The men got up and shuffled from the room. Coxine turned to his two lieutenants. "All right, Wallace, see that those crawlers do what I told them to do. And you, Simms, get after that rocket scout."
The two spacemen saluted their captain and turned away. Coxine watched them leave the room, already planning his next move, a move calculated to be so surprising that the Solar Guard would be absolutely helpless.
Bull Coxine smiled and turned to study the charts of the asteroid belt.
Alone aboard the armored decoy ship, Captain Strong blasted steadily on his course through the asteroid belt. The young Solar Guard officer was aware that at any moment after reaching the celestial jungle of small planetoids he could be fired on without warning. And though the Solar Guard patrol ships, well hidden in the belt, would blast Coxine out of existence, it would still be too late for him.
Grim-faced, his hands gripping the controls, he rocketed through space, determined to put an end, once and for all, to the marauding pirate and old enemy, Bull Coxine.
When night fell over the Academy spaceport, Tom, Roger, and Astro climbed silently into the giant rocket cruiser Polaris and raised ship for Titan. Their departure from Earth was routine, with no one but Commander Walters and Captain Strong knowing that stowed in the storage compartment of the spaceship was twenty million credits, the pay roll for the miners of Titan.
Once in space, the rocket ship was put on course and held there by automatic pilot. The three cadets gathered in the messroom and sipped hot tea, staring moodily into their cups. Unable to break audio silence, lest they should betray their position, their first chance of hearing any news lay far ahead of them at Titan. They could only hope that the decoy trap would succeed and that their skipper and friend would return safely. The only comment was Astro's grim prediction.
"If anything happens to Captain Strong," he paused and finished his sentence in a tense whisper, "I'll search the universe until I find Coxine. And when I do, I'll break him in two!"