To Velimir Doloyev

"So, how's it going?" the man who entered finally asked.
They kept trying to outstare each other until the other man sitting behind the table lowered his eyes. His long ponytail of black hair streaked with silver brushed against the fiberboard that was blurry with frost.

"Okay."

"Forgot the past?"

"No."

"Crisis of conscience?"

"Do you expect me to start complaining? To you? Right now--"

"--and here," the man who entered anticipated him with scorn in his voice. He looked around meaningfully; inside the walls of the chamber many clouds of silvery sparkles were swirling, appearing and disappearing, like blood cells in the veins of an enormous beast or schools of fingerlings on the sea shelves of Stavros. The curves of the building were dilating and contracting with breathing, although those movements could hardly be seen by an eye. Right now those pulsations were slowed down, which meant that the location of the chamber itself was uncertain; it kept fluctuating between longitudes and latitudes so that the others couldn't pin down its coordinates. One minute it was a bunker inside a sheer rock, the next it was a military headquarters orbiting the planet.

"Tapping the conversations of your own, aren't we? Or did you ever become one of their own? Tsk-tsk-tsk… Pity, really -- you betrayed everything, but you're still no more than a turncoat."

"We're in antiphase, Buzzard. You can say anything."

"With no repercussions?"

"You think I don't know that you would set up an information blockade from the start? If we wanted an interrogation, it wouldn't be here. Or with me."

"How is your relationship with the Organization doing, my erstwhile friend? I am so worried about your mental health, really. All those secrets and insinuations… Makes one go real crazy real fast." A chair jumped next to the man who entered. He fell into the chair and relaxed lazily.

"They don't know who it is they've caught. Your appearance was altered -- by real professionals. They'll just send you to a penal colony as a minor offender who was simply obeying others."

"Won't you set me free?!"

"Enough of this farce, Buzzard," the black-haired man said wearily. "Do you know how much trouble it was — to make sure you hadn't been shot down in the raid? Go. Do your time. I don't think it'll be much of a problem -- how many times did they arrange your escape?" The pale, deep-set eyes under the unibrow looked up, burning with hatred:

"How many have stayed forever in your prisons?"

"How many have died last time you blew up public transport, Buzzard?"

"This soil will burn under the feet of invaders," he answered flatly, "just like you and I promised twenty years ago, Eagle."

"You who once were a fighter became a murderer."

"You who once were a rebel became a headsman."

#

Golden Eagle's head sank. Yes, that was definitely one of the ways to tell the story of two childhood friends from the backwater planet of Stavros who loved the same girl next door and hated injustice. Then the dark times came, and some people remembered that they descended from the first wave of colonists who came from the very heart of the human-populated galaxy two centuries ago, while yet others remembered that they are immigrants from the faraway Brangwen which was founded by the refugees from Ashura Prime. And thus began a civil war where no one was absolutely right or irredeemably wrong, where those two erstwhile comrades ought not to take sides. Yet that war split the world in two and washed the former friends up on the opposite shores.

But there was also another way to tell this story, a completely different way…

#

"You led the emperor's bloodhounds here. I won't stop at anything to throw them out."

"It was the only way to stop the bloodshed, Buzzard!"

"How sanctimonious you get once your bloodline comes into picture. Traitor!"

"You lie! It weren't their genetic IDs that I was looking at. Those freedom fighters of yours blocked the entire city, then shut down their energy and water supply, then began bombing. I was only saving the innocent -- the elderly and the children."

"The elderly have rotten to death in their fetid beds, and the children have grown up to be cannon fodder to annex new provinces. This is the disease, and it's spreading across the worlds like cancer!"

"It's far easier to change the Empire from within, Buzzard…"

"If you're still trying to fool me -- or yourself -- you're an idiot. You don't change the Empire -- it changes you, and the likes of you, and devours your souls. You won't be able to think of anything except swapping one ruling oligarchy for another. Another ten years, and you'll want to become the Emperor yourself…"

"What do you want me to do if the liberators turned out to be the same shit, just smaller in scope?"

To feel more comfortable, the man with the pale eyes shifted his elbows that were held together by force manacles behind his back:

"Be a good boy, pour me some beer, and let's finish this useless talk. We just don't click, Eagle. And just so that you know -- don't expect chivalry from me next time we meet, I'll shoot you like a dog."

"Buzzard, our child was among the survivors in Calvao. He won't become cannon fodder," intelligence officer Saul Eagleson spoke softly. The convict's lips quivered a little above the beer glass that formed instantly from the same material that the tabletop consisted of. When they were young, they decided they were new people, free from the old prejudice, and therefore the girl didn't have to choose between the two.

"I kept looking for Anjana everywhere. They didn't have food, or water. Only the intervention of the embassy and the peacekeepers gave us a chance--"

"--and safety? And the damned security, the stasis secured by blood -- all for the price of one little betrayal? Now I see why she fled you both -- so that she wouldn't be tempted to sell her soul."

"It's your child, Buzzard. Your son."

"Shut up! Leave the biographies to yourself!" the other man barked. "I'm not betraying my principles for my bucket of bolt nor for my son!" he rose. "Call your henchmen, damn you all to hell!"

The terrorist's eyes were burning with such intense, mad joy that he had to avert his gaze. Golden Eagle looked at his twisted arm and sighed -- Eagle knew that Anjana's child was actually his, and not his friend's. The boy now lived with a foster family who didn't know of his parentage, and the father couldn't see him as that would mean giving his new masters material to blackmail him. Eagle did find Anjana, but all too late; she had spent last sixteen years in a coma in a semi-basement of a neurological institute. They'd put up a charity especially for her that pays for her life support and her sarcophagus. Her son, Kervald, went to a music school; none of his parents -- Buzzard, Golden Eagle or Jan -- had any particular talent for music, it's just that his foster mother was a conductor. Kervald and his family spent their summers on the yellow sandy shores of Cervanky, where one still finds ceramic shards of bombshells, smoothed over by the waves.

The End