“Don’t worry about that,” Reed told her. “Just get our people home.”
“Aye, sir, as soon as we finish mopping up.” There was a distant sound of phase-pistol fire, then moments later: “About time, you guys! We secure? . . . Sir, undocking now. We’ll be home any minute.”
“We’ll keep a light on for you.” Fortunately, Williams wasn’t exaggerating about the brief travel time. The Rigelian asteroid fields were quite close to the star, so Pioneer was waiting in the asteroid’s umbra, letting its mass shield them from the heat and radiation. The entire mining facility had been built on the permanent dark side created once the asteroid’s rotation had been synched with its orbit. Even so, it was chiefly automated, like most of the mines here—which was no doubt why the First Families had deemed them a good hiding place. Also, the radiation would have made it problematical for a ship to spend too long searching here unless its crew knew where to look—as they had done once Hoshi Sato had decrypted and tracked a signal to the Thamnos estate alerting them to an ongoing fraud investigation whose exposure would endanger a number of undercover investigators on Rigel II. The Trade Commission had warned those investigators even as Pioneer, the nearer of the Starfleet ships, had flown to their crew’s rescue.
They’re not home yet, Reed reminded himself as he watched the shuttle undock from the mining outpost. The asteroid remained in hostile hands. It had no weapons to speak of, but there was still the possibility that—
“Sir!” Rey Sangupta called from the science station. “Energy buildup on the surface.” He frowned. “It’s a magnetic signature, not a weapon, but . . .”
“Shields,” Reed ordered, anticipating. Crewman Detzel at tactical complied just before the ship rocked from a fierce impact. Consoles sparked and flickered, suggesting that the blow was forceful enough to shake some internal connections loose. It certainly felt like it knocked some of Reed’s internal connections loose.
“What was that?” Travis Mayweather asked.
“They fired their mass driver at us,” Sangupta replied. “Launched a packet of asteroidal ore at high speed.”
Ensign Tallarico threw him a quizzical look. “They’re throwing rocks at us?”
“Don’t knock it, Ensign,” Reed said. “Kinetic energy’s still as potent as any other kind. So I suggest you move us out of its line of fire.”
“Easier said than done, Captain,” Sangupta said. “The driver track circles the whole asteroid, so they can launch on various trajectories. And we have to stay in the umbra, for the shuttlepod’s sake if not our own.”
“Don’t worry about us, Rey,” came Williams’s voice over the open channel from the pod. “Keep the ship safe.” She left it unsaid that the pod was stuck outside as long as Pioneer’s shields stayed up.
“Incoming!” Detzel called. Tallarico’s hands raced, but the ship suffered another glancing blow before she could dodge completely. The hull rattled and groaned, and Reed struggled to stay seated.
Mayweather clung to the safety handle on the front of the science station. “Damage report!” he called when the shock subsided.
“Shields at half strength,” Detzel replied. “Damage to hull plating and subsurface conduits. And one of the impulse reactors is down.”
“Polarize the plating,” Reed belatedly instructed.
“These shields aren’t designed for a low-tech attack like this,” said Mayweather.
“Then let’s stop relying on them,” Reed replied. “Detzel, target that damned mass driver.”
The crewman frowned. “Sir, which part?”
“The part that a projectile would launch from to hit us! Surely you remember tangents from geometry class.”
A humbled Detzel hastened to comply, and his phase-cannon blast damaged the track at the appropriate place. The ore packet that had already been accelerating toward launch struck the damaged section and crashed, producing a nice splash of ejecta from the impact site. “Excellent,” Reed said. “Shuttlepod, proceed to docking!”
Williams acknowledged, and the pod began to move toward Pioneer again. But then Reed saw lights on the asteroid’s surface, and Sangupta announced, “Thrusters, sir! They’re rotating the asteroid!”
“Detzel, keep firing at the track! Take out as much as you can!”
“Sir, the shuttle’s too close to the line of fire!”
“Val, abort approach!”
But it was too late. Another ore packet flew from the surface, missing the shuttlepod by only a few hundred meters, and clubbed Pioneer hard and head-on. Reed was knocked halfway out of his chair, Mayweather thrown to the deck. Once the captain recovered from the ringing blow, he saw that the bridge lights had dimmed, making it easier to spot the small fire that had erupted on Detzel’s console. Its cooling fan whirred fiercely as the crewman batted the fire out with a gray sleeve.