The High-Tech Knight

Interlude Four

I hit the STOP button again.

"I don't believe that shooting, and I'm too much of an agnostic to believe that you have a truly documented miracle here. Your fingerprints are all over this, Tom! What gives?"

"Well, of course I did it. I couldn't trust Conrad's life to one medieval bowman, no matter how good he was. You don't think I could let those German bastards murder my own cousin, do you?"

"For a long time, I've had a section of engineers working on advanced weaponry, just in case we ever needed such a thing. We've never had to use it, which is good, but rather frustrating for the engineers. They were delighted when I gave them this assignment."

"The golden arrows were the easy part. Just some thrusters on the arrowheads and some microelectronics to guide them, then a temporal circuit to get rid of the high-tech stuff afterward."

"Getting rid of Tadaos's arrows was the hard part. They had to do some weather-control work to get the low cloud-ceiling to hide our ship, then detect and take out some small, uncooperative targets. After that, well, would you believe thirty-caliber cruise missiles?"

"I thought that you were so sure that Conrad would be alive eight years later," I said.

"There are so many unknowns floating around this mess that I just couldn't take the chance. Maybe he could be both killed and stay alive. Is that any stranger than both saving and abandoning that child?"

"So you faked a miracle. It's hard to believe that even from you!"

"Look, kid. One man's miracle is another man's technology."

He hit the START button.