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display, Kaden hung in orange, ice-capped splendor. Hazzard’s commands crackled through the shipnet. “Deploy full sail! All back! Ishi, dump V into the drive fields!…”
    Like the Victor at Tribaltren Station, the Indeterminacy was now barreling into the fray with far too much velocity. Much could be dumped as energy fed directly into the drive fields, expanding them across well over a hundred kilometers of empty space where it could actually be applied to braking the ship’s headlong plunge forward. Still, V could be translated into energy only so quickly. By the time they neared Kaden, they would still be moving too quickly to engage the enemy vessels.
    “Mr. Ishiwara,” Hazzard said. “I want you to stand by on the drive controls. We’re going to pop our fields out full as we round the planet.”
    “The fields are already extended all the way, Captain.” The larger the volume of Indeterminacy’s space-warping wake, the more velocity could be safely dumped.
    “I know. We’re going to pull an anchor drag.”
    He heard the pause, as loud as a shout, as the engineer digested this. “Sir…”
    “Do it. Planetary encounter in… twenty-eight seconds, now.”
    “Aye, aye, sir.”
    Hazzard took a last look at the Indy’s alignment with the fast-growing planet and the squadron battle ahead. This was going to be damned tight…
    “Strike all sails,” he ordered. “ Smartly now! Helm… you’re on thrusters, now. Hang on to her! She’s going to buck!”
    Swiftly, as rats and spiders swarmed through the rigging, Indeterminacy’s spread of sails collapsed, folded, and vanished, furling into their storage lockers on mast and spar.
    “All hands below!” Hazzard ordered. He didn’t want to lose anyone with this maneuver… though that was a fairly forlorn hope. What he was trying to do was not exactly recommended in Yardley’s Book of C-Manship . “Set ship for close passage!”
    Constellations of points of light flowed down the rigging and masts, vanishing into Indy’s below-deck spaces. Slowly, now, the yards were folding, the masts telescoping down their own lengths, truncating themselves to reduce the possibility of crippling damage from tidal effects or-don’t think about the possibility!-drive field failure.
    There wasn’t time for a full close-passage deployment. They were going to take some damage here, in another few seconds. The question was… how much?
    As Indeterminacy had approached Kaden over the course of the past few minutes, the ship’s display computers had been steadily recalculating magnification factors and redisplaying the view forward. Hazzard noted with a small kick of surprise that the magnification factor was down to one, that the planet now filling his mental view ahead was as it really was outside the all-too-thin walls of Indeterminacy’s hull. They were crossing the terminator now, swinging low across the white and orange curve of the world into day-side. He could sense the growing tug of gravity… though far, far too weak to capture the frigate at her current velocity of over ten percent of the speed of light itself.
    Ahead, close along the equator, just south of the mo-tionlessly sprawled swirl of a tropical storm, lay the ragged, mountainous thrust of the Dalacradak Peninsula, thrusting out from the eastern coast of Alekred and into the violet-blue, cloud-dappled reaches of the Zurkeded Ocean like a Valosian scimitar, straight at the hilt, wickedly curved at the tip, Cape Zhadurg. Goddess! He could see the big guns of the PDS firing up ahead, each discharge like a straight-line bolt of lightning stabbing into space from the wrinkled, snow-capped barrenness of the mountains as they smoothly rolled over the horizon and into view.
    “Captain?” It was cy-Tomlin, the bridge team’s Starlord-in-training. “We’re not supposed to fire on the Irdikads!” He sounded outraged. “ Especially not their planet!”
    “As you were, Mid,” Pardoe said.
    “I’m not about to