Beyond All Weapons

The revolt was over and the firing parties had begun. In a single day in Under Washington, three thousand rebels were executed and twelve thousand more condemned to life imprisonment in the camps. And the Bellerophon hung fifteen thousand miles out of reach, caught between death by starvation and swifter death by surrender.

She was the last of the rebel ships, the Bellerophon. Sent by Admiral Correlli during the last hours of the action to the relief of an isolated community on Mars, she had escaped the debacle which had overtaken all her sister ships in contest with Earth.

The revolt was ill begun and worse ended. But the cause had been bright and the emergency large, and Mars, long-suffering colony of an arbitrary and aged Earth, had at last, as the dying bulldog seeks to take one final grip on the throat of his foe, revolted against Mother Earth.

But there was little sense in recounting those woes now, as Captain Guide well knew. The taxes and embargoes had all but murdered Mars before the revolt had begun. The savage bombardment of the combined navies of Earth had left an expanse of wasted tillage and shattered towns and the colonists had been all but annihilated.

Like her sisters, the Bellerophon was a converted merchantman. Any resemblance she bore to a naval spaceship was resident only in the minds of her officers and crew. Plying her trade from Cap City to Denverchicago, she had suffered much from being colonial-built. The inspectors on Earth had inspected her twice as often as regulations demanded and found ten times as much fault. And because she was colonial, her duties, enforced by irksome searches and even crew seizures for the Earth Navy, had all but bankrupted Smiley Smith and the line’s directors—not that that mattered now, for the company and all its people were dead in the wreck which had been the finest city in the colonies.

“I won’t surrender!” said Georges Micard, first mate. “Not while I’ve got a gun to fire! It’s their holiday. Let’s give them a few blazing cities to celebrate by!”

Guide, cool, austere, had looked at his mate in silence for a while. He said, “Your plan is not without merit, Georges. We have suffered beyond endurance and our comrades have died gallantly. And a few blazing cities would be much in order were it not for one thing: the barrier.”

Georges, optimistic, very young, was apt to forget practical details. The reason Earth had won had been the barrier. So well had the secret been kept that when the colonial fleet had attacked, every missile they had launched at the queen cities of their mother planet had exploded a thousand miles out from target. There was an invisible barrier there, a screen, an electronic ceiling. And Mars, new-formed, braver than she was sensible, had found herself unable to retaliate for the thunder of missiles which had wrenched her cities from their foundations and laid them into dust.

“All right,” said Georges, glancing around the wardroom at the other officers. “We’ll sit up here until the cruisers come get us and then we’ll vanish in a puff of atoms.”

“They won’t come,” said Carteret. “They know we are here, but they’ll wait for us to starve. They have every spaceport on Mars and Venus. We’re done.”

Gloom deepened in the room. Then Albert Firth, their political adviser, an intense-eyed Scot, honed keen in the chill clime of New Iceland, Mars, leaned forward.

“You interested me, Captain, when you spoke today of the drives for which our fleet should have waited. Exactly what were those drives, sir?”

Guide looked at him with understanding. It was time to speak. These people had depleted their own stores of ideas. Hundreds of thousands of colonists were dead, and as fast as the orders for execution could be issued, thousands more were dying. These men would not cavil at thin chances.

“I have had, for some time, a plan,” he said.

Eyes whipped to him. They knew Guide. Bilged out of the Space Academy at fourteen for one too many duels, raised by the lawless camps of the southern cap on Mars, cast off by his family, but infinitely esteemed by his comrades and former employers, Firstin Guide was a man to whom one paid attention.

“I think they ought to be whipped,” he said quietly.

In more optimistic times, that had been a common opinion on Mars. Since the triarchy of the Polar State had destroyed all free government, the thoughts of less disciplined peoples had run in that vein. Martian colonists were, more lately, refugees from the insensate cruelties and caprices of the Polar regime. And they had all thought that the “snow devils”—that strange race who had managed to adapt their metabolism to the blood-chilling climate of the North Pole, and who in half a century had made their unexploited realm the prime power of Earth—ought to be whipped. But here, in a ship almost out of food, low on ammunition, with half her fuel gone and her cause already lost, those words drew a quick intake of breath from all. But they knew Firstin Guide. He would not speak idly.