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fire on them,” Hazzard explained gently. “I’m about to make a mistake…”
    “Sir?”
    Hazzard smiled to himself. Starlords might have all the advantages with their hardwired personal technology, but they were hampered, sometimes, by an almost desperate need to play by the rules.
    Rules that, sometimes, could be bent…
    “Altitude three hundred two kilometers,” the helmsman reported. “Now two fifty-five kilometers. One hundred eighty-one… One hundred seven…”
    “I can read the altitude data, Mr. Sotheby, thank you. Bring us up just a bit, plus zero-two.”
    Maneuvering thrusters, fueled by water from the ship’s forward tank, imparted a scant few kilos of thrust, amplified by the drives. Hazzard was completely focused now on the dance of numbers- Indeterminacy‘& heading, altitude, dwindling velocity…
    Ahead, almost below now, the big guns kept firing, hurling pinpoints of dazzling sunlight into the tangle of star-sailing vessels ahead. Decider had just taken several more hits, as microsingularities from both the planet and the P’aaseni smashed through drive barriers, sails, and hull with equal ease, savaging armor plate, splintering bulwarks, slashing through the deep-buried vitals of a dying ship.
    “Captain!” Ishiwara’s voice said. “We’re dragging upper atmosphere. Contact with the surface in five seconds… four…”
    “All hands!” Pardoe called. “Brace for impact!”
    Even empty space has substance, on the quantum level, the eleven-dimensional structure of emptiness sometimes called the fabric of space-time, the stuff a starship’s drive fields grab hold of during maneuvers and acceleration. Now, though, the interface surface of Indeterminacy^ drive field was intersecting solid rock as the frigate hurtled low across the Kadenese surface. At low velocity, space would bend, gravity-like, with no noticeable effect. At several percent of the speed of light, Indy’s current velocity, the fringe effects of a drive field dragging through unyielding rock…
    There were… effects.
    Indeterminacy slowed, first of all, decelerating sharply and for free at tens of thousands of gravities, though the drive field kept the velocity change uniform and unfelt aboard… fortunately for the men and women belowdecks.
    On the surface, solid rock flexed… warped… then snapped as stress points were reached and surpassed.
    The interface shock wave dragged along the Dalacradak Peninsula well astern of the hurtling starship, visible from space as a frothy white V arrowing across land and sea alike. The south face of Gadeddej Mountain shuddered, shouldering slightly skyward, then collapsed, a thundering, booming detonation of rock avalanching into the Drudep Valley below, carrying with it the bristling array of deep-space sensor antenna and wave guide towers mounted there.
    The shock wave boomed across Egezhur Bay, slammed into the Drugid Cliffs, and hit the Razurig defense facility like an oncoming storm wall straight from the depths of hell. The main gun turret, its muzzle cocked at a point in the sky above the eastern horizon, tipped crazily, spun, then shredded under the impact of fast-moving discontinuous space. The military garrison town of Krebur vanished as buildings shook themselves to pieces in the seismic quake rolling along behind the storm front.
    Mount Gadez, long dormant, awakened as its lava plug shattered and long-pent energies deep within the crust were catastrophically released.
    The close passage, as Indeterminacy‘ ’s wake lightly brushed the planet’s surface, lasted less than three seconds. As the frigate arrowed now back into the interplanetary‘ depths of the Kaden system, the planet receding astern showed evidence of the ferocity of that encounter. The shock wave continued to ripple east across the Zurkeded Ocean, though with fast-fading force. Storm clouds were gathering in white-swirling fury above the peninsula, and Mount Gadez glowed in the depths of its fast-expanding