"I was not always rich — have you forgotten that? Do you know how I became literate? I stood next to announcement boards and compared the herald's words with letters. My father was the poorest shaman in the village; I stole on the streets and drank out of mud pools. I was lucky — I met Nan and instead of ending up in a gang, I ended up in the White Buzhva Lycee. Not that it would make any difference to an Earthman… When I was an official seven years ago, I had been waiting for my arrest, torture and exile every day. Have you ever expected being arrested, Terence? Even if you were arrested for DWI, I don't think that you would be thrown in an earth pit."
"I don't argue that," Bemish agreed. "The earth pits are a strong point of your civilization."
"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."
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.
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.