Philip Francis Nowlan
The Airlords of Han
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Table of contents
CHAPTER I. The Airlords Besieged
CHAPTER II. The Ground Ships Threaten
CHAPTER III. We "Sink" the Ground Ships
CHAPTER IV. Han Electrono-Ray Science
CHAPTER V. American Ultra-Sonic Science
CHAPTER VI. An Unequal Duel
CHAPTER VII. Captured!
CHAPTER VIII. Hypnotic Torture
CHAPTER IX. The Fall of Nu-Yok
CHAPTER X. Life in Lo-Tan, the Magnificent
CHAPTER XI. The Forest Men Attack
CHAPTER XII. The Mysterious "Air Balls"
CHAPTER XIII. Escape!
CHAPTER XIV. The Destruction of Lo-Tan
CHAPTER XVI. The Counter Attack
CHAPTER XVI. Victory
CHAPTER I. The Airlords Besieged
In
a previous record of my adventures in the early part of the Second
War of Independence I explained how I, Anthony Rogers, was overcome
by radioactive gases in an abandoned mine near Scranton in the year
1927, where I existed in a state of suspended animation for nearly
five hundred years; and awakened to find that the America I knew had
been crushed under the cruel tyranny of the Airlords of Han, fierce
Mongolians, who, as scientists now contend, had in their blood a
taint not of this earth, and who with science and resources far in
advance of those of a United States, economically prostrate at the
end of a long series of wars with a Bolshevik Europe, in the year
2270 A.D., had swept down from the skies in their great airships that
rode "repeller rays" as a ball rides the stream of a
fountain, and with their terrible "disintegrator rays" had
destroyed more than four-fifths of the American race, and driven the
other fifth to cover in the vast forests which grew up over the
remains of the once mighty civilization of the United States.I
explained the part I played in the fall of the year 2419, when the
rugged Americans, with science secretly developed to terrific
efficiency in their forest fastness, turned fiercely and assumed the
aggressive against a now effete Han population, which for generations
had shut itself up in the fifteen great Mongolian cities of America,
having abandoned cultivation of the soil and the operation of mines;
for these Hans produced all they needed in the way of food, clothing,
shelter and machinery through electrono-synthetic processes.I
explained how I was adopted into the Wyoming Gang, or clan,
descendants of the original populations of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and
the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania; how quite by accident I stumbled
upon a method of destroying Han aircraft by shooting explosive
rockets, not directly at the heavily armored ships, but at the
repeller ray columns, which automatically drew the rockets upward
where they exploded in the generators of the aircraft; how the
Wyomings threw the first thrill of terror into the Airlords by
bringing an entire squadron crashing to earth; how a handful of us in
a rocketship successfully raided the Han city of Nu-Yok; and how by
the application of military principles, I remembered from the First
World War, I was able to lead the Wyomings to victory over the
Sinsings, a Hudson River tribe which had formed a traitorous alliance
with the hereditary enemies and oppressors of the White Race in
America.*
* * *By
the Spring of 2420 A.D., a short six months after these events, the
positions of the Yellow and the White Races in America had been
reversed. The hunted were now the hunters. The Hans desperately were
increasing the defenses of their fifteen cities, around each of which
the American Gangs had drawn a widely deployed line of long-gunners.
Nervous air convoys, closely bunched behind their protective screen
of disintegrator beams, kept up sporadic and costly systems of
transportation between the cities.During
this period our own campaign against the Hans of Nu-Yok was fairly
typical of the development of the war throughout the country. Our
force was composed of contingents from most of the Gangs of
Pennsylvania, Jersey and New England. We encircled the city on a wide
radius, our line running roughly from Staten Island to the forested
site of the Ancient City of Elizabeth, to First and Second Mountains
just west of the ruins of Newark, Bloomfield and Montclair, thence
northeasterly across the Hudson, and down to the Sound. On Long
Island our line was pushed forward to the first slopes of the hills.We
had no more than four long-gunners to the square mile in our first
line, but each of these was equal to a battery of heavy artillery
such as I had known in the First World War. And when their fire was
first concentrated on the Han City, they blew its outer walls and
roof levels into a chaotic mass of wreckage before the nervous
Mongolian engineers could turn on the ring of generators which
surrounded the city with a vertical film of dis rays. Our explosive
rockets could not penetrate this film, for it disintegrated them
instantly and harmlessly, as it did all other material substance with
the sole exception of inertron.The
continuous operation of the disintegrators destroyed the air and
maintained a constant vacuum wherever they played, into which the
surrounding air continuously rushed, naturally creating atmospheric
disturbances after a time, which resulted in a local storm. This,
however, ceased after a number of hours, when the flow of air toward
the city became steady.The
Hans suffered severely from atmospheric conditions inside their city
at first, but later rearranged their disintegrator ring in a system
of overlapping films that left diagonal openings, through which the
air rushed to them, and through which their ships emerged to scout
our positions.We
shot down seven of their cruisers before they realized the folly of
floating individually over our invisible line. Their beams traced
paths of destruction like scars across the countryside, but caught
less than half a dozen of our gunners all told, for it takes a lot of
time to sweep every square foot of a square mile with a beam whose
cross section is not more than twenty or twenty-five feet in
diameter. Our gunners, completely concealed beneath the foliage of
the forest, with weapons which did not reveal their position, as did
the flashes and detonation of the Twentieth Century artillery, hit
their repeller rays with comparative ease.The
"drop ships," which the Hans next sent out, were harder to
handle. Rising to immense heights behind the city's disintegrator
wall, these tiny, projectile-like craft slipped through the rifts in
the cylinders of destruction, and then turning off their repeller
rays, dropped at terrific speed until their small vanes were
sufficient to support them as they volplaned in great circles,
shooting back into the city defenses at a lower level.The
great speed of these craft made it almost impossible to register a
direct hit against them with rocket guns, and they had no repeller
rays at which we might shoot while they were over our lines.But
by the same token they were able to do little damage to us. So great
was the speed of a drop ship, that the only way in which it could use
a disintegrator ray was from a fixed generator in the nose of the
structure as it dropped in a straight line toward its target. But
since they could not sight the widely deployed individual gunners in
our line, their scouting was just as ineffective as our attempts were
to shoot them down.For
more than a month the situation remained a deadlock, with the Hans
locked up in their cities, while we mobilized gunners and supplies.Had
our stock of inertron been sufficiently great at this period, we
could have ended the war quickly, with aircraft impervious to the dis
ray. But the production of inertron is a painfully slow process,
involving the building up of this weightless element from ultronic
vibrations through the subelectronic, electronic and atomic states
into molecular form. Our laboratories had barely begun production on
a quantity basis, for we had just learned how to protect them from
Han air raids, and it would be many months more before the supply
they had just started to manufacture would be finished. In the
meantime we had enough for a few aircraft, for jumping belts and a
small amount of armor.We
Wyomings possessed one swooper completely sheathed with inertron and
counterweighted with ultron. The Altoonas and the Lycomings also had
one apiece. But a shielded swooper, while impervious to the dis ray,
was helpless against squadrons of Han aircraft, for the Hans
developed a technique of playing their beams underneath the swooper
in such fashion as to suck it down flutteringly into the vacuum so
created, until they brought it more or less violently to earth.Ultimately
the Hans broke our blockade to a certain extent, when they resumed
traffic between their cities in great convoys, protected by squadrons
of cruisers in vertical formation, playing a continuous crossfire of
disintegrator beams ahead of them and down on the sides in a most
effective screen; it was very difficult for us to get a rocket
through to the rep rays.But
we lined the scar paths beneath their air routes for miles at a
stretch with concealed gunners, some of whom would sooner or later
register hits, and it was seldom that a convoy made the trip between
Nu-Yok and Boss-Tan, Bah-Flo, Si-kaga or Ahlanah without losing
several of its ships.Hans
who reached the ground alive were never taken prisoner. Not even the
splendid discipline of the Americans could curb the wild hate
developed through centuries of oppression, and the Hans were
mercilessly slaughtered, when they did not save us the trouble by
committing suicide.Several
times the Hans drove "air wedges" over our lines in this
vertical or "cloud bank" formation, ploughing a scar path a
mile or more wide through our positions. But at worst, to us, this
did not mean the loss of more than a dozen men and girls, and
generally their raids cost them one or more ships. They cut paths of
destruction across the map, but they could not cover the entire area;
when they had ploughed out over our lines, there was nothing left for
them to do but to turn around and plough back to Nu-Yok. Our lines
closed up again after each raid, and we continued to take heavy toll
from convoys and raiding fleets. Finally they abandoned these
tactics.So
at the time of which I speak, the Spring of 2420 A.D., the Americans
and the Hans were temporarily at pretty much of a deadlock. But the
Hans were as desperate as we were sanguine, for we had time on our
side.It
was at this period that we first learned of the Airlords'
determinations--very unpopular one with their conscripted
populations--to carry the fight to us on the ground. The time had
passed when command of the air meant victory. We had no visible
cities nor massed bodies of men for them to destroy, nothing but vast
stretches of silent forests and hills, where our forces lurked,
invisible from the air.
CHAPTER II. The Ground Ships Threaten
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!