"Leo Frankowski - Stargard 4 - The Flying Warlord" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

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 The Flying Warlord

"But that's impossible! You know that's impossible! The circuitry for the stasis field is always built inside the field itself Time doesn't
exist inside the field, so how could the circuitry possibly have had time to fail?"

"Yeah, I know. But I still say that something is screwed up somewhere. The trip here takes six years subjective, and he had maybe two
hours of air in the can. But that's not the big question. The biggie is whether or not you want to take the trip back. Me, I wouldn't risk it. "

"Well, this chamber that I'm in hasn't failed. Why should it fail just because the other one did?"

"You know better than that, bitch. You're in the same damn chamber he's in. Right after sending you back, I got to send the empty
chamber back to yesterday. It makes for a quicker turnaround that way. But I ran a self-check on it last night and it checked out perfect.
So make up your mind. You're costing the owner a million bucks a second."

"Screw the owner," she said, squirming out of the chamber. "I'm not going anywhere till I see a live body crawl out of this thing!"

"Then help me get this dead one into your chamber. We gotta let the people uptime know what the problem is and we don't have much
time to do it. Getting the body should be explanation enough!"

"Why not just ship him in the one he came in?"

He got the surprisingly light corpse into the other canister. "Lady, your big problem is that you're dumb."

He sent the canister back uptime and waited for a reply.

He waited for a long, long time.



Chapter One
FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI

My people was always boatmen on the Vistula. My father was a boatman and his father before him, and my great-grandfather was one,
too. I still would be, except I lost my boat a few years back. I would have lost my life with it, if it hadn't been for Baron Conrad Stargard.

I was maybe the first man to meet him in Poland, next to the priest, Abbot Ignacy at the Franciscan Monastery in Cracow. I was stuck
on the rocks on the upper Dunajec with no one but a worthless little Goliard poet to help get me off. It was the poet's fault that we were
hung up in the first place, since the twit rowed to port when I yelled starboard, but that's all water down the river. It was late in the
season, and the weather was cold. Another day, and the river would be froze over and I'd lose my boat and cargo, all I owned, and
maybe my life, too.

Then along comes this priest and with him was Sir Conrad. He was a giant of a man, a head and a half taller than I am, and I'm no
shorty. He was pretty smart, and after I'd hired them two, we got the boat free in jig time with a line bent around a rock upriver,
following Sir Conrad's directions. Never saw the like of it.

He told me he was an Englishman, but I never believed it. He didn't talk like no Englishman and he'd never seen an English longbow!

Now me, I'm a master of the English longbow. There's no one no where who can shoot farther or straighter or better than me, and that's