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asked.
    Hazzard gave a mental shrug. “It gives both sides a bit of something to save face with,” he replied. “And at least we stopped those damned guns!”
    “I hope the Admiralty sees it that way, sir.”
    “Skek the Admiralty!” The curse was more bitter than he’d intended. “They’re not here!”
    Bursts of plasma from Indy’s maneuvering thrusters slowed, then arrested the ship’s spin. A large tangle of wreckage-remnants of the entire starboard mast array-broke free a moment later, imparting a slight yaw to port.
    “Helm! Don’t correct that!” Hazzard snapped. “Let them think we’re still helpless!”
    The port yaw was turning the Indy relative to the oncoming enemy line, bringing her dorsal gun deck around.
    Naval tactics were dictated by the physics of ship handling and the nature of ship design. Vast arrays of sails and rigging forward and astern meant that a warship’s guns- all but her relatively small bow and stern chasers-faced outward, abeam. The wooden warships that had sailed the oceans of ancient Earth four thousand years before had adopted tactics quite similar to these, shaped by the cold hand of physics.
    “Port roll,” Hazzard ordered. “Dorsal guns, run out! Fire as you bear!”
    In those long-vanished sailing vessels at the dawn of history, shipboard guns had used charges of exploding chemical powder to impel spherical lumps of inert metal across hundreds of meters of open sea. Aboard Indeterminacy , guns used magnetic fields to launch artificially generated micro-singularities across far greater gulfs of empty space. Indy’s largest guns were 32s, each accelerating a thirty-two-kilogram mass, compressed to a volume rivaling that of a single proton, to a velocity of nearly twenty percent of c .
    Along the checkered surface of Indeterminacy‘$ dorsal gun deck, hatches swung open and the blunt, black muzzles of the singularity launchers snubbed forth. They fired, the massive, rippling broadside slamming the frigate sideways in hammering recoil, the dead hand of Isaac Newton rocking them back in all the fury of his Third Law. Indy’s drive fields absorbed much of the recoil, and the massive shock absorbers housing each of her guns dissipated much of the rest. Still, the effect of a broadside on those aboard the vessel was one of jolting, thundering power barely contained by the drive fields.
    Hazzard felt the lurch and rumble, driven to the core of his being.
    Indy’s first broadside struck home.
    “Maintain port roll!” he called. “Starboard deck, roll out! Fire as you bear!”
    A ship’s drive field could be fluttered, distorting space enough to bend laser and particle beams safely clear of the vessel… or to crumple and shred the electronics of any missile, or the fusing of an incoming explosive warhead. Microsingularities, however, smaller than an atomic nucleus and moving at velocities only slightly less than relativistic, tended to slide through a field’s fringe interference effect, and the damage they wreaked on the target came not from exploding warheads, but from the simple kinetic destruction wrought by high-velocity mass.
    Like the shipboard guns of an earlier era, Indeterminacy ‘s singularity cannon pounded away at the lead P’aaseni ship, puncturing main courses, jibs, and tops’ls, slamming home into her ornately painted prow. Where most Union warship prows were broad, flattened domes, fifty meters or more across, P’aaseni vessels bore clusters of twelve spherical water tanks, held together by gilded frames that gave them the look of bizarre baskets of fruit. Each impact blew glittering bits of hull metal, basket loads of scrap, and gushing white plumes of escaping steam, crystallizing almost at once into frost-gleaming clouds of ice-fog. Every starship carried a small lake in its prow storage tank-water for the crew’s use, for use as fuel in the fusion reactors, and reaction mass for the thrusters. Storing the water in a prow tank provided