There is much more, of course. Brave phrases of emotion and fanciful unreality written by one who never saw the night of space agleam with stars.
There was no talk of tyranny or liberty aboard the Hound that day we leveled with the Maid and the Arrow a thousand miles over the Russian Base of Corfu. There was talk of the bullion stored under the fortress’ turrets.
Merril’s face appeared in my visor screen, superimposed on the image of the grimy little asteroid floating darkly against the starfields.
“Their radar has picked us up by now, and they’re wondering who we are,” he said, “Take the Hound out on tangent left and join the Maid. Cover my attack and stand by to put a landing party aground.”
I watched the image of the Arrow—a sliver of darkness against the crescent of Corfu—lancing down at the fortress. Her forward tubes were glowing with the familiar pre-discharge emanation.
Below us, confusion reigned. For the first time in memory an asteroid Base was under attack. Merril brought the Arrow in to within fifty miles and then unleashed the fury of his forward tubes. Hellfire coruscated over the steel turrets and stone walls of Corfu. It splashed like a liquid flame over men and metal and twisted the towers and buttresses into spidery tendrils of glowing thread. Corfu died without firing a shot.
We put a party from the Hound aground ten hours later. Even then, we had to wear insulated suits to walk in that still molten inferno. Charred bodies had become one with the stuff of the fortress, and nothing living was left within the keep. We looted Corfu’s treasure and lifted into space heavy with gold.
Time passed in an orgy of looting for the men of the Compact. We grew rich and arrogant, for in space we were kings. Torn by suspicion of one another, America and Russia could do nothing against us. They had built an Iron Curtain in space, and it kept them divided and weak.
Endymion felt our blasts, and Clio. Then came Tethys, Rhea, Iapetus. We cared nothing for the flag these Bases flew. They were the gathering points for all the gold and treasure of space and we of the Compact took what we wished of it, leaving a trail of blood and rapine behind us. No nation claimed our loyalty; space was our mother and lust our father.
Thus, the Peacemakers.
For five full years—the long years of the Outer Belt—the Arrow, the Starhound, the Moonmaid, the Lady and the Argonaut were the scourges of the spacelanes. No patrol could find us, and no defense could contain us. I recall how we laughed at the angry sputtering of Earth’s radio. Vast sums were spent in searches and new weapons to protect the meek and the mutually distrustful from Merril and the men of the Compact. Budgets, already strained to the breaking point by generations of the cold war, creaked and groaned as Russians and Americans spent furiously to build up their defenses against our depredations. But though we were few and they many—space was large and it hid us well.
And then one darkling day, Jaq Merril and I stood on the thin methane snow that carpeted our Base’s landing ramp, waiting under our own blue-black sky for the return of the Argonaut. Merril had sent her sunward to strike at the mines of Loki, an asteroid where Russian komisars rolled in mountains of blood-red rubies.
We waited through the day and into the sable night, but the Argonaut did not return. For the first time since the formation of the Compact, we had lost a ship, and something like unease crept into our hearts. The carousal that night had no gaiety, and there was the sound of bereaved women weeping.
Merril could learn nothing of the Argonaut’s fate. It was as though she had dropped through a hole in the fabric of space itself and vanished from the ken of men. To me he said: “I fear a new weapon.” But to the rest, he kept his peace and let the work of the Compact continue. There was nothing else to be done. Our Wall Decade was waning, and when a man or a Compact outlives the age that gave him or it birth, there is nothing to do but go forward and meet the new day dawning.
So it was with the Compact. We lived on as we had lived before: looting and killing and draining the wealth of space into our coffers. But in the back of our minds a shadow was lurking.
On the next raid, the Lady was lost. I saw it happen, as did Merril. There was nothing we could do to help her, and she died, spilling men into the void as she ruptured in her last agony.
It was off Hyperion, whence we had come to loot the trove built there by the prospectors of the Saturnian Moons. And it was a trap.
The Arrow, the Hound and the Lady circled the moonlet, swinging inward to the attack. It was the Lady who was to put aground the raiding party, and her valves hung open while men readied the assault-boats. Our radar screens showed nothing of danger. There was only the bloated giant in the sky, a ringed monster of yellow gold against the starry velvet of space.
The Lady dropped her boats, the Hound and the Arrow hovering by to watch over their sister. And suddenly, the jagged moonscape below erupted—belching streaks of fire that sought us like probing fingers. I knew in one single instant of terror that this was the new weapon that had killed the Argonaut, for it sliced into the Lady’s flanks as though the steelite hull were cheese.
She bulged, glowing like an ember. There was a sudden nimbus of snow about her as her air escaped and froze, and then she rolled into her death-dance, open from bow to stern, spilling scorched corpses into the void.
The Arrow and the Hound drove off into space like furies leaving the spinning body of their sister ship behind, not waiting to watch her crash down onto the rocky face of Hyperion. And now the five of the Compact were only three, and again there was the sound of weeping among our women.
Two months after that engagement, a single assault-boat returned to Base. It was the lone survivor of the Lady’s landing party. By some miracle, the three men aboard had escaped the holocaust. They had landed and been captured and then they had fought their way free and into the void once more. They were half-dead from starvation and exposure, but they had brought word to Merril that the wall that had so long protected us was crumbling.
Merril sought me out, his lean hard face grim and set.
“There was a Russian among the Americans on Hyperion,” he said.
“A prisoner?” It was my hope that spoke so, not my sure knowledge of what was to come.
Merril shook his head slowly. “A technician. They developed the beam that killed the Argonaut and the Lady—together.” His voice was harsh and bleak. Then suddenly he laughed. “We’ve touched them,” he said, “Touched them on their tender spot—their purses.” He bowed low, filled with bitter mockery. “Behold the diplomats, the men who are accomplishing the impossible!”
And I knew that his words spelt doom. Doom for the Compact and for the Wall Decade that was our life.
Yet we did not stint. In that year we raided Dione, Io, Ganymede, and even the American naval Base on Callisto. We gutted six Russian and four American rockets filled with treasure. And we ventured sunward as far as the moons of Mars.
We dared battles with patrol ships and won. We killed the destroyer Alexei Tolstoi off Europa and we shattered an American monitor over Syrtis itself, and watched the wreckage rain down on Yakki, the place where the Compact was born.