Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories Fact and Science Fiction_ May 1962 and was first published in _Amazing Stories_ March 1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. A table of contents has been provided below: I. The Airlords Besieged II. The "Ground Ships" Threaten III. We "Sink" the "Ground Ships" IV. Han Electrono-Ray Science V. American Ultronic Science VI. An Unequal Duel VII. Captured! VIII. Hypnotic Torture IX. The Fall of Nu-Yok X. Life in Lo-Tan, the Magnificent XI. The Forest Men Attack XII. The Mysterious "Air Balls" XIII. Escape! XIV. The Destruction of Lo-Tan XV. The Counter-Attack XVI. Victory [Illustration: A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, March, 1929] _The AIRLORDS of HAN_ By PHILIP FRANCIS NOWLAN Illustrated by FRANK R. PAUL _Copyright, 1927, by E. P. Co., Inc._ 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.