The Airlords of Han
Philip Francis Nowlan (1929)
Country of origin: U.S.A.
Available texts by the same author here
Chapter 9: The Fall of Nu-Yok
My position among the Hans, in this period, was a peculiar one. I was at once a closely guarded prisoner and an honored guest. San-Lan told me frankly that I would remain the latter only so long as I remained an object of serious study or mental diversion to himself or his court. I made bold to ask him what would be done with me when I ceased to be such."Naturally," he said, "you will be eliminated. What else? It takes the services of fifteen men altogether, to guard you; and men, you understand, cannot be produced and developed in less than eighteen years." He meditated frowningly for a moment. "That, by the way, is something I must take up with the Birth and Educational Bureau. They must develop some method of speeding growth, even at the cost of mental development. With your wild forest men getting out of hand this way, we are going to need greater resources of population, and need them badly.
"But," he continued more lightly, "there seems to be no need for you to disturb yourself over the prospect at present. It is true you have been able to resist our psychoanalysts and hypnotists, and so have no value to us from the viewpoint of military information, but as a philosopher, you have proved interesting indeed."
He broke off to give his attention to a gorgeously uniformed official who suddenly appeared on the large viewplate that formed one wall of the apartment. So perfectly did this mechanism operate, that the man might have been in the room with us. He made a low obeisance, then rose to his full height and looked at his ruler with malicious amusement.
"Heaven-Born," he said, "I have the exquisite pain of reporting bad news."
San-Lan gave him a scathing look. "It will be less unpleasant if I am not distracted by the sight of you while you report."
At this the man disappeared, and the viewplate once more presented its normal picture of the mountains north of Lo-Tan; but the voice continued:
"Heaven-Born, the Nu-Yok fleet has been destroyed, the city is in ruins, and the newly formed ground brigades, reduced to 10,000 men, have taken refuge in the hills of Ron-Dak (the Adirondacks) where they are being pressed hard by the tribesmen, who have surrounded them."
For an instant San-Lan sat as though paralyzed. Then he leaped to his feet, facing the viewplate.
"Let me see you!" he snarled. Instantly the mountain view disappeared and the Intelligence Officer appeared again, this time looking a little frightened.
"Where is Lui-Lok?" he shouted. "Cut him in on my north plate. The commander who loses his city dies by torture. Cut him in. Cut him in!"
"Heaven-Born, Lui-Lok committed suicide. He leaped into a ray, when the rockets of the tribesmen began to penetrate the ray-wall. Lip-Hung is in command of the survivors. We have just had a message from him. We could not understand all of it. Reception was very weak because he is operating with emergency apparatus on Bah-Flo power. The Nu-Yok power broadcast plant has been blown up. Lip-Hung begs for a rescue fleet."
San-Lan, his expression momentarily becoming more vicious, now was striding up and down the room, while the poor wretch in the viewplate, thoroughly scared at last, stood trembling.
"What!" shrieked the tyrant. "He begs a rescue. A rescue of what? Of 10,000 beaten men and nothing better than makeshift apparatus? No fleet? No city? I give him and his 10,000 to the tribesmen! They are of no use to us now! Get out! Vanish! No, wait! Have any of the beasts' rockets penetrated the ray-walls of other cities?"
"No, Heaven-Born, no. It is only at Nu-Yok that the tribesmen used rockets sheathed in the same mysterious substance they use on their little aircraft and which cannot be disintegrated by the ray." (He meant inertron, of course.)
San-Lan waved his hand in dismissal. The officer dissolved from view, and the mountains once more appeared, as though the whole side of the room were of glass.
More slowly he paced back and forth. He was the caged tiger now, his face seamed with hate and the desperation of foreshadowed doom.
"Driven out into the hills," he muttered to himself. "Not more than 10,000 of them left. Hunted like beasts—and by the very beasts we ourselves have hunted for centuries. Cursed be our ancestors for letting a single one of the spawn live!" He shook his clenched hands above his head. Then, suddenly remembering me, he turned and glared.
"Forest man, what have you to say?" he demanded.
Thus confronted, there stole over me that same detached feeling that possessed me the day I had been made Boss of the Wyomings.
"It is the end of the Air Lords of Han," I said quietly. "For five centuries command of the air has meant victory. But this is so no longer. For more than three centuries your great, gleaming cities have been impregnable in all their arrogant visibility. But that day is done also. Victory returns once more to the ground, to men invisible in the vast expanse of the forest which covers the ruins of the civilization destroyed by your ancestors. Ye have sown destruction. Ye shall reap it!
"Your ancestors thought they had made mere beasts of the American race. Physically you did reduce them to the state of beasts. But men do have souls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished the spark of manhood, of honor, of independence. While the Hans have degenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they have unwittingly bred a race of super-men out of those they sought to make animals. You have bred your own destruction. Your cities shall be blasted from their foundations. Your air fleets shall be brought crashing to earth. You have your choice of dying in the wreckage, or of fleeing to the forests, there to be hunted down and killed as you have sought to destroy us!"
And the ruler of all the Hans shrank back from my outstretched finger as though it had been in truth the finger of doom.
But only for a moment. Suddenly he snarled and crouched as though to spring at me with his bare hands. By a mighty convulsion of the will he regained control of himself, however, and assumed a manner of quiet dignity. He even smiled—a slow, crooked smile.
"No," he said, answering his own thought. "I will not have you killed now. You shall live on, my honored guest, to see with your own eyes how we shall exterminate your animal-brethren in their forests. With your own ears you shall hear their dying shrieks. The cold science of Han is superior to your spurious knowledge. We have been careless. To our cost we have let you develop brains of a sort. But we are still superior. We shall go down into the forests and meet you. We shall beat you in your own element. When you have seen and heard this happen, my Council shall devise for you a death by scientific torture, such as no man in the history of the world has been honored with."
I must digress here a bit from my own personal adventures to explain briefly how the fall of Nu-Yok came about, as I learned it afterward.
Upon my capture by the Hans, my wife, Wilma, courageously had assumed command of my Gang, the Wyomings.
Boss Handan, of the Winslows, who was directing the American forces investing Nu-Yok, contented himself for several weeks with maintaining our lines, while waiting for the completion of the first supply of inertron-jacketed rockets. At last they arrived with a limited quantity of very high-powered atomic shells, a trifle over a hundred of them to be exact. But this number, it was estimated, would be enough to reduce the city to ruins. The rockets were distributed, and the day for the final bombardment was set.
The Hans, however, upset Handan's plans by launching a ground expedition up the west bank of the Hudson. Under cover of an air raid to the southwest, in which the bulk of their ships took part, this ground expedition shot northward in low-flying ships.
The raiding air fleet ploughed deep into our lines in their famous "cloud-bank" formation, with down-playing disintegrator rays so concentrated as to form a virtual curtain of destruction. It seared a scar path a mile and a half wide fifteen miles into our territory.
Everyone of our rocket gunners caught in this section was annihilated. Altogether we lost several hundred men and girls.
Gunners to each side of the raiding ships kept up a continuous fire on them. Most of the rockets were disintegrated, for Handan would not permit the use of the inertron rockets against the ships. But now and then one found its way through the playing beams, hit a repeller ray and was hurled up against a Han ship, bringing it crashing down.
The orders that Handan barked into his ultrophone were, of course, heard by every long-gunner in the ring of American forces around the city, and nearly all of them turned their fire on the Han airfleet, with the exception of those equipped with the inertron rockets.
These latter held to the original target and promptly cut loose on the city with a shower of destruction which the disintegrator-ray walls could not stop. The results produced awe even in our own ranks.
Where an instant before had stood the high-flung masses and towers of Nu-Yok, gleaming red, blue and gold in the brilliant sunlight, and shimmering through the iridescence of the ray "wall," there was a seething turmoil of gigantic explosions.
Surging billows of debris were hurled skyward on gigantic pulsations of blinding light, to the detonations that shook men from their feet in many sections of the American line seven and eight miles away.
As I have said, there were only some hundred of the inertron rockets among the Americans, long and slender, to fit the ordinary guns, but the atomic laboratories hidden beneath the forests, had outdone themselves in their construction. Their release of atomic force was nearly 100 per cent, and each one of them was equal to many hundred tons of trinitrotoluol, which I had known in the First World War, five hundred years before, as "T.N.T."
It was all over in a few seconds. Nu-Yok had ceased to exist, and the waters of the bay and the rivers were pouring into the vast hole where a moment before had been the rocky strata beneath lower Manhattan.
Naturally, with the destruction of the city's power-broadcasting plant the Han air fleet had plunged to earth.
But the ships of the ground expedition up the river, hugging the tree tops closely, had run the gauntlet of the American long-gunners who were busily shooting at the other Han fleet, high in the air to the southwest, and about half of them had landed before their ships were robbed of their power. The other half crashed, taking some 10,000 or 12,000 Han troops to destruction with them. But from those which had landed safely, emerged the 10,000 who now were the sole survivors of the city, and who took refuge in wooded fastnesses of the Adirondacks.
The Americans with their immensely greater mobility, due to their jumping belts and their familiarity with the forest, had them ringed in within twenty-four hours.
But owing to the speed of the maneuvers, the lines were not as tightly drawn as they might have been, and there was considerable scattering of both American and Han units. The Hans could make only the weakest short-range use of their newly developed disintegrator-ray field units, since they had only distant sources of power-broadcast on which to draw. On the other hand, the Americans could use their explosive rockets only sparingly for fear of hitting one another.
So the battle was finished in a series of desperate hand-to-hand encounters in the ravines and mountain slopes of the district.
The Mifflins and Altoonas, themselves from rocky, mountainous sections, gave a splendid account of themselves in this fighting, leaping to the craggy slopes above the Hans, and driving them down into the ravines, where they could safely concentrate on them the fire of depressed rocket guns.
The Susquannas, with their great inertron shields, which served them well against the weak rays of the Hans, pressed forward irresistibly every time they made a contact with a Han unit, their short-range rocket guns sending a hail of explosive destruction before them.
But the Delawares, with their smaller shields, inertron leg-guards and helmets, and their ax-guns, made faster work of it. They would rush the Hans, shooting from their shields as they closed in, and finish the business with their ax-blades and the small rocket guns that formed the handles of their axes.
It was my own unit of Wyomings, equipped with bayonet guns not unlike the rifles of the First World War, that took the most terrible toll from the Hans.
They advanced at the double, laying a continuous barrage before them as they ran, closing with the enemy in great leaps, cutting, thrusting and slicing with those terrible double-ended weapons in a vicious efficiency against which the Hans with their swords, knives and spears were utterly helpless.
And so my prediction that the war would develop hand-to-hand fighting was verified at the outset.
None of the details of this battle of the Ron-Daks were ever known in Lo-Tan. Not more than the barest outlines of the destruction of the survivors of Nu-Yok were ever received by San-Lan and his Council. And of course, at that time I knew no more about it than they did.