The Airlords of Han
Page 9
CHAPTER IX
The Fall of Nu-Yok
My position among the Hans, in this period, was a peculiar one. I was atonce a closely guarded prisoner and an honored guest. San-Lan told mefrankly that I would remain the latter only so long as I remained anobject of serious study or mental diversion to himself or his court. Imade bold to ask him what would be done with me when I ceased to besuch.
"Naturally," he said, "you will be eliminated. What else? It takes theservices of fifteen men altogether, to guard you; and men, youunderstand, cannot be produced and developed in less than eighteenyears." He meditated frowningly for a moment. "That, by the way, issomething I must take up with the Birth and Educational Bureau. Theymust develop some method of speeding growth, even at the cost of mentaldevelopment. With your wild forest men getting out of hand this way, weare going to need greater resources of population, and need them badly.
"But," he continued more lightly, "there seems to be no need for you todisturb yourself over the prospect at present. It is true you have beenable to resist our psychoanalysts and hypnotists, and so have no valueto 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 officialwho suddenly appeared on the large viewplate that formed one wall of theapartment. So perfectly did this mechanism operate, that the man mighthave been in the room with us. He made a low obeisance, then rose to hisfull height and looked at his ruler with malicious amusement.
"Heaven-Born," he said, "I have the exquisite pain of reporting badnews."
San-Lan gave him a scathing look. "It will be less unpleasant if I amnot distracted by the sight of you while you report."
At this the man disappeared, and the viewplate once more presented itsnormal picture of the mountains north of Lo-Tan; but the voicecontinued:
"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 takenrefuge in the hills of Ron-Dak (the Adirondacks) where they are beingpressed hard by the tribesmen, who have surrounded them."
* * * * *
For an instant San-Lan sat as though paralyzed. Then he leaped to hisfeet, facing the viewplate.
"Let me see you!" he snarled. Instantly the mountain view disappearedand the Intelligence Officer appeared again, this time looking a littlefrightened.
"Where is Lui-Lok?" he shouted. "Cut him in on my north plate. Thecommander 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 therockets of the tribesmen began to penetrate the ray-wall. Lip-Hung is incommand of the survivors. We have just had a message from him. We couldnot understand all of it. Reception was very weak because he isoperating with emergency apparatus on Bah-Flo power. The Nu-Yok powerbroadcast plant has been blown up. Lip-Hung begs for a rescue fleet."
San-Lan, his expression momentarily becoming more vicious, now wasstriding 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? Of10,000 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 useto us now! Get out! Vanish! No, wait! Have any of the beasts' rocketspenetrated the ray-walls of other cities?"
"No, Heaven-Born, no. It is only at Nu-Yok that the tribesmen usedrockets sheathed in the same mysterious substance they use on theirlittle aircraft and which cannot be disintegrated by the ray." (He meantinertron, 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 theroom were of glass.
More slowly he paced back and forth. He was the caged tiger now, hisface seamed with hate and the desperation of foreshadowed doom.
"Driven out into the hills," he muttered to himself. "Not more than10,000 of them left. Hunted like beasts--and by the very beasts weourselves have hunted for centuries. Cursed be our ancestors for lettinga single one of the spawn live!" He shook his clenched hands above hishead. 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 thatpossessed 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 fivecenturies command of the air has meant victory. But this is so nolonger. For more than three centuries your great, gleaming cities havebeen impregnable in all their arrogant visibility. But that day is donealso. Victory returns once more to the ground, to men invisible in thevast expanse of the forest which covers the ruins of the civilizationdestroyed 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 havesouls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished thespark of manhood, of honor, of independence. While the Hans havedegenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they haveunwittingly bred a race of super-men out of those they sought to makeanimals. You have bred your own destruction. Your cities shall beblasted from their foundations. Your air fleets shall be broughtcrashing to earth. You have your choice of dying in the wreckage, or offleeing to the forests, there to be hunted down and killed as you havesought to destroy us!"
And the ruler of all the Hans shrank back from my outstretched finger asthough it had been in truth the finger of doom.
But only for a moment. Suddenly he snarled and crouched as though tospring at me with his bare hands. By a mighty convulsion of the will heregained control of himself, however, and assumed a manner of quietdignity. He even smiled--a slow, crooked smile.
"No," he said, answering his own thought. "I will not have you killednow. You shall live on, my honored guest, to see with your own eyes howwe shall exterminate your animal-brethren in their forests. With yourown ears you shall hear their dying shrieks. The cold science of Han issuperior to your spurious knowledge. We have been careless. To our costwe have let you develop brains of a sort. But we are still superior. Weshall go down into the forests and meet you. We shall beat you in yourown element. When you have seen and heard this happen, my Council shalldevise for you a death by scientific torture, such as no man in thehistory of the world has been honored with."
* * * * *
I must digress here a bit from my own personal adventures to explainbriefly how the fall of Nu-Yok came about, as I learned it afterward.
Upon my capture by the Hans, my wife, Wilma, courageously had assumedcommand of my Gang, the Wyomings.
Boss Handan, of the Winslows, who was directing the American forcesinvesting Nu-Yok, contented himself for several weeks with maintainingour lines, while waiting for the completion of the first supply ofinertron-jacketed rockets. At last they arrived with a limited quantityof very high-powered atomic shells, a trifle over a hundred of them tobe exact. But this number, it was estimated, would be enough to reducethe city to ruins. The rockets were distributed, and the day for thefinal bombardment was set.
The Hans, however, upset Handan's plans by launching a ground expeditionup the west bank of the Hudson. Under cover of an air raid to thesouthwest, in which the bulk of their ships took part, this groundexpedition 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 soconcentrated as to form a virtual curtain of destruction. It seared ascar 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 onthe
m. Most of the rockets were disintegrated, for Handan would notpermit the use of the inertron rockets against the ships. But now andthen one found its way through the playing beams, hit a repeller ray andwas hurled up against a Han ship, bringing it crashing down.
The orders that Handan barked into his ultrophone were, of course, heardby every long-gunner in the ring of American forces around the city, andnearly all of them turned their fire on the Han airfleet, with theexception of those equipped with the inertron rockets.
These latter held to the original target and promptly cut loose on thecity with a shower of destruction which the disintegrator-ray wallscould not stop. The results produced awe even in our own ranks.
* * * * *
Where an instant before had stood the high-flung masses and towers ofNu-Yok, gleaming red, blue and gold in the brilliant sunlight, andshimmering through the iridescence of the ray "wall," there was aseething turmoil of gigantic explosions.
Surging billows of debris were hurled skyward on gigantic pulsations ofblinding light, to the detonations that shook men from their feet inmany sections of the American line seven and eight miles away.
As I have said, there were only some hundred of the inertron rocketsamong the Americans, long and slender, to fit the ordinary guns, but theatomic laboratories hidden beneath the forests, had outdone themselvesin their construction. Their release of atomic force was nearly 100 percent, and each one of them was equal to many hundred tons oftrinitrotoluol, which I had known in the First World War, five hundredyears before, as "T.N.T."
It was all over in a few seconds. Nu-Yok had ceased to exist, and thewaters of the bay and the rivers were pouring into the vast hole where amoment before had been the rocky strata beneath lower Manhattan.
Naturally, with the destruction of the city's power-broadcasting plantthe Han air fleet had plunged to earth.
But the ships of the ground expedition up the river, hugging the treetops closely, had run the gauntlet of the American long-gunners who werebusily shooting at the other Han fleet, high in the air to thesouthwest, and about half of them had landed before their ships wererobbed of their power. The other half crashed, taking some 10,000 or12,000 Han troops to destruction with them. But from those which hadlanded safely, emerged the 10,000 who now were the sole survivors ofthe city, and who took refuge in wooded fastnesses of the Adirondacks.
* * * * *
The Americans with their immensely greater mobility, due to theirjumping belts and their familiarity with the forest, had them ringed inwithin twenty-four hours.
But owing to the speed of the maneuvers, the lines were not as tightlydrawn as they might have been, and there was considerable scattering ofboth American and Han units. The Hans could make only the weakestshort-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 onlysparingly for fear of hitting one another.
So the battle was finished in a series of desperate hand-to-handencounters 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 thecraggy slopes above the Hans, and driving them down into the ravines,where they could safely concentrate on them the fire of depressed rocketguns.
The Susquannas, with their great inertron shields, which served themwell against the weak rays of the Hans, pressed forward irresistiblyevery time they made a contact with a Han unit, their short-range rocketguns sending a hail of explosive destruction before them.
But the Delawares, with their smaller shields, inertron leg-guards andhelmets, and their ax-guns, made faster work of it. They would rush theHans, shooting from their shields as they closed in, and finish thebusiness with their ax-blades and the small rocket guns that formed thehandles of their axes.
It was my own unit of Wyomings, equipped with bayonet guns not unlikethe rifles of the First World War, that took the most terrible toll fromthe Hans.
They advanced at the double, laying a continuous barrage before them asthey ran, closing with the enemy in great leaps, cutting, thrusting andslicing with those terrible double-ended weapons in a vicious efficiencyagainst which the Hans with their swords, knives and spears were utterlyhelpless.
And so my prediction that the war would develop hand-to-hand fightingwas verified at the outset.
None of the details of this battle of the Ron-Daks were ever known inLo-Tan. Not more than the barest outlines of the destruction of thesurvivors of Nu-Yok were ever received by San-Lan and his Council. Andof course, at that time I knew no more about it than they did.