"Well, well, Commander," he said. "Just what we needed - a visit from you. Now we can rack up a score of two Dorsai Commanders before your soldiers carry what's left of us off to the morgue; and St. Marie can see that even you people can be handled by the Blue Front"
We could not see Ian's face; but he said nothing and apparently his lack of reaction was irritating to the big assassin, because he dropped his cheerful tone and leaned forward in his chair.
"Don't you understand, Graeme?" he said. "We've lived and died for the Blue Front, all three of us - for the one political parry with the strength and guts to save our world. We're dead men no matter what we do. Did you think we don't know that? You think we don't know what would happen to us if we were idiots enough to surrender the way you said? Your men would tear us apart; and if there was anything left of us after that, the government's law would try us and then shoot us. We only let you in here so that we could lay you out like your twin brother, before we were laid out ourselves. Don't you follow me, man? You walked into our hands here like a fly into a trap, never realizing."
"I realized," said Ian.
The big man scowled at him and the muzzle of the heat rifle he held in one thick hand, came up.
"What do you mean?" he demanded. "Whatever you think you've got up your sleeve isn't going to save you. Why would you come in here, knowing what we'd do?"
"The Dorsai are professional soldiers," said Ian's voice, calmly. "We live and survive by our reputation. Without that reputation none of us could earn our living. And the reputation of the Dorsai in general is the sum of the reputations of its individual men and women. So Field Commander Kensie Graeme's professional reputation is a thing of value, to be guarded even after his death. I came in for that reason."
The big man's eyes narrowed. He was doing all the talking and his two companions seemed content to leave it that way.
"A reputation's worth dying for?" he said.
"I've been ready to die for mine for eighteen years," said Ian's voice, quietly. "Today's no different than yesterday."
"And you came in here - " the big man's voice broke off on a snort. "I don't believe it. Watch him, you two!"
"Believe or not," said Ian. "I came in here, just as I told you, to see that the professional reputation of Held Commander Graeme was protected from events which might tarnish it. You'll notice - " his head moved slightly as if indicating something behind him and out of our sight, "I've turned on your annunciator screen, so that outside the door they can see what's going on in here."
The eyes of the three men jerked upwards to stare at the screen inside the suite, somewhere over Ian's head. There was a blur of motion that was Ian's tanned body flying through the air, a sound of something smashing and the screen went blank again.
We outside were left blind once more, standing in the hallway, staring at the unresponsive screen and door. Pel, who had stepped up next to me, moved toward the door itself
"Stay!" snapped Charley.
The single sharp tone was like a command given to some domestic beast. Pel flinched at the tone, but stopped - and in that moment the door before us disintegrated to the roar of an explosion in the room.
"Come on!" I yelled, and flung myself through the now-open doorway.
It was like diving into a centrifuge filled with whirling bodies. I ducked to avoid the flying form of one of the men I had seen in the screen, but his leg slammed my head, and I went reeling, half-dazed and disoriented, into the very heart of the tumult. It was all a blur of action. I had a scrambled impression of explosions, of fire-beams lancing around me - and somehow in the midst of it all, the towering, brown body of Ian moving with the certainty and deadliness of a panther. All those he touched went down; and all who went down, stayed down.
Then it was over. I steadied myself with one hand against a half-burned wall and realized that only Ian and myself were on our feet in that room. Not one of the other Dorsai had followed me in. On the floor, the three assassins lay still. One had his neck broken. Across the room a second man lay obviously dead, but with no obvious sign of the damage that had ended his life. The big man, the ex-wrestler, had the right side of his forehead crushed in, as if by a club.
Looking up from the three bodies, I saw I was now alone in the room. I turned back into the corridor, and found there only Pel and Charley. Ian and the other Dorsai were already gone.
"Where's Ian?" I asked Charley. My voice came out thickly, like the voice of a slightly drunken man.
"Leave him alone," said Charley. "You don't need him, now. Those are the assassins there; and the enlisted men have already been notified and pulled back from their search of Blauvain. What more is needed?"
I pulled myself together; and remembered I was a policeman.
"I've got to know exactly what happened," I said. "I've got to know if it was self-defense, or…"
The words died on my tongue. To accuse a naked man of anything else in the death of three heavily armed individuals who had threatened his life, as I had just heard them do over the annunciator, was ridiculous.
"No," said Charley. "This was done during a period of martial law in Blauvain. Your office will receive a report from our command about it; but actually it's not even something within your authority."
Some of the tension that had been in him earlier seemed to leak out of him, then. He half-smiled and became more like the friendly officer I had known before Kensie's death.
"But that martial law is about to be withdrawn," he said. "Maybe you'll want to get on the phone and start getting your own people out here to tidy up the details."
- And he stood aside to let me go.
One day later, and the professional soldiers of the Exotic Expeditionary Force showed their affection for Kensie in a different fashion.
His body had been laid in state for a public review in the open, main floor lobby of the Blauvain City Government building. Beginning in the grey dawn and through the cloudless day - the sort of hard, bright day that seems impatient with those who will not bury their dead and get on to further things - the mercenaries filed past the casket holding Kensie, visible at foil length in dress uniform under the transparent cover. Each one as he passed touched the casket lightly with his fingertips, or said a word to the dead man, or both. There were over ten thousand soldiers passing, one at a time. They were unarmed, in field uniforms and their line seemed endless.
But that was not the end of it. The civilians of Blauvain had formed along either side of the street down which the line of troops wound on its way to the place where Kensie lay waiting for them. The civilians had formed in the face of strict police orders against doing any such thing; and my men could not drive them away. The situation could not have offered a better opportunity for the Blue Front to cause trouble. One heat grenade tossed into that line of slowly moving, unarmed soldiers, for example… But nothing happened.
By the time noon came and went without incident, I was ready to make a guess why not. It was because there was something in the mood of the civilian crowd itself that forbade terrorism, here and now. Any Blue Front activists trying such a thing would have been smothered by the very civilians around them in whose name they were doing it.
Something of awe and pity, and almost of envy, seemed to be stirring the souls of the Blauvain people; those same people of mine who had huddled in their houses twenty hours before, in undiluted fear of the very men now lined up before them and moving slowly to the City Government building. Once more, as I stood on a balcony above the lobby holding the casket, I felt those winds of vast movement I had sensed first for a moment in Ian's office, the winds of those forces of which Padma had spoken to me. The Blauvain people were different today and showed the difference. Kensie's death had changed them.