Rip watched,
searching for some reason for their actions. Then one of the boats
pulled away from the others. It returned to the asteroid, with stern jet
burning fitfully.
"Is he landing?" Koa asked.
Rip didn't know. The snapper-boat was moving slowly enough to make a
landing.
Directly above the asteroid it changed direction, circled, and returned
over their heads. Rip could almost have picked it off with a pistol shot.
Santos could have blasted it into space dust with one rocket.
The snapper-boat changed direction, and for a fraction of a second stern
and side tubes "fought" each other, making the boat yaw wildly. Then it
straightened out on a new course.
Koa exclaimed, "That's a drone!"
Rip got it then. A pilotless snapper-boat! That's why its actions were a
little uneven. Only one thing could explain its deliberate slowness. It
was bait. The _Scorpius_ had sent piloted snapper-boats over the asteroid
at high speed, crisscrossing in order to cover the thorium world
completely, expecting to have the unknown rocketeer fire at them. Then a
fire bomb had been dropped as a further means of getting the asteroid to
fire. But no rockets had been fired from the asteroid, so the pilot in
control of the drone had sent it at low speed, a perfect target.
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