Starship: First Steps to Empire

by R J Murray

  “Playing.”

  “Greetings. I am the Astangii, the ship with which you are sharing an orbit. I bring you greetings from the Gastal, the guiding council of the home world. You are the second intelligent race capable of FTL we have contacted. From the data I have located in your mainframe, you seem much as we are, and seem to have friendly intentions.”

  “And, what did you discover this time?” Martha asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

  Eric looked at Martha. “They found other intelligent races out here, more industrially primitive races still bound to their planet or solar system. But they found one other race with FTL capability. Asi said that we are the second race with FTL they have contacted. It wasn’t the Catroph or the Beaks, they evolved on the same planet. Who was the first? Where is the first?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  R J Murray was born on a small farm in central Kentucky in the early fifties. Growing up in the country gave him a love of nature and a dislike of shoveling manure, as well as the certain knowledge that goats were smarter than dogs and cows were dumber than rocks.

  After moving to Florida with his family, he returned to Kentucky each summer with his siblings and first heard about organic gardening as a teenager. Manure finally had a purpose. Winters were spent attending school on Florida's east coast and he returned to Kentucky after graduating from High School in 1969, where he got a job flipping burgers while he attended the local branch of the University of Kentucky. His free time was spent reading Science Fiction from the Golden Age, hunting, fishing and gardening. Hobbies have included history, spelunking, geology, as well as many different home crafts such as cross stitch, leather work, making his own suit of mail armor and baking.

  He worked in construction and manufacturing for thirty years. At age fifty-nine, he accepted a writing challenge from his wife. (With your wild imagination, it should be easy for you.)

  He wrote his first novel in fifty-eight days, changed the title many times, and ended up with a manuscript of two thousand pages, which eventually became the first books in the Fantasy series, Tales of the Triad.

  Since that time, he has retired from his day job and now writes full time. He shares the house with his wife, her cat and his computer.