The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Thirty Four

When humankind made the leap from the confines of Earth That Was to the larger horizons of the ancient Solar System, it was with fairly simple reaction rockets: big, chemical things that broke out of the gravity well by pure brute force. Though Ion Drives and other exotic forms of propulsion were experimented with, the cheapest and most efficient thing to use was the Latex/Nitrous Oxide engines that had been the workhorse of aerospace since the early 21st century. It was cheap, safe, efficient . . . and slow. A trip to the nearest planet took years and cost immense amounts of money. This made interplanetary travel expensive and difficult and interstellar travel virtually impossible.

It wasn’t until late in the 21st century, in the aftermath of WWIII, when a young Hungarian physicist named Dr. Emil Laszlo in exile in England sat down in a Manchester café with three colleagues and a half-dozen croissants one crisp autumn day and came up with the magical Grand Unification Theory, uniting the Four Forces paradigm that had held sway over physics for nearly two centuries. Laszlo and his friends had been doing experiments and making observations about the mysterious substance known as Dark Matter, the six-dimensional stuff that seemed to be responsible for the bulk of the mass in the universe.

While the math involved was arcane, the predictions that Laszlo made about the Dark Matter were brilliant: within a generation, the rare and precious material and its trans-nuclear derivatives had been used to conquer gravity, provide cheap and efficient H3 fusion power, and surmount the light-speed barrier for data transmission. But as much as the Gravity Drive, the Tamed H3 Fusion Engine, and the Telephotonic Data Ansible had improved the technology of humanity, it still left it chained to Sol.

It wasn’t until the early in the 22nd century that an intellectual descendent of Lazlo, Dr. Ho Minh Huei in the Great Chinese Republic, had used a particularly rare d