The Airlords Besieged

: The Airlords Of Han

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,
ho, 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;

while 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 Yellow engineers

could turn on the ring of generators which surrounded the city with a

vertical film of disintegrator 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," that synthetic element developed by the Americans from the

sub-electronic and ultronic orders.



* * * * *



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 cylinder 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 sub-electronic, 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 finally, and 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

cross-fire of disintegrator beams ahead of them and down on the sides in

a most effective screen, so that it was very difficult for us to get a

rocket through to the repeller 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 Bos-Tan, Bah-Flo, Si-ka-ga or Ah-la-nah 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 dastardly 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, and 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'

determination, a 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.



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