Of our nine sensitives, three-the boy and two women-were wide-awakes; the other six were hypnos. The technician hooked the boy first to one in Penoyer’s craft. The kid established rapport almost at once and Penoyer got through a report:
‘BLANKETED BY SMOKE. HAVE SHIFTED LEFT WING TO PSYCHO. WHAT HOOK-UP? – PENOYER.’
I answered, ‘Pass down the line.’ Doctrine permitted two types of telepathic hook-up: relay, in which a message would be passed along until it reached its destination; and command mesh, in which there was direct hook-up from flag to each ship under that flag, plus ship-to-ship for adjacent units. In the first case each sensitive carries just one circuit, that is, is in rapport with just one other telepath; in the second they might have to handle as many as four circuits. I wanted to hold off overloading them as long as possible.
The technician tied the other two wide-awakes into our flanking craft in the battle line, then turned his attention to the hypnos. Four of them required hypodermics; the other two went under in response to suggestion. Shortly we were hooked up with the transports and second-line craft, as well as with the bombers and the rocket-jet spotting the fall of shot. The jet reported visibility zero and complained that he wasn’t getting anything intelligible by radar. I told him to stand by; the morning breeze might clear the smoke away presently.
We weren’t dependent on him anyway; we knew our positions almost to the inch. We had taken departure from a benchmark and our dead reckoning was checked for the whole battle line every time any skipper identified a map-shown landmark. In addition, the dead reckoners of a tread-driven cruiser are surprisingly accurate; the treads literally measure every yard of ground as they pass over it and a little differential gadget compares the treads and keeps just as careful track of direction. The smoke did not really bother us and we could keep on firing accurately even if radar failed. On the other hand, if the Palace commander kept us in smoke he himself was entirely dependent on radar.
His radar was apparently working; shot was falling all around us. We hadn’t been hit yet but we could feel the concussions when shells struck near us and some of the reports were not cheerful. Penoyer reported the Martyr hit; the shell had ruptured her starboard engine room. The skipper had tried to cross connect and proceed at half-speed, but the gear train was jammed; she was definitely out of action. The Archangel had overheated her gun. She was in formation but would be harmless until the turret captain got her straightened out.
Huxley ordered them to shift to Formation E, a plan which used changing speeds and apparently random courses-carefully planned to avoid collision between ships, however. It was intended to confuse the fire control of the enemy.
At 4:11 Huxley sent the bombers back to base. We were inside the city now and the walls of the Palace lay just beyond-too close to target for comfort; we didn’t want to lose ships to our own bombs.
At 4:17 we were struck. The port upper tread casing was split, the barbette was damaged so that the gun would no longer .train, and the conning tower was cracked along its after surface. The pilot was killed at his controls.
I helped the psychoperator get gas helmets over the heads. of the hypnos. Huxley picked himself up off the floor plates, put on his own helmet, and studied the set-up on my battle tracker, frozen at the instant the shell hit us.
‘The Benison should pass by this point in three minutes,. John. Tell them to proceed dead slow, come along starboard side, and pick us up. Tell Penoyer I am shifting my flag.’
We made the transfer without mishap, Huxley, myself, the psychoperator, and his sensitives. One sensitive was dead, killed by a flying splinter. One went into a deep trance and we could not rouse her. We left her in the disabled battlewagon; she was as safe there as she could be.
I had torn the current plot from my tracker and brought it along. It had the time-predicted plots for Formation E. We would have to struggle along with those, as the tracker could not be moved and was probably beyond casual repair in any case. Huxley studied the chart.