Chapter One:

“No, no, no, no, no!” Professor Maglen informed his protégé, a young woman named Maree. He saw the lines around her pretty, brown eyes tighten at his admonition. Maree was, if anything, one of his brighter students, however here, alone in the classroom in the dark hours of the setting of the second sun, when all of her peers had gone home, she struggled with a new paradigm.

Her frown was heart-breaking. She ran long fingers through her luxurious, brown hair. She dressed in a scholarly uniform – a yellow skirt and white blouse. Her long, olive legs spoke of the body that her voluminous clothing concealed. She stared at the lesson board before them as if, by staring at it, she could absorb the math.

“Energy is the equivalent of mass, multiplied by the speed of light, to the second power,” she repeated. Good, Maglen thought. Start with what you know. Reaffirm from the stable base.

He stepped back from her, his Professorial black robe billowing around him. Six times her age, his scalp was spotted brown, his jowls hung like a mastiff’s. His grey eyes held the sympathy that his rigid posture belied.

“Yes…” he allowed her.

“But not really,” she continued. “Mass, then, would be equal to energy divided by the speed of light, squared – if you add more energy to a thing, it doesn’t get bigger.”

Maglen held his breath. This was where his students always faltered.

He’d been at this for more than 100 years – teaching advanced physics students at the Academy. He’d taught some of the best, some of the brightest. His students had solved the problems of controlled fusion, of tapping into the motion of the planet to produce energy and, later, to realize that such a drag on the planet was, in fact, against their greater interest.

He’d lost his hair decades ago – his bald pallet he blamed on his students. He’d compensated with facial hair for a while, but with an old man’s belly, it made him look like a doting grandfather, and such a look decried the authoritarian teacher which he needed to be.

“It’s inertial mass that increases,” she continued, her brown eyes turning to his for approval. The girl was barely 20, but beautiful – so attractive that she fought the males to be taken seriously. Her fight, her unwillingness to cede to handsome young men who’d listen to her prattle on about anything, just for a chance at a kiss (or more), is what had brought her to his attention.

“Continue,” he told her.

“So an object in space,” she said, “increasing in speed, increasing in energy, must increase in inertial mass.”

She ran to the board, picked up a stylus and started the calculations that he’d been waiting for. This was the moment that made years of teaching fade, the excitement of knowledge, passed one to the other. He almost choked back tears as she got it.

“And as we approach the speed of light?” he asked her.

Maree frowned at her own calculations, then turned to him from the board, her long, brown hair flying over her shoulder. The light from one of the setting suns, blazing through the window, outlined her figure through the blousy, white shirt she wore.

“The energy requirement becomes infinite,” she said. “You couldn’t feed whatever engine you used enough to maintain forward motion – to overcome inertial mass. The object stops itself.”

He nodded. His stomach growled. This leap had taken hours, but it was worth it.

“Travel at the speed of light cannot be achieved in the physical plane,” she decided, looking back at the board. She laid down her stylus.

Maglen sighed. “Well done,” he began to say.

Holding her chin in her delicate hand, she interrupted him first.

“But,” she added, “what if you could?”

In another part of the Academy, a young man named Viniker bent over a work table, over a cone that he’d been working on for almost an entire day. If you’d have asked him, he would have told you that he’d only just begun, but that was Viniker in a nut shell – entirely distracted by his work.

Unlike Maree, Maglen had abandoned Viniker more than a year ago. ‘That mind,’ the professor would say, ‘is beyond hope.’ While Maree pondered the dark edge of a limit in physics, Viniker pushed past one with his electro-magnetic cone.

“For every action,” he’d been taught, “there was an equal and opposite reaction.” The first time he’d heard that, it had sent his mind racing.

If there is gravity, then, there must be anti-gravity. There was no debate about it, in his mind, it simply had to be.

Not what he’d been taught. Gravity was the proximity to a spinning mass, like Syriahs, their home world. It was Syriahs spinning around Sol, it’s sun. It was a measure of centripetal force, opposed by centrifugal force – in balance, inevitable.

However centrifugal force was a manufacture of physics, and debatably not real. Gravity, on the other hand, was entirely real, as dozens of people falling out of trees and windows attested to every day. If they fell and hit the ground, then the planet would deliver to them as much force as they delivered to the ground they hit – however if that were true, why did they not rocket out into space?

A tiny fraction of the planet’s mass, applied to a single being – no, they were missing something in the picture and, it seemed to Viniker, that no one else saw it.

Or they thought they had explained it away.

The young man, taller than the rest of his peers, had met their derision with blue-eyed certainty that he, not they, had the right idea on this. Years of dedication, late nights, missed meals and focus had left him pencil-thin, his blonde hair usually either long around his shoulders or, as it was now, buzzed down almost to his scalp – a distraction simply to be removed by a man who had no time to care how he looked.

Viniker realigned the cone and pushed it into the harness that he’d made – mainly just leather straps from a few old belts he’d had to sacrifice. No one supported this research that he did, and essentially everything he used he had to purchase himself, or beg for from one of the other students whose projects were approved of by the Academy leaders.

He connected two lead wires to the electro-magnetic engine he’d developed, and he picked up a steel ball from a container that he’d “found” next to an uncompleted generator. If his latest theory was correct, then the ball bearing was the key – the force of gravity simply didn’t exist where there were not two objects in motion. Just as sound requires the emission and the receipt of intelligence, gravity didn’t exist unless there was an actor, and then something to be acted upon.

He clicked on the DC power supply to the EM generator. The cone trembled from the wave passing through it, but so imperceptibly that, had he not run this experiment more than one hundred times, he wouldn’t have noticed it.

Viniker took the small ball bearing, placed it against the side of the cone, held his breath and began pushing it along the side, parallel to the ground.

In a moment, the ball left his hand, spinning on its own around what Viniker hoped was becoming an artificial gravity well on his work bench.

The ball bearing moved slowly around the first time, much more quickly the second, and faster than he could see on the third.

As the well formed, precisely the opposite of the polarity of the planet beneath them, the mass of said planet applied itself to the tiny cone, the tiny engine and the relatively, imperceptibly small ball bearing.

Faster than the speed of sound, the cone rocketed up from the table and through the ceiling above them, dragging its wires free of the DC power supply but taking the ball bearing with it. As a smashed mass it terrified a janitor cleaning a now-permeated floor above the startled scholar, flew through the building’s roof and continued up through the atmosphere, where it floated for a moment, red-hot from air-friction, its momentum halted by that resistance, and then crashed back into an ocean on the other side of the planet.

Shaking his head from the tiny, sonic boom that had occurred, covered in dust and metal shards, Viniker stared up into the vacant eyes of the janitor staring down at him through the recently-created hole in one’s ceiling and the other’s floor. His cheek hurt for some reason, but he didn’t know why and he didn’t have the time to find out.

He was quoted as saying, “Huh.”

A day later, as the second sun set and the first rose, Professor Maglen, scholar Viniker and Master Assessor Almott Shrew stood on the purged, flat roof of the Academy’s Physical Science building.

“Huh,” Maglen said. He had no idea that he was repeating his abandoned student.

Shrew – a middle-aged man of family and reputation – stood between the two, as close to the purge in the roof as he dared. He looked with brown eyes to the sky, as if he expected the return of Viniker’s ‘anti-grav cone.’ He ran pudgy fingers through lank, brown hair on his head, the heat of the day already starting.

He sighed, and looked to the Academe’s.

“So – this works?” he asked.

Viniker nodded, Maglen was less enthusiastic. Hard to tell the student you’d abandoned how wrong he still was, though, when proof of his success had left a hole in a roof, and was later tracked by one orbiting satellite after another until it committed itself to a watery grave.

Already, there was a ship looking for it.

“And you can recreate it?” Shrew pressed them.

Viniker’s eyes brightened. The professors’ narrowed. Before the student could respond, the teacher inserted, “Once it’s been studied, I think, yes.”

The value of this discovery went beyond calculating, and the student had created it on what could be described as pocket change. He’d supposedly thought that he could contain the cone with, of all things, an old belt, which had snapped and left a welt on the young man’s cheek that he’d probably still failed to notice.

The Academy, for all that it gave back to the world, needed wealth to survive, and took it where it could. Fifty years ago they’d thought they’d never have to worry again, when fusion power was harnessed and the world looked at a safe, clean source of energy for all time.

Twenty years later, power from the rotation of the planet seemed to make that technology irrelevant, right when engineers were preparing to put the first fusion plant online. Who wanted the risk of fusion when this passive energy was available? The loss in wealth that the Academy suffered would be more than made up for here.

Five years later, as a string of ‘power towers’ were being put in place, another gifted student proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, while the ‘load’ on the planet’s rotation would be miniscule, it was real – and with free energy, that load would dramatically increase as it was exploited without consideration. Eventually, it would halt the rotation of the planet and, well before then, that rotation would be slowed enough to affect the atmosphere, agriculture and the well-being of the people living here.

And so, another loss and a return to fusion, but now to a skeptical public. This, however, bore no skepticism. This was in-the-face progress and immediately exploitable.

Heart-breakingly, much as it had destroyed a roof in the Physical Sciences building, this was not, in fact, an experiment under the auspices (and subject to the exploitation) of the Academy. Just the opposite, Professors like Maglen were on record discouraging young Viniker and banning this work.

The Academy could prosecute Viniker for trespass and sue him for damages, however the profits of the experiment were beyond their reach, unless the young man could be convinced to pursue that work here, with their resources. In his fourth decade in his position, Almott Shrew had never stood on shakier ground – and by that he didn’t mean the inherent unsafety of a roof with a hole punched in it.

He turned to the Academes – the old, bald fat-man with brown eyes darting between the hole and the student, and the student himself, eager beyond measure, red-eyed from lack of sleep and string-skinny from denying himself – and put his hands behind him.

“Find out quick,” he ordered them. “I want to see something more reasonable than this, and soon.

“If I do,” he added, turning, “then I can’t imagine why young Viniker couldn’t receive his black robes, and be allowed to further his research here.”

He turned and left them on the roof, already shifting budgets in his mind to cover the repairs to the building, the new lab that this experiment would require, and the cost of seating for the grand display of this ‘EM Cone,’ as he’d already named it.

At the Academy’s outdoor colosseum, scholars from across the planet collected to see what had been whispered about in dark corners for the month before.

Among them was Maree, sitting alone, her favorite professor having become too busy for her, the entire Academy seemingly focused on one bean-pole of a man who, up to now, had been on the verge of expulsion.

Overweight Professors in various dress of black surrounded her in seats too large for her and too small for them. One finally crowded past her and plunked himself down to her left. As males often would, he turned to her to engage her.

His brown eyes quickly found her breasts. For this reason she usually buttoned up her blouse to the collar, rather than part way, as most women would. Her looks – she’d cursed them her whole life. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate her natural beauty, she just wished it wasn’t the first and often the only thing that her male counter-parts noticed about her.

She smiled to herself as she heard and forgot the name of the scholar introducing himself to her. When she traveled through space, faster than light, let them stare then!

“Maree,” she identified herself. The older male took her hand in his, cold and rough like old paper. He smelled of a younger man’s deodorant and loose chalk. She nodded and pulled a pad and stylus from her pack at her feet, probably giving the other a display of her cleavage, but at the same time putting up an unspoken border between them.

“What is your subject?” he asked, meaning what discipline she was focusing on.

“Physics,” she answered. “Astronomical applications.”

The other nodded. “Fighting the dust,” he said, with a smile.

She regarded him. His paunch rested on his lap. He’d brought no pad to take notes on – typical of senior professors. He wore a black robe and, unlike Maglen, he retained a full head of hair, all of it white.

“Pardon,” she asked.

“High speed travel through space,” the professor asserted. “Even if you reconcile yourself to the radiation and the time in space, what are you going to do about the dust that exists all through the galaxy?”

She hadn’t heard of this. “What about it?” she asked. “It’s – it’s dust.”

The professor smiled and looked at her chest again. “My dear,” he said. “That dust will, over time, tear your ship apart before you could get anywhere. The faster you go, the greater the damage and the harder it is to avoid.”

Tiny impacts of debris in space, the residue of asteroids and comets – she’d never in her life considered it. Why should she? If you can’t go faster than light, you’d never live long enough to get wherever you wanted to go.

The lights dimmed. All eyes turned forward, to a stage with Maglen and the student she knew as Viniker standing on either side of a cone with wires connected to the top of it. There were other, similar cones behind them, and a few, first-year students in white and yellow standing by them.

Maglen began the greeting to the crowd. It was always the same and she tuned it out, looking at Viniker. Stick-thin and fidgeting, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. She’d never spoken to the ‘ghost of the Academy,’ as his peers called him, for his pale skin and, of course, his apparent failure to do anything but haunt the labs. At least, she thought, someone had taken the time to cut his blonde hair.

He wasn’t an ugly man. A little meat on his bones might make him attractive. Supposedly he’d shot one of these ‘cones’ through two ceilings and into the upper atmosphere, and landed it on the other side of the world. If he’d actually accomplished that, then this could further her own studies, which was why she was here.

“First,” Maglen said, stepping back and standing almost next to the younger man, “This is Viniker, who has been here longer than most scholars. Now we know why!”

There was a chuckle that she joined in.

“Viniker has, in all of the time I’ve known him,” Maglen continued, “focused on one thing and one thing only – what is the opposite of ‘gravity’?”

Maree frowned. There is no ‘opposite’ to gravity – gravity is a universal force.

Even then, however, she wondered, “But what force doesn’t have a counter-force?”

Maglen continued. “He’s studied this for years and, I must admit, with little encouragement from the rest of us. Like most of our best scholars here at the Academy, he had something to teach us, would we but learn it.

“Without further explanation, I turn the demonstration over to him.”

Maglen stepped back, Viniker stepped forward, his blue eyes twinkling. He black robes swirled around his feet as he moved – very new and crisp. The rumor was that, once his work had been proven, the robes had been all but shoved onto him, in order to secure his project as the property of the Academy.

“For every action,” he said, “there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Yes, Maree thought. I agree with that.

“So, I wondered,” he continued, “what is the opposite of gravity. Please – do not let this alarm you.”

He stepped up the first cone, and he connected a DC battery to a box sitting on top of it. He then picked up a ball bearing, showed it to the crowd between his thumb and forefinger, and then placed it against the side of the cone.

He moved it along the side of the cone, let go, and it slid down the cone and bounced across the stage.

Viniker was clearly mortified. Maglen stepped up, checked the wire connections and spoke a few words to Viniker while the crowd murmured.

Finally, the professor disconnected the two wires, touched them together and frowned at Viniker. The latter smiled and took another battery from one of the other cones. The two disconnected the one battery, assigned them to the other one, sparked the leads and then reconnected the small box.

Viniker took another ball bearing, placed it to the side of the cone, and sent it spinning along the cone’s surface.

It travelled lazily around the first time, then faster the second. On the third, the whole thing began to tremble.

Without warning, the cone leapt into the air, flipping over the battery and tearing the wires off of its leads. A small, sonic boom rocked the outdoor colosseum as the cone and its little box rocketed toward the stratosphere.

Maree could barely hear Viniker as he said, “That cone will end up on the other side of the planet. Why?”

No one responded. What they’d seen was simply too shocking.

“How do you harness that?” Maree was wondering. “You’ve got an amazing tool to put a mission anywhere you need them, but in the process, you crush them from the sudden acceleration.”

“What you’ve just seen,” Viniker continued, “is the equal and opposite reaction to the planet’s gravity. Because the planet is vast, and the cone is small, that reaction heavily favored Syriahs. It won’t be until the atmospheric drag on the cone is completely dissipated that it will stop.

“And a problem lies in the determinant, ‘Equal and opposite’,” he continued, “because we’ve just used a small battery and gotten quite a hefty result. This required some experimentation.”

He picked up another of the cones, attached it to a battery, and pointed its wide end into the air.

The professor handed him another ball bearing, and once again he sent it spinning around the cone. This time, however, it didn’t pick up speed.

He began to angle the cone downward. Maree could hear the ball bearing scraping the side of the metal cone, even where she sat. Once the cone broke the horizon, it looked like it started to pull against Viniker’s hands, and the ball bearing started going faster.

He tilted it back, and the ball bearing slowed.

Maree was already designing a four-cone speed control in her mind.

The professor disconnected the DC power supply, and the ball bearing dropped to the stage. Two scholars pushed a board up behind the two, and Viniker immediately began writing equations. The professor sitting next to Maree scrambled for something to write on.

Her mind was already racing, though. As Viniker and Maglen stole the stylus from each other and explained what most of the people here probably had already guessed at, her mind was already overcoming a problem that she didn’t know she had an hour before.

Fight the dust, indeed!