Free Refugee by Piers Anthony

less mass to flatten them out—no, I'm wrong, how can a hole have mass?—or maybe it is that they are fresher, so have not yet melted down to gentleness. Geologically speaking, any crater less than a million years old is an infant, born yesterday. Yet my father surely would have seen it and avoided it. Anyway, it was a bad jolt. Spirit, perched high, had to grab my head to keep from being flung out of the vehicle.
    I must recreate what followed partly from logic, as my entanglement with Spirit prevented me from paying full attention. The message capsule missed us and struck the rock to our right. It exploded on contact, gouging out a new little crater. That one really was fresh! The impact of the flying debris bounced off our vehicle and the expanding gas shoved the transporter across the sand. We were very lucky no sand holed our suits.
    That capsule was no message—at least, not the kind we had anticipated. That was a bomb!

Bio of a Space Tyrant 1 - Refugee
    Chapter 5 — FIGHT FOR LIFE
    Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.
    Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.
    The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.
    The saucer swerved to get above us again. I saw its pincers, holding another bomb. There was now no doubt about its hostile intent! But, though the immediacy of the threat somehow abated the fear I should naturally have felt, my curiosity remained undimmed. Who was trying to do this to us, and why?
    My father swerved again and braked, and the second bomb missed us to the left front. This time all of us were hanging on firmly, so neither the swerving nor the jolt of the ground from the explosion dislodged us.
    The forward bumper took the brunt of the flying debris, and we all ducked low so the rest passed harmlessly overhead. This was nervous business, though. Sand is sharp, and while space suits are tough, they aren't that tough.
    Still the saucer pursued. It was more maneuverable than we were, and faster; I knew we could not escape it long. I didn't know how many bombs it had, but all it needed was one score on our vehicle.
    Each cylinder was small, and the saucer's hold could contain hundreds of them. Weight wouldn't make much difference, with the gravity shielding; a full hold weighed about the same as an empty one.
    The pincers carefully lowered each bomb below the shield before releasing it, as I mentioned; otherwise, instead of dropping, the cylinder would remain in the chamber until it banged, into something there, and—
    That gave me a notion. If I could somehow jam a bomb back into the hold, or set it off before it dropped—
    I got out my laser and took a shot, but the two vehicles were jogging about so violently relative to each other—I'm sure it was mostly us, but it seemed at the time like the saucer, which is a useful exercise in perspective—that I couldn't aim well, and I missed. I wasn't at all sure the laser beam would detonate the bomb anyway. Light and heat were one thing; abrupt collision was another. In any event, if the bomb did explode above us, shrapnel could rain down on us and wipe us out. Even if it also took out the saucer, what good would it do us then? Maybe it was best that I had failed. I