just to exterminate them all?"
"Well, you can't deny that it improved the situation in the country. Shavash's desire to get rid of destabilizing forces…"
"He wouldn't give a fig about them being destabilizing forces! Shavash would make a deal with destabilizing forces, demons, devils, Gera, with God knows whom. He just had a misfortune to have a personal quarrel with the zealots' spiritual head and so he killed them all."
"What are you suggesting we do?" it was Severin talking.
"There are no more hostages in the spaceport. There are only terrorists and soldiers that betrayed their oath. We have the right to destroy them by any means accessible to a superpower," Bemish said.
"Do you mean nuclear weapons?" Severin inquired.
"I suggest doing what Kissur would do in our situation. He would not think for a moment about negotiating with an enemy. He would not think about it even if there were three thousand hostages! We should not do what Kissur expects us to."
One general elbowed another quietly and asked him about the relationship between Bemish and the spaceport. Having found out that Bemish was certainly the owner of the property to be destroyed, he gazed at the businessman with satisfaction.
"I have a firm opinion," Bemish continued, "that we should not hold any negotiations with Shavash. This man doesn't even know what ethics is, whether is has wings or a tail. He treats people in the following way, "If one parrot keels over, we'll buy another one." He will cheat you because he will lie to you about the things that you take for granted. You wouldn't even consider checking them out as you wouldn't consider testing the gravitational constant."
"Unfortunately," a counter-intelligence officer spoke, "there are six large paratrooper divisions currently in Weian orbit. They had all been called in just before the commandos switched over to Kissur. There are about ten thousand commandos there and eighty five hundred of them are Aloms. These ships rotate around Weia and we don't really know whose side they are on. As long as the Federation agrees to negotiate with Kissur, they are certainly the Federal troops. If the soldiers learn, however, that an order came out to use nuclear weapons against Kissur…"
"What will happen then?"
"We have certain reasons to believe," the officer spoke surrounded by dead silence, "that in this case our own commandos may commit a series of terrorist attacks similar to Kissur's. They may do it on Earth, on Vain, on Tennox — on the largest Federation planets."
"So, we just don't have an alternative — we have to negotiate with Mr. Shavash," Bemish summarized.
"Yes. We have to do it at the highest level, as they demanded."
X X X
Truly, the delegation came out to be very impressive. It was led by the state secretary Khaime Khodsky, the third person in the Federation after the president. It also included the foreign affairs minister Camilla Leyson, the defense minister, two four star generals (one of them commanded the Fourth Space Army) and five senators.
They spent a while arguing about where to conduct the talks. Shavash told them to fly to Assalah — just land on the field and we'll meet you there. However, Bemish didn't like that idea. The belligerent financier somehow happened to become one of the key figures during the talks and he was especially appreciated by the army people who had insisted on immediate cancellation of the negotiations. Bemish claimed that as the Assalah spaceport director he couldn't guarantee the safety of the landing on purely technical grounds. It was not a joke — there were almost no qualified air traffic controllers left and the few that were still around had been crapping in their pants with fright for three days in a row.
Shavash declared that he would not go to the capital.
"Are you afraid that you will be arrested?"
Shavash briskly objected that he was afraid of nothing but he didn't trust a lot of people, first of all, Mr. Bemish who had learned some things on Weia.
"Who have I learned it from?" Bemish exploded right in the face that was smiling at him from the screen, "Hasn't it been you and Kissur?"
"State secretary, could
you please, get this mutt out of here?" Shavash demanded. "He is not even a Federation official!"
Bemish silently turned away and left the hall without waiting to be shown to the door.
X X X
Behind the wall, in the foyer, General Ackles, the Fourth Space Army's commander, sat surrounded by all the military HQ small fries and silently studied the carved ceiling.
The ceiling was decorated with hanging grape bunches.
"That's a fancy room," the general said. "What does the writing above the door say?"
"It's the name of the room," Bemish answered. "It's the Hall of Seven Grape Bunches. It's quite a historic place. Here Emperor Attakh ordered the head to be hacked off to his most faithful military commander."
"Why?" the general inquired.
"The people claim that it happened because of an imps' wedding. These local demons needed a place for a wedding and they bribed a palace official. The demons had fun in the hall all night and no correct decisions can be made here since. That's why the commander was executed."
The general gave a long turbid look to the company director and then asked him,
"Have they arranged the meeting?"
"No. Shavash is afraid of coming to the capital."
"Do you understand what he wants?"
"Hell knows what he wants," Bemish said exasperatedly. "He can't really want any territorial concessions, can he, general? And if he wants the Earthmen to get off Weia, he doesn't even have to ask us about it. I think that after what's happened, we will run away from this planet faster than a mouse runs away from a fox."
"If they can't agree on where to hold the negotiations, it will all fall through," the general noted.
Here, somebody carefully touched Bemish on the shoulder. The latter turned around — the minister of the police, Mr. Akhotoi stood behind him.
"They would like to talk to you," Akhotoi said, "Could you, please, follow me?"
Akhotoi walked Bemish down hotel corridors, where frightened brass gods squinted their eyes from the daylight lamps, and down garden paths covered with yellow sand. Akhotoi walked Bemish to a small pavilion with a roof that resembled swallow's wings and opened the doors in front of him.
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