Bemish rose.
"Gentlemen, I refuse to take part in this abomination."
And he left.
The sunrise was starting somewhere far away. The fragrance of the jasmine bushes was sharp and sleepy bulls mooed in the village having returned from the late plowing.
Wrapping himself in an overcoat and shuddering from cold, Bemish walked to an old gazebo. A servant, stepping softly, brought a basket with liquors to the gazebo and asked what they should serve the guests for the dinner and what they should do to the policemen. The latter started screaming already and the servants had to give them twenty sacks from storage…
Bemish barked at him such that the slave ran away in fear. The basket, however, came to be quite useful. Bemish grabbed a wooden bottle plaited with bark, tore the plug out, threw his head back and started gulping palm vodka.
He stopped only after having drunk half of it.
Far away, through a woven gazebo wall he could see the spaceport. Unlike usual, t didn't gleam at night. The main buildings shined with a dull light and where only yesterday the landing lights used to sparkle, darkness and fog sprawled above the chutes. The monorail gleamed as a lonely horn sticking out of the dark and posts of armed people swarmed every hundred meters on the highway.
Somewhere far away, at the first gates blocking the access to the villa, the whole crowd of journalists was throwing a fit. These idiots, Weian officials, insisted on not letting them in… Bemish, however, didn't want to see the journalists. He could imagine what questions they would ask him. And he couldn't even tell them one tenth of what he had said at the emergency committee meeting.
The gazebo door squeaked. Bemish turned his head and saw the envoy. The latter's crazy eyes wandered around for a while and then he grabbed the vodka bottle.
"I've drunk out of it already," Bemish warned him.
The envoy just waved his hand.
"You were correct when you left," Severin said. He finished the vodka off and dropped heavily on a bench. "Everybody taking part in this accident will be in shit up to their ears."
"Have they decided to call the troops in?"
"The commandoes will be here in two hours. It's the Eleventh Federal Paratrooper Division. They are damned good. At the moment Kissur lets the hostages go, they'll roll over him."
"In two hours?! How did they get here so fast?"
"They were being moved to their new positions."
"So, that they could be closer to Gera, right?"
The envoy smirked and nodded.
"Do you understand that this is Shavash's decision? The only thing that he is afraid of is that Kissur will hang him on the tallest catalpa? He went nuts from fear."
"That's right," the envoy said. "I have never seen it before in my life
— Mr. Shavash made a public statement supporting a certain decision and he took all the responsibility. Can you imagine that — he signed the request for the Federal troops himself! All the ministers there kindly passed this honor to him…"
Bemish muttered something.
"Do you know why the officials agreed to invite the troops? They understand that this will make Shavash a political nonentity… You, however, were very brave. Don't you regret losing your company?"
Bemish paused. Then he added, smiling.
"My company is bankrupt. My stocks are worth less than rutabaga in a farmer's market. I don't care whether my creditors get one cent or ten cents for a dinar."
By the time sunrise came to Assalah spaceport and another working day ended in Melbourne, the Federation capital, the news of the Assalah accident had spread across the whole Galaxy. Assalah was photographed from above, from below and from the side. This place used to be known only to a small group of financiers as a great example of investment into a development market. Now it occupied the front pages of newspapers. A number of channels started delivering hourly news from Assalah. Everybody was waiting for the broadcast that was assigned to start (after minor technical arguments with Kissur) at fifteen thirty. Even if Kissur hadn't given his horrible ultimatum — five shot hostages for every minute of delay — few people would've missed such a possibility to peep at history.
The division arrived in Weian orbit by seven. They landed in Salgar spaceport by eight and, in four hours, military helicopters unloaded most of the commandoes next to Bemish's villa. Tanks, gleaming dully and looking like huge beetles, spread in a large semicircle; indecipherable peeps of coded signals filled ether; soldiers had already started setting hardy camouflaged tents; bread and canned meat were being passed to the companies off the helicopters.
At the same time, the first media conference finally took place. Weian "yellow jackets" ran a body search on a dozen of journalists, crammed them in a bus and drove them to the villa. There, Shavash, Bemish and Envoy Severin sat decorously in a row, expecting them.
Shavash familiarized the media with Kissur's ultimatum and he kept talking for a while. Accordingly to his words, the Weian government would not allow any nationalization of private industry to take place. He also said that as the Assalah emergency committee head, he had requested the Federation's military assistance and that 11th space commando division was currently disembarking next to Assalah.
"Are they going to attack the spaceport?" a journalist asked.
"Absolutely not," Shavash lied unabashedly. "We can't endanger the hostages. We are going to blockade the spaceport so that we can negotiate from a better position."
At fifteen thirty, Bemish and the other members of the emergency committee gathered to watch the broadcast made by the hostage journalists.
One had to admit that the journalists did their best. They made it clear that they were reporting at gun point. They made it clear that the men who had them at gun point would sacrifice the other people's lives unhesitatingly. They also made it clear that the terrorists would also sacrifice their own lives unhesitatingly.
Their denunciations were horrifying. The cameras coldly stared inside the reinforced chutes while, behind the screen, Kissur monotonously commented that these particular types of boarding joints were built only for military rockets. The dull sides of Cassiopeia missiles gleamed slightly. The old accusations spread by zealots about the spaceport's dual purpose were confirmed. The most fantastic rumors spread by Gera about the Federation clandestinely breaking the non-proliferation treaties pompously signed in the past were also confirmed.
Luxury cars had been imported labeled as assistance to the victims of natural disasters and ancient Lamass vases had been exported as scrap brass. Laws and regulations had been flouted at an incredible scale. The takeover of the spaceport looked like a desperate attempt — however cruel and despicable it was — to demonstrate the scale of current administration's thievery, corruption and treachery. Several Earth auditors and financiers unwillingly confirmed Ashinik's calculations of the chicanery that had taken place at the spaceport.
Once the broadcast had come to an end, the party of people's freedom started a media conference. It was relayed to Weia in real time and to the Galaxy with a five minute delay.
Kissur and his cronies sat in the company's director office. Kissur said that right after the conference, they would start releasing the hostages.
"Aren't you afraid," a journalist asked, "that they will obliterate you immediately after the hostages are released?"
Here Kissur answered that the party of people's freedom had acted out of despair and had tried to reveal the ultimate corruption of the current government. They also wanted to demonstrate that the military treaties, catastrophic for Weia, did in fact exist in spite of blatant denials coming from the government. Killing several thousand unarmed peasants would only confirm the treaty's presence and it would be difficult to imagine the government ready to compromise itself so much.