* * * * *
Hatch laughed at himself sourly. He was in space, not hiding behind a
tree on a battlefield-to-be. He was floating out there in the openest
open that had ever been opened, where it was definitely true that if he
could see them, they could see him. Trying to hide in the middle of
that task force was like a man as masculine as he was, trying to troll
unnoticed through a mass meeting of the Gamma Upsilon Mu--better known
as the "Get Your Man" sorority.
Besides, other men were back there in space that must be warned.
Probably he had already been noticed, and zeroed-in from a few of the
smaller projectors in that task force. They would hardly let him pass
through the fleet and go free. They might not blow him out of space
until the last moment, to preserve their element of surprise. But the
men back there--
He reached for the microphone, took a deep breath, and offered up
a brief prayer to get his lines through before the blast came. And
that the blast be a quick and merciful blackout instead of a slow and
painful matter of dying all alone, deep in space....
Wilson was striding up and down the stereo room when the loud-speaker
on the wall bellowed into a strained roar:
"Commander Hatch to Commodore Wilson on emergency priority!"
The entire personnel of the plotting room froze solid.
"Wilson! I've just contacted a fleet of warcraft, big ships with
nasty-looking projector sort of things looking out of mobile turrets.
There are big ones! Bigger than anything we've ever built, and
skeletonlike things that have open decks loaded with one-man fighters.
They're--"....