Easy to Be a God, page 1
RICH SPACE OPERA IN A COLORFUL, MIND-BOGGLING UNIVERSE.
In the twenty-fourth century, Humankind has made a great leap forward, colonizing over a thousand planets and exploring thousands more.
It also survived a bloody civil war.
Now, people must struggle with revolutionary changes. In the Xan 4 System, both scientists and Federation soldiers, including Sergeant Henryan Darski, who is temporarily on parole, secretly observe two alien races from an orbital station. The sergeant is supposed to identify a group of people who—against procedures—are trying to save one of the races. At stake is not only the survival of the Warriors of the Bone, but also Henryan’s life.
Meanwhile, in the distant New Rouen System, the Nomad, a ship from the Recycling Corps, finds a mysterious, millennia-old shipwreck while clearing the fields of long-forgotten space battles. The derelict’s advanced technology is impressive …
… but the being found onboard could shake the very foundation of human civilization …
PRAISE FOR ROBERT J. SZMIDT
“With the right tech, it’s easy to be a god. But as Robert J. Szmidt points out in this impressive novel, to be a god for the right reasons, sometimes you have to spend a few years in Hell, first.”
—David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington series.
“An exciting beginning to an epic saga of space exploration. Morrisey and his crew of daring, corrupt rogues will hold you breathless as they loot the wrecks of spaceships—until they find the one that could change everything in the galaxy.”
—Nancy Kress, author of Beggars in Spain
“A fast-paced tale of a piratical salvage crew who find more than they expected when they discover an ancient Alien artifact. An engaging story.”
—Jack Campbell, author of The Lost Fleet series.
“The Fields of Long-Forgotten Battles series by Robert J. Szmidt shows a truly remarkable imagination, and is told with charm and originality. I highly recommend it.”
—Mike Resnick
“Robert J. Szmidt writes on a vast canvas. His stories are ambitious space opera that will capture your imagination.”
—Kevin J. Anderson
EASY TO BE A GOD
THE FIELDS OF LONG-FORGOTTEN BATTLES, BOOK 1
ROBERT J. SZMIDT
Easy to Be a God
Copyright © 2014 Robert J. Szmidt
Originally published by REBIS Publishing House 2014
Royal Hawaiian Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
WordFire Press has chosen to reissue selected out-of-print novels, in hopes of creating a new readership. Because these works were written in a different time, some attitudes and phrasing may seem outdated to a modern audience. After careful consideration, rather than revising the author’s work, we have chosen to preserve the original wording and intent.
* * *
EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-236-0
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-235-3
Dust Jacket Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-237-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951082
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Cover design by Janet McDonald
Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock
Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director
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Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers
WordFire Press eBook Edition 2022
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CONTENTS
I. The Nomad’s Mission
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
II. The Colony
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
III. The Station
Prologue
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
If You Liked …
Other WordFire Press Titles By Robert J. Szmidt
DEDICATION
With thanks to all the great SF masters
who have read Easy to Be a God
and supported me all along.
PART ONE
THE NOMAD’S MISSION
ONE
THE SOLAR SYSTEM, ALPHA SECTOR
06/22/2354
“Time to get up, my lord…” whispered Monicatherine, still sleepy, and stretched herself sensually between the rustling sheets.
“Not just yet, the sun’s barely rising,” said Nike very quietly, making himself heard, but not disturbing her blissful idleness.
He sat, or in fact reclined, in a shallow armchair draped with a tiger fur, eyes fixed on the narrow bay window. Sipping tangy wine from a crystal goblet, he watched the treetops being tossed by the strong wind and the gray-blue mountain range looming in the distance. Although the first rays of dawn had just lit up the horizon, it was bright enough to make out every detail of the landscape. Wispy clouds drifted lazily across the sky like wreaths of smoke from a dying campfire. Among them frolicked slender, winged silhouettes racing the wind. Too distinctive to be confused with birds. Too swift and lithe. Too glistening. An entire wing of fiery red dragons had left their nests to greet the day in the air.
“Why didn’t you awake me, master?”
The question came from behind his armchair so unexpectedly that he started involuntarily, dropping the goblet. Either Monicatherine had crept up so quietly, or he had been so wrapped in thought. The crystal vessel—fortunately already empty—fell directly onto the furs carpeting the stone floor. It didn’t smash, and only a few drops of scarlet liquid splashed on the long, snow-white hairs, however …
That’s not a good sign, Nike grimaced.
“What’s bothering you, darling?” The girl was crouching alongside now. She rested her head in the crook of his shoulder, letting him slide his fingertips over her long golden hair.
“You know very well what.” He leaned over to kiss her, but she stood up right at that moment.
She passed by him naked, still sleep-warm and dreamy, stood in front of the window obscuring the whole view, and then bent forward sensually, resting her elbows on the narrow windowsill.
“Dragons … look how many there are today, darling,” she said, knowing that his attention was not focused on the winged giants.
“I like dragons,” Nike responded, trying to sound unruffled. “They’re so dignified, but at the same time so carefree.”
Monicatherine smiled. A moment later, she knelt by the window and together they watched the distant, whirling glimmers. The pale red dawn continued to swell on the horizon.
“I’ll miss them,” Nike added. At the same time a sudden flash made him snap his eyelids shut. He kept his eyes closed tightly, but it did not help much; he still felt as if the naked sun had blazed straight into his pupils.
“It’s seven already,” he heard Monicatherine’s words. “Your last parade … You’re gonna be late.”
The blinding flash made him realize she had turned off the illusioner. The image of the stone wall with the narrow bay window vanished, and with it—the trees, mountains, sky, and the dragons dancing in the wind. The panoramic screen occupying half the cabin now showed the boundless blackness of space and the home world suspended in it. Precisely synchronized with the illusion, the Sun had emerged from behind the edge of the blue and white globe. The photochromic crystallite darkened instan
“I’ll make it.” He groaned, partly with pain and partly because it was their last shared illusion.
“It sounds as if you don’t want to go to the parade.” She walked over to him rolling her hips, but stopped beyond his reach. “Are you sure everything’s all right?”
“You’ve seen my grade book,” he answered evasively, still rubbing his eyes. “I’ve got the fourth best score in my year.”
“And I told you it’s enough, didn’t I? Trust me.”
“I do, darling.” He reached out to grab her waist, but only caught thin air and that unique—though somehow elusive—scent of warm skin.
Monicatherine stepped back nimbly and continued to look intently at him, as though to imprint his image in her memory; his elongated face, straight, proportional nose, high cheekbones lending him the alpha male look, deep-set brown eyes, and jet-black short hair only growing at the back of his head.
“You seem so downcast today,” she began as he was getting up from the armchair.
“C’mon. It’s not every day you graduate from the Academy.”
“Being inducted isn’t a sentence,” she retorted. “Nothing’s really going to change. With your grades you’re sure to stay within the Solar System. You might even get a post here in orbit.”
“Yes, nothing’s gonna change between us,” he assured her, knowing that his words were at least as false as the illusion they had been watching a short time before.
“Get going,” she said, throwing him a jumpsuit—the dress uniform for last-year cadets—the same one he had so meticulously folded the evening before. “There’s only fifteen minutes left till the first whistle, and I’d like to—”
She didn’t have to finish. He knew what she wanted. He also knew he would miss that the most.
“Attention!” Three equilateral formations of uniformed figures straightened up in a split second.
In this place everything appealed to the imagination: the semidarkness of the immense hangar, the streamlined contours of the fighters looming in the distance, the massive bulk of assault ships, and more than anything—the omnipresent cold, which reminded the participants in the ceremony that they were only separated from endless space by a layer of porous helon a few yards thick.
“And finally, Admiral-Rector Damiandreas Dreade-Ravenore,” the duty officer announced, then saluted the lecturers occupying seats in the honorary grandstand and left the rostrum, giving his place over to a well-built man.
Dredd, even though bald as a coot, wasn’t at all old. He may have notched up a hundred sixty years, of which a hundred and thirty-three years he had spent in active service, but he still looked like a young god thanks to almost eight decades of forced hibernation. He was as tall as a basketball player, had a square jaw, broad shoulders, the muscles of a bodybuilder, and limber but dignified movements. All the cadets envied the Admiral his fitness, but none of them would have confessed—even under torture—that during the six long years of training they had felt even a trace of affection toward him. Damiandreas Dreade-Ravenore was a supercilious, sadistic clone-of-a-bitch and liked nothing better than to give speeches. He loved to torment the cadets physically but also verbally. They had experienced both kinds of harassment many times—firsthand and first ear, so to speak—and long before had sworn that none of them would utter the slightest sound during his farewell speech.
“At ease, cadets!” he began customarily, holding up a thick sheaf of papers, which contained notes for his speech.
He then fell pointedly silent, counting on the murmur of despair he so relished. This time, though, the cadets stayed true to their word and disappointed Dredd. Those in the middle of the front row could see the Admiral’s eyelid twitching.
“I have no doubt that more than once you’ve asked yourselves why we trained you in such tough conditions,” he said in an angry tone, putting the script down on the rostrum. “Why you had to carry out the most complicated warning procedures with your eyes closed, when—”
Here he stopped and shifted his gaze over the regular formations, before picking up his speech with a repetition, a favorite rhetorical device of his that allowed him to lengthen his address.
“—why you had to carry out the most complicated warning procedures with your eyes closed, when for a hundred and eighteen years no vessel of the Federation Fleet has been involved in combat. We have no enemies today, I agree. The first and the last colonial war was an absolute and unequivocal success. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, there’s no denying it. Every family lost loved ones in that conflict. However, that immense blood sacrifice ensured our civilization a century of peaceful existence and unprecedented development. Never has peace been so enduring in the history of Humankind.
“We reached the stars barely three centuries ago. The beginnings were humble. The colonization of the Moon lasted forty-five years, following the first flights to the Silver Globe picked up again in the initial decades of the twenty-first century. Things went more swiftly with Mars, but we still needed thirty years in order for the domes of cities and industrial installations to spring up among the rust-colored sands. The beginning of the twenty-second century finally brought a breakthrough, a huge breakthrough. The invention of FTL drive—for the first time in history, fully efficient—allowed the human race to reach the stars.
“Events gathered pace. Thousands of space probes hurtled toward distant systems, extending the borders of the known Universe. The final frontier had been overcome; the final obstacle keeping us on Earth, the cradle of Humankind, had been surmounted. People had left the home world and in less than a hundred fifty years had colonized one thousand and fourteen planets in eight hundred and seventy-two star systems within a one thousand nine hundred light-year radius of Earth. They had also investigated a further eighteen thousand dead star systems, unsuitable for colonization. That’s a great deal, a really great deal for almost three centuries of expansion, and were it not for the period of civil war—” The Admiral made a short rhetorical pause again.
“That’s a great deal, a really great deal for almost three centuries of expansion, and had it not been for the civil war we might have added to that list hundreds—if not thousands—of other worlds. But what is our Federation in the grand scheme of things, since even ten times as many colonized planets would be a mere drop in the ocean of the Galaxy? Tens of billions of new stars still await exploration in the center of the Milky Way, not to mention those in its remaining spiral arms. We haven’t got the slightest idea how many habitable, Earthlike planets orbit them. Neither do we know how many civilizations as powerful as ours, or even mightier, may exist there.
“The fact that we have not yet discovered advanced forms of life in the one arm of the Milky Way we have so far explored, that we have not come across any signals or artifacts left by Aliens, doesn’t mean in any way that they do not exist. That they aren’t out there,” he nodded toward the bulkhead, “just beyond the frontiers of knowledge. And that they haven’t been observing us for a long time … That they won’t threaten us in the more distant or quite near future … The Universe is immense; some even say it’s infinite. We will not be safe, while even one system in the farthest corner of the Galaxy remains unexplored. And the end of the exploration will only be possible in thousands—and who knows if not tens of thousands—of years.”
