demonstration of the Empress's displeasure with you?"
Merwin stared at her. "Are you serious? They have slower-than-light ramscoops, enough to keep Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti under their banner. The Empire isn't precisely the same as the Realm, don't you know that?" The Realm of Her Serene Majesty, Empress Susan XVI, extended along part of the galaxy's Sagittarius arm, with Old Earth near the center of the strand.
"Are you lecturing me, Duke Merwin? I thought you eschewed politics."
"Don't call me that."
"The Empress purports to rule the Realm as well as the Empire, doesn't she?"
Merwin remained silent.
"A ramscoop starship that left Old Earth the day you first displeased her might only now be arriving, isn't that so?"
Again, Merwin stared at her. "No, it's not so! It's over four-hundred light-years away, for God's sake."
Ms. Noori sniffed. "I hardly think you're an expert. Our online polls indicate sixty-two percent of the population considers it a likely scenario—"
"Then sixty-two percent of the population are idiots."
"You heard him, ladies and gentlemen! Right from his mouth."
"You don't mean this conversation is being broadcast?" Merwin hoped the sudden horror he felt didn't show on his face.
"Certainly I mean it. Besides, the Free Fleet was formerly the Imperial Fleet, prior to their emancipation. Do we know for a fact the Empress doesn't have some form of ultradrive? Perhaps a slower version?"
"Nick! Cut the connection! Cut it!"
Nick did so. He folded up his terminal pad and put it in his pocket. "Well, at least she didn't drag Barbraluna into it."
— — —
Author's Afterword
Back to Table of Contents
Why release a free ebook?
To be blunt, I'm hoping to scare up some business. But you figured as much, didn't you?
I think Saviors of the Galaxy: In the Beginning can be read and (hopefully) enjoyed on its own merits, but it's actually a somewhat condensed version of the first section of a novel that I'll be releasing just as soon as I can get around to finishing it. In the meantime, I hope that some of you will enjoy some of these other things I've written at various points in time.
The Saviors novelette you just read (unless you skipped to the back of this book) is also available in a collection entitled Incident on Sugar Sand Road and other stories, which is now available at various online retailers for the paltry sum of $2.99. It contains five original tales (including "Panic Button" and "Holy Warfare"), and personally I think it's a bargain.
Anyway, thanks for downloading this book, and I hope that some of you will go on to purchase the collection itself.
It's a compendium of stuff I'm proud of. The advent of indie publishing has made it possible for a writer to publish everything he's every written, if he chooses, but I'm not going to do that. I've left quite a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor, so to speak, and everything I publish from here on out will be new—but I do feel good about these particular stories. They're the ones that still work for me, the cream of the crop.
This is all what you might call seat-of-the-pants marketing. My little roadside pop stand has been open for business almost two yearss now, but so far business has been pretty dang slow, and customers have been scarce.
There are people I really respect in this emerging field of Indie Publishing who are on record as saying that the whole process just takes time. Your readers will find you eventually, they say. Even if you're not to everybody's taste, if your work has any sort of appeal at all there will be readers who are looking for just the kind of thing you write. You only have to be patient.
That's good advice, no doubt, but a writer could starve to death waiting for his readers to find him. As we all know, sometimes they don't even find him until after he's dead—excuse me for bringing that up, but it's true. I'm a big Rex Stout fan, but he never made a penny off me because I didn't encounter his books until after he'd left us, although he and I were both around during the latter middle part of the last century. I would have loved his books even as a child, and as an adult I'd have happily bought his new books in hardcover just as soon as they came out, that's how good his stuff is.
I'm not putting myself in his league, but this is still my way of looking for some readers before I croak. Hopefully we'll find each other before that happens.
I'm not getting any younger, people.
Some of you, no doubt, will think I'm delusional to believe that anyone would actually like my stuff, and some of you will probably even be kind enough to write and tell me so.
Fair enough. You're entitled to your opinion.
And I'm entitled to mine. Which is that these are actually some pretty good stories, and that there are at least a few people out there who are going to like them.
Time will tell, I suppose.
— — —
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