Hatch flipped his flitter end for end and set the blast. It brought him to a slowdown by the time he came abreast of the second wave of Viggon Sarri's space force.
To one side was a monster, sleek and dangerous-looking, its turrets flat and ugly-snouted. Above him was another, more distant, but no less angry-looking. Before him was a fighter carrier, its skeleton deckworks crammed with fleet hornets of space, their stinger fixed forward, looking out of the carrier at every angle.
Small, ineffective drive flares indicated that their crews were alert, though idling, and that their working guts were hot and ready to arrow into space. Before him was another of the vast battle wagons, its projector snouts uncovered. One of the turrets made a swift turn, a lift of the projectors, a lowering and complete swivel. Then another started the warm-up maneuver.
Hatch's scoutcraft passed on. On through the front line of ultra-heavies to the lighter, faster classes of spacecraft behind the front array. Jaw slack, he pressed his eyes against the binocular scope, straining to see the flat-extent of each formation. But they faded off into the depths of space and he could not see the end of them.
He passed another carrier and watched the first flight of fighters whip out from the skeleton deck in a flat circle, to turn upward along the axis of the carrier and disappear forward toward the spearhead of the force. They looped around after awhile and came back to the carrier after their test flight.
Everywhere Hatch saw the ugly snouts of projectors lifting and turning in their turrets.
He broke out in a cold sweat. Hatch was as frightened a man as ever existed.
He was a commander in the Space Force, a body trained for combat. But the Space Force, for obvious reasons, was not trained in combat. Aside from having to contend with an attempt at space piracy, some more frequent attempts at barratry, theft, and other forms of skullduggery, and very frequent smuggling, the Space Force was not armed against opposition.
They had their arms, and their ships were efficient. But for the lack of an active enemy, the Space Force was not a pampered service, handed money for the development of heavy space ordnance. There had always been the unexpected "Maybe, some day," but to date no one had ever come up with any proof that Humankind did not represent the only sentient animal in the aggregation of Galaxies.
So Hatch, trained to run down fragmentary piracies and an occasional run-in with some spaceman whose operations exuded an odor into space, was no more trained to space combat than any of his fellows. He had exercises, but had never heard a shot fired in wartime anger.