Cole declared a two-week moratorium on their undeclared war.

"As dense as the brass are, even they will figure out something’s going on if they keep losing a ship or two every day" was his explanation.

The captured ship, which was named the Shooting Star, failed to yield any new secrets concerning the Republic or its weaponry, which wasn’t all that surprising considering that the Teddy R had been a functioning ship in the Navy less than four years ago. Cole had Dan Moyer take command of it and select a crew. Slick, the Tolobite who, with his second-skin symbiote, could operate in the cold of space for hours at a time, gave the exterior a thorough inspection and made a few cosmetic repairs.

Cole didn’t let the two weeks go to waste. By the end of the first week he’d recruited another twenty ships, mostly one- and two-man jobs, a few bigger ones, to his cause. Jacovic, Braxite, Jaxtaboxl, Domak, and the other aliens under his command sought out their own kind, and soon another twelve ships joined his small but growing fleet.

Braxite gathered a few other Molarians for a religious ritual that theoretically sent Forrice’s soul on its way to the next level of existence—they had no word for Heaven—and Cole was allowed to attend. He had no idea what was being said—Braxite sat next to him and translated, but the concepts were as alien to him as the language but it had a mildly cathartic effect on him. At least, he felt he would finally be able to sleep through an entire night without dreaming of his friend’s final few agonized minutes of life.

From time to time sightings of lone Republic ships would be reported, but Cole stuck to his timetable: no military action for two weeks, do nothing to alert the Republic to the fact that anything unusual was transpiring on the Inner Frontier. The Teddy R remained docked at Singapore Station.

David Copperfield seemed increasingly uneasy. The little alien had no taste for conflict of any kind, and yet it was obvious that conflict was precisely what Cole’s fleet was preparing for.

"You don’t have to stay on the ship, David," said Cole one morning when Copperfield was awkwardly trying to find out when Cole planned to go hunting for Republic ships again. "You can stay on Singapore Station. No one will hold it against you."

"My place is at your side," replied Copperfield adamantly. "And since it’s obvious that you’re not going to remain in port, I will go into battle with you." He paused. "It is a far better thing I do than I have ever done."

"Do you really believe that?" asked Cole.

"Not for a minute," admitted the little alien. "But just once in my life I wanted to say it."

"There’s another saying worth considering," said Cole. "He who opts to run away will live to fight another day."

"It’s like hiding from the dentist," said Copperfield, making a face. "Eventually you have to see him."

"Yeah, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it."

"As long as I can’t talk you out of it, perhaps I can make a suggestion."

"Shoot," said Cole.

"You are going to war with the Republic. The Teroni Federation is already at war with the Republic. Why don’t you join forces?"

"Because the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend," replied Cole. "Besides, they’ve got over a million ships. I don’t have much bargaining power if all I can bring them is another sixty or seventy. We’d just become a small unimportant unit in the Teroni Navy, and I don’t believe in their cause any more than I believe in the Republic’s. There are something like forty million dead on each side, and I’ll bet half of the politicians and top brass don’t remember or never knew just what it is they’re fighting about."

Copperfield stared at him long and hard. "I had no idea you were this bitter, Steerforth."

"How would you like to be related to someone who lived on Braccio II?" responded Cole.

"The Navy has been pacifying worlds for a millennium."

"I realize that it’s only a matter of degree, but there’s still a difference between pacifying them and annihilating them." He paused, the muscles in his jaw tensing. "If you had vital information, information that could save thousands of lives, and you refused to give it to me, I would still never do to you what those bastards did to Four Eyes, and neither would my Teroni First Officer."

The little alien looked into Cole’s eyes and decided it was time to change the subject.

"So how soon will we let the Navy know that we’re the enemy?"

"They already know it. There’s a ten-million-credit price on my head, remember?"

"I meant when will we let the Navy know that we’re the ones who are attacking them?"

Cole shrugged. "I don’t know. When we can withstand an attack by a couple of hundred ships, I suppose."

Copperfield relaxed visibly. "That might not be for a year or more."

"Anything’s possible," said Cole noncommittally.

"Suddenly I feel better," said the little alien. "Come over to Duke’s Place and I’ll split a bottle of their best champagne with you."

"Yeah, why not?" said Cole. "I spend years cooped up in ships with claustrophobic rooms and seven-foot ceilings. Why the hell stay here when I don’t have to?"

They took the tram to the station, and were on their way to Duke’s Place when Rachel’s image appeared alongside them.

"I’m sorry to bother you, sir," she said, "but you told me to keep you apprised of any Republic ships we could track within the boundaries of the Frontier."

"What have you got?" asked Cole.

"Twelve ships have recently shown up, six near the Quinellus Cluster, six more in the vicinity of Keepsake."

Cole nodded. "They’re looking for their missing ships. They won’t find the Shooting Star, of course, and my understanding is that Vladimir damned near vaporized the ship out by the cluster." He paused for a moment, considering the situation. "Keep tabs on them, Rachel; get Mr. Briggs or Lieutenant Domak to help if necessary, and alert Christine when she comes on duty. Inform Val, too. As long as they’re just searching in space, fine—but if they land anywhere and become an indiscriminate punishment party, or they start taking captives for the kind of questioning they gave Four Eyes, I want to know about it instantly."

"Yes, sir," she said, saluting. Her image vanished a second later.

Cole turned to Copperfield. "You go ahead to Duke’s. I’ve got something that I need to do."

"Are you going back to the ship?"

"Not just yet."

"I guess I’ll see you later," said Copperfield as Cole began walking down a long metal corridor. Cole was back at the ship an hour later. Two robots accompanied him, carrying his purchases from the tram to the shuttle bay. He resisted the urge to either tip or thank them and went up to the bridge, where Rachel Marcos was still tracking the Republic ships.

"Anything going on?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No, sir."

"Keep me informed."

Sharon Blacksmith met him as he was going to his office. "I saw you bringing something aboard," she said. "What is it?"

"A little present for the Republic."

"Come on, Wilson," she said. "I’m the Chief of Security. If you don’t tell me, I’ll just open them up."

"If you tamper with them, they might explode."

"What the hell are they?" she demanded."

"They’re mines."

"Like we used against the Republic? We’ve already got a bunch, don’t we?"

"Yeah, but they’re regulation Republic issue. I wanted some that are more than half a century old, and built by—what can I call them?—freelance bombmakers."

"Why?"

"The Republic’s got a dozen ships looking for the Shooting Star and the one Vladimir took out in the Quinelllus Cluster. Hopefully they’ll give up, turn around, and go home—but if they decide that something happened to those ships, that they’re not merely lost or out of touch, they’ll start questioning the locals, pretty much the way they questioned Four Eyes. Even if it’s just one ship and we isolate it, we can’t open fire on it. It’ll almost certainly be in contact with ships that are out of range, and I’m not ready for the Republic to know what we’re doing yet. So I’m going to pass these ancient mines out to some of our smaller ships, little one- and two-man jobs, and once we know that one of the Republic ships is causing trouble, we’ll see to it that it hits one of these mines or vice versa. Then, when his comrades come along to learn what happened, all they’ll find are the remains of a half-century-old mine, obviously left over from an earlier war… and no one will go home any the wiser." A tight little smile crossed his face. "That’s the scenario, anyway."

"Who will you give them to?"

"I’ve got six of them," responded Cole. "I plan to give two apiece to Moyer, Bujandi, and one of Jacovic’s Teronis."

"I’ll contact them for you," she said.

"Good. The mines are so out-of-date that I’m going to have to show them how to activate the damned things."

The mines were placed aboard three small ships an hour later, and the ships promptly headed off, one toward Keepsake, two toward the Quinellus Cluster.

Cole checked with the personnel on the bridge every hour. The Navy ships had split up and were honeycombing the areas in question, but so far none of them had touched down. The situation was unchanged when he finally went to bed.

He was awakened three hours later by Christine, who informed him that a Republic ship had radioed Keepsake for landing coordinates.

"Which ship have we got over there?"

"Mr. Moyer’s ship, sir."

"Patch me through to him."

"Yes, sir."

Moyer’s face appeared over Cole’s built-in dresser.

"Dan, one of the Republic ships is going to try to land on Keepsake. You know what to do?"

"Yes, sir," said Moyer. "You went over it with each of us."

"Okay. Good luck."

Cole broke the connection. "Give me a play-by-play," he said to Christine’s image.

"Nothing yet, sir. The Republic ship—it’s the Johannesburg—has been given its coordinates and is approaching Keepsake." Thirty seconds of silence followed. "Mr. Moyer just cut across the Johannesburg s path. The Johannesburg has altered course and is in pursuit. Mr. Moyer is banking further away from the planet."

"That’s the ballgame," said Cole. "He used the maneuver to hide the fact that he dumped the mines. They’re coded not to go after him."

"No change yet, sir. There!" she yelled. "The Johannesburg is gone!"

"Okay," said Cole. "Now for Step Two. Patch me through to Slade McNeil, Slade McBain, whatever the hell His name is—the guy who owns the big casino on Moritat."

"Moritat, sir?"

"That’s the Tradertown on Keepsake."

"Yes, sir."

A moment later the image of a burly gray-haired man with a bushy mustache replaced Christine’s image.

"Good evening, Slade," said Cole. "You saw what happened?"

"It’s afternoon here, Captain, and yes, we did. Lit up the sky. Beautiful sight."

"If the Republic asks about it, you don’t know what happened, your instruments recorded the explosion."

"How can we not know?" said the burly man.

"Tell them that there was a battle between a pair of warlords about fifty or sixty years ago. One of them dumped a batch of mines, and when the war was over, the winner cleaned most of them up. Over the years you lost three or four ships to rogue mines that hadn’t been deactivated. You thought you’d gotten them all, but evidently you were mistaken."

"That’s pretty far-fetched," said the man. "Are you sure they’ll buy it?"

"They will, when they find fragments of the mine. I’m going to log off now, but stay connected, and Officer Mboya will give you a scramble code to alert us if they don’t buy it and start harassing you."

"Will do."

"Christine," said Cole, "take it from here."

"Yes, sir," she replied.

As Cole lay back on his bunk, he brought forth the image of Forrice in his mind, and smiled.

"You’d have been proud of us today," he murmured as he began drifting off. "Using those ancient mines was worthy of your devious mind. The Navy will reconstruct what happened, and in the end the only thing they’ll do is warn their people away from Keepsake until they make sure there are no more uncollected mines floating in the vicinity. Yeah, you’d have been pleased with it."

And for the first time in days, Cole slept like a baby.