Bemish looked at him, surprised.
"I mean Kissur's Aloms. It's a mountain people who… Listen, haven't you been briefed about the Assalah takeover?"
"No," the commander said, "I don't know the details. The assistance request said that it was a rebellion of Weian zealots who had won the elections."
"Generally, it's correct," the envoy shrugged his shoulders. "The majority of people in the spaceport are zealots."
"So, is the spaceport occupied by Aloms and not by the indigenous people of the Empire?" the colonel specified with unnatural lack of expression.
"What difference does it make for you?" the exasperated envoy shouted.
Bemish shuddered.
"Sorry, colonel, but how do you know about the difference between Weians and Aloms?"
"Yes," the colonel said, "what's the difference? We follow orders."
It was already dark, when Bemish, having finished briefing colonel Rogov on the spaceport's specific details, walked into the garden.
Bemish had never run into the Federation Army before even though he had recently become acquainted to the Federation Counter Intelligence. He liked colonel Rogov — Bemish had considered military people to be much more stupid. One thing astounded him. There were dozens of populated planets in the Galaxy. Weia was located in the backyard of the civilized world. How could a Federal Army colonel know about the enmity between Weians and Aloms who had conquered the former a number of times? When did they start teaching galactic ethnography in military academies? Even he, Bemish, had needed quite a bit of time to realize how deep was the gap between the peoples that outsider observers considered to belong to the same race — the "Empire people" and the "mountainous barbarians."
Bemish stood and looked at the night bustling with people. Somewhere an engine yelped piteously like a cat that somebody kept stepping on the tail. The crackling of cicadas mixed with rustling of faraway power stations. That's it. Tomorrow this division would throw all its force at the construction — he had dedicated the last two years of his life to this construction and he had put his soul into it. They would hack the roadways with their tanks, turn buildings and terminals into dust. Crazy zealots would face the tanks with prayers and spells; they would be sure that all this machinery was simply demonic phantoms and that their leaders would rise into the air and turn the demonic fighting machines into paper and their grenade launchers into beans…
Tomorrow Kissur would die. Because even if a termite shell's direct hit didn't flatten him into the floor and a fan laser burst didn't find him and a shock wave didn't roll over him, he would still kill himself. It would happen because Kissur always lived as if he had died a long time ago. Never would Kissur let himself be taken alive by commandos called in by Shavash.
And then somebody just to Bemish's left said in Alom,
"Do you have a fag?"
Bemish turned there in astonishment.
A Federation soldier sitting next to a fire silently flicked a pack of cigarettes to his comrade.
Bemish rushed to the soldier. The latter was clicking his lighter but having seen a civilian he stood up to attention hurriedly.
"What have you just said?" Bemish asked.
"I asked for a smoke, sir," the soldier was speaking English now. He spoke it with a strange but quite familiar accent.
A horrible hunch entered Bemish's mind.
"Are you Alom?" he asked sharply in Alom. The soldier was silent.
"Are you Alom?"
Federation soldiers are forbidden to speak foreign languages, sir," the private replied.
"To the hell with this! What's your name?"
"Khaina, sir."
Khaina, "wolf," was one of the most widely used names among the fighting clans of the mountainous country.
"Whose vassal was your father?"
"He was a vassal of Sarvak clan."
Sarvak clan! Sarvaks were vassals of the White Falcon clan that Kissur belonged to.
"How many Aloms are in the division?" Bemish asked trying to suppress shudder in his voice.
"I can't know, sir. We are Federation soldiers and we swore an oath to serve the Federation. Aloms do not break their oaths."
Bemish paused. Ten soldiers sitting around the fire looked at him with curiosity. Almost everybody had blond or reddish hair, wide eyes and eyebrows tips that were almost flying…
"What's your contract salary?" Bemish asked suddenly.
"Three hundred credits a year, sir," Khaina said.
Three hundred credits a year! The minimal yearly unemployment benefits for a Federation citizen was eleven hundred twelve credits!
Bemish turned and walked away searching for the colonel. Now he understood why the latter knew the difference between Aloms and Weians.
Bemish found Rogov in the living room. The colonel and several of his officers watched the day's broadcast closely. The colonel was interested not in the broadcast's content but rather in the layout of hangars, storages and chutes. The officers were watching the broadcast for the third time and the sound was turned off. It was difficult to guess, looking at their faces, what they thought about the broadcast after having seen it the first time.
"Colonel! How many Aloms are in the division?"
The colonel and the officers turned around like one. It looked like there were no Aloms among them except for this one, on the side… No, he was not an Alom, he was a half-breed something like a mix of a Dane and a Vietnamese…
"Nobody has counted them," the colonel said calmly, as if he had been waiting for this question for a while, "but I think that it's about eighty to eighty five percent."
"Eighty?!! Why?"
The colonel grinned.
"Mr. Bemish, have you ever served in the army?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because…" Bemish broke off. On the second day of their acquaintance, Kissur had asked him why he had never served in the army and Bemish remembered what he had said.
The colonel smiled as if he guessed what Bemish had answered then and said.
"The majority of fully fledged Federation citizens share your attitude towards the army, director. The army receives twenty times less budget financing than medicine.
"And you enlist Aloms in the army!"
"We enlist anybody who agrees to serve in the army."
Here Bemish turned around and noticed that two more people entered the living room attracted by the argument — the Earth envoy, Mr. Severin and the emergency committee head, Mr. Shavash.
"But three hundred credits is four times less than unemployment benefits!"
"The unemployment benefits are allotted to Federation citizens, not to Aloms. You know very well that they are doomed to much greater poverty in their mountains. For centuries they have been indoctrinated that war is the only occupation worthy of a man, that man should kill, that death is the way to glory. They are happy to join Federation forces. The ones who pass our admission committees take it as a pass to heaven. They know that they will obtain citizenship in ten years of service. By the way, having received it, they don't leave the service. They are as happy to hold weapons in their hands as others are to hold women or money… Where else will you find such warriors? If a Federation citizen is born in a middle class family, he graduates from a college and he makes money. If he is born in a garbage can, he receives unemployment benefits and gobbles up hallucinogens…"
"But three hundred credits!"
"How much can we pay them? The military budget is one half percent of the GDP!"
The envoy listened to their conversation in astonishment. Clearly, he also hadn't known who exactly guarded the borders of his great motherland. Probably, it was a delicate and not particularly popular subject. The military command was not in a hurry to announce that foreign barbarians made up eighty percent of the army, and that strong, healthy guys with excellent muscles and decent brains got paid three times less than hereditary unemployed saturated with drugs.