Ian W Donald

Relativity's Enchantment Ian W Donald

Publisher Marketing: The year is 2048 and the world has gone through a tumultuous period. The nations of the Earth have polarized into a number of confederated states each with separate aspirations. The powerful Western and Southern Pacific Alliance has built the world's most advanced particle accelerator in the Australian Outback. Its purpose is to explore the depths of nature and unravel nature's final secrets; however, during its first major commissioning run, the seemingly impossible occurs, particles are accelerated to beyond the speed of light. Although part of the accelerator is destroyed in the process, the transient result is a warping of the space-time continuum, with the formation of a super wormhole linking the Earth to a distant world; an inhabited world peopled by two opposing quasi-religious sects. Professor Frank McKellan and his associate, Dr. David Haley, are transported to this new world as a consequence of this event. The cataclysmic destruction of the accelerator withdraws the wormhole, bringing McKellan back home, but David Haley is left stranded in an alien environment. Plans are drawn up on Earth for a calculated return to this world, utilizing an experimental and still untried US accelerator. Although a return is achieved, all does not go well for McKellan and his fellow interstellar traveller, Professor Greg Dawson, as they fall into the hands of the brutal Ordo Dominus Corpus. The opposing Order, marginally more benign than their adversaries, and into who's hands Haley has fallen, hear of their arrival and set out to rescue McKellan. A fierce battle for the survival of them all commences, with deadly and unpredictable consequences. Consequences that ultimately expose the people of Earth to unprecedented danger.