So Hatch sweated it out.
He flipped off his drive so that he would not be seen. His hand trembled, halfway to the microphone of his infrawave. He stopped it, lest he be heard.
Flipping off his drive was good for another reason too, he told his quaking mind. It also kept up his speed instead of decelerating to a dead stop in the middle of this incomprehensible, magnificent, dangerous-looking fleet of space battle-craft.
Personal safety, and the hope of—
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!"