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their PDS against the possibility that they would be dragged into the spreading war between Union and Alliance. There. The eight or ten Planetary Defense System emplacements stretched along the Dalacradak Peninsula were likely the ones firing on the Union squadron.
    Hazzard was uncomfortably aware of his orders, specific to the point of anality, forbidding him from opening fire on any Kaden military facilities even in self-defense.
    Planetary defense batteries tended to be immense fortresses, buried, for the most part, under kilometers of bedrock, with only the surface turrets mounting the massive singularity cannon visible on the surface. A return bombardment from space, with the throw-mass possible for a frigate like Indeterminacy , might damage some of those batteries, but it wouldn’t knock them out… not before the Indy herself was smashed into blue-hot fragments.
    But there might be another way…
    Range to the battle was now eleven light-minutes. The light announcing Indy’s arrival in-system still hadn’t reached Kaden but would in another… make it ninety-five seconds. He reached out through the ship’s senses, trying to feel the accelerated flow of the situation, to guess what was actually happening now .
    “Captain?” Pardoe said, perhaps wondering if Hazzard had his mind on the situation at hand. “Shall I order more sail and a shift to acceleration, Captain?” Clearly, fleeing for the safety of the out-system station-and giving warning to the heavies-was where duty lay.
    Or…
    “Affirmative,” Hazzard snapped. “Have all hands prepare for hopskip.”
    “A microjump?… We’re not going to warn the squadron, sir?”
    “If we do, Bellemew and the inshore squadron are dead. Uriel can warn the fleet.
    And maybe we can make a difference down there.” Speaking quickly and with a calm he could not feel, Hazzard described what he was planning.
    Pardoe hesitated only a moment before giving a sharp-edged “Aye, sir.”
    “Let’s go to battle stations, if you please, Mr. Pardoe. We will be engaging within a few minutes.”
    Under the frantic urgings of rigging rats and spiders tele-operated by Indy’s c-men, jacked in from their racks deep within the ship’s hull, the frigate’s sails transfigured, top and’t‘gallant sails unfolding, sail surfaces turning from silver to black forward, and swinging on the yards to set the ship accelerating toward the battle, instead of slowing down.
    Minutes crawled as she built back her velocity, reaching toward the speed of light as her primary drive compounded the minute accelerations of photon flux and magnetic field into near-c jamming. Ahead, a fuzzy, hard-to-look-at sphere the color of the back of one’s eyelids began condensing out of empty space, the singularity created and focused by Indeterminacy‘^ fast-increasing relativistic mass. At velocities above
    .99 c, the singularity became a doorway for the ship into trans-c.
    “ Indeterminacy ready for microtransition,” Ishiwara, the drive engineer, reported.
    “Strike the sails,” Hazzard ordered. “Stand by for transit!”
    The crescent of Kaden swelled rapidly ahead as the frigate’s sails collapsed and furled. By now, even with light’s snail-pace crawl, the P’aaseni squadron had noted the frigate’s initial arrival, and their ships were redeploying to intercept this new threat. They wouldn’t know yet, however, that the Indy was coming to meet them.
    “Helm, we’re feeding you transit course corrections.”
    “Aye, sir. Got ‘em.”
    “Sails furled,” Pardoe said. “Vessel ready in all respects for transit.”
    “Punch it!”
    Indeterminacy dropped into the singularity, in a sense swallowing herself whole. At the last moment, the helm used the singularity’s intense gravity to bend the frigate’s course slightly, adjusting her heading as she dropped into utter strangeness…
    … and reemerged, a fractional blink of an eye later.
    A scant light-minute ahead, huge in the magnified