The Airlords of Han - Philip Francis Nowlan (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

showed that there were no less than 10,000 Hans in the force to our north, which evidently was equipped with a portable power broadcast, sufficient for communication purposes and the local operation of small scoutships, painted a green which made them difficult to distinguish against the mountain and forest backgrounds. These ships just skimmed the surface of the terrain, hardly ever outlining themselves against the sky. Moreover, the Han commanders wisely had refrained from massing their forces. They had developed over a very wide and deep front, in small units, well scattered, which were driving down the parallel valleys and canyons like spearheads. Their communications were working well too, for our scouts reported their advance as well restrained, and maintaining a perfect front as between valley and valley, with a secondary line of heavy batteries, moved by small airships from peak to peak, following along the ridges somewhat behind the valley forces.

Hallwell had determined to withdraw our southern wing, pivoting it back to face the outflanking Han force on that side, which had already worked its way well down in back of our line.

In the ultronophone council which we held at once, each Boss tuning in on Hallwell’s band, though remaining with his unit, Wilma and I pleaded for a vigorous attack rather than a defensive maneuver. Our suggestion was to divide the American forces into three divisions, with all the swoopers forming a special reserve, and to advance with a rush on the three Han forces behind a rolling barrage.

But the best we could do was to secure permission to make such an attack with our Wyomings, if we wished, to serve as a diversion while the lines were reforming. And two of the southern Gangs on the west flank, which were eager to get at the enemy, received the same permission.

The rest of the army fumed at the caution of the council, but it spoke well for their discipline that they did not take things in their own hands, for in the eyes of those forest men who had been hounded for centuries, the chance to spring at the throats of the Hans outweighed all other considerations.

So, as the council signed off, Wilma and I turned to the eager faces that surrounded us, and issued our orders.

In a moment the air was filled with leaping figures as the men and girls shot away over the tree tops and up the mountain sides in the deployment movement.

A group of our engineers threw themselves headlong toward a cave across the valley, where they had rigged out a powerful electrono plant operating from atomic energy. And a few moments later the little portable receiver, the Intelligence Boss used to pick up the enemy messages, began to emit such earsplitting squeals and howls that he shut it off. Our heterodyne or “radio-scrambling” broadcast had gone into operation, emitting impulses of constantly varying wavelength over the full broadcast range and heterodyning the Han communications into futility.

In a little while our scouts came leaping down the valley from the north, and our air balls now were hovering above the Han lines, operators at the control boards nearby painstakingly picking up the pictures of the Han squads struggling down the valleys with their comparatively clumsy weapons.

As fast as the air-ball scopes picked out these squads, their operators, each of whom was in ultronophone communication with a girl long-gunner at some spot in our line, would inform her of the location of the enemy unit, and the latter, after a bit of mathematical calculation, would send a rocket into the air which would come roaring down on, or very near that unit, and wipe it out.

But for all of that, the number of the Han squads were too much for us. And for every squad we destroyed, fifty advanced.

And though the lines were still several miles apart, in most places, and in some cases with mountain ridges intervening, the Han fire control began to sense the general location of our posts, and things became more serious as their rockets too began to hiss down and explode here and there in our lines, not infrequently killing or maiming one or more of our girls.

The men, our bayonet-gunners, had not as yet suffered, for they were well in advance of the girls, under strict orders to shoot no rockets nor in any way reveal their positions; so the Han rockets were going over their heads.

The Hans in the valleys now were shooting diagonal barrages up the slopes toward the ridges, where they suspected we would be most strongly posted, thus making a crossfire up the two sides of a ridge, while their heavy batteries, somewhat in the rear, shot straight along the tops of the ridges. But their valley forces were getting out of alignment a bit by now, owing to our heterodyne operations.

I ordered our swoopers, of which we had five, to sweep along above these ridges and destroy the Han batteries.

Up in the higher levels where they were located, the Hans had little cover. A few of their small rep-ray ships rose to meet our swoopers, but were battered down. One swooper they brought to earth with a disintegrator ray beam, by creating a vacuum beneath it, but they did it no serious damage, for its fall was a light one. Subsequently it did tremendous damage, cleaning off an entire ridge.

Another swooper ran into a catastrophe that had one chance in a million of occurring. It hit a heavy Han rocket nose to nose. Inertron sheathing and all, it was blown into powder.

But the others accomplished their jobs excellently. Small, two-man ships, streaking straight at the Hans at between 600 and 700 miles an hour, they could not be hit except by sheer amazing luck, and they showered their tiny but powerful bombs everywhere as they went.

At the same instant I ordered the girls to cease sharpshooting, and lay their barrages down in the valleys, with their long-guns set for maximum automatic advance, and to feed