The Riftspace Saga

Brandt Rikee is about to become the most hunted human on Kotea.

For millennia, dwarfs and sylen have grudgingly shared the planet and the Committee that rules it. Humans don’t even have a vote. What actually keeps global apocalypse at bay isn’t the Committee—it’s mutually assured destruction. Either species can annihilate the other, but neither can survive the answering strike.

Both species have spent centuries desperately seeking something that would let them survive retaliation. Brandt and Chief Engineer Tokmak just built it.

The Nullifier.

Anti-gravity is the least of its promises.

Hours after its first successful test, Savant Kirak takes the lab. Tokmak goes to a dwarven prison in chains, and Brandt is put to work crating up his own machine—so Kirak can build enough of them to shield the dwarf keeps while the sylen burn.

Brandt is certain he can sabotage the stolen Nullifier. Certain he can steal the only computer backups. Certain he can rebuild it better and stronger. Certain he can beat Kirak and save his world.

Above the blackboard, in the lab they took from him, Tokmak’s warning is still chalked where he left it:

Certainty is the greatest danger to a theorist.

NULLIFIER is Book One of the completed Riftspace Trilogy.

Brandt Rikee gave dwarfs and humans the stars. Unfortunately, the stars have teeth, and the deeper Brandt dug to uproot all of physics, the longer those teeth became, and the more dwarfs and humans died or suffered. Ultimate power has no moral compass. That burden belonged to Brandt, and a heavy burden it was.

Mogul Elonia’s laser focus on founding a colony for Kotea’s presumed last survivors chafed like a festering blister. Brandt needed to explore those mysteries before what they hid destroyed them all, but Elonia’s refusals drive him to a Faustian bargain, in exchange for architecting their city, give him a ship, and let him go.

And go he does. Deeper and deeper into the realization that every advance has a cost, but those costs had to be paid to unlock the secrets that might, just possibly, help them heal all the damage they had done.

He is carrying a seed that is the last hope of the fae, a machine the galaxy has outlawed, and a growing suspicion that he is the most dangerous thing aboard his own ship.

Brandt Rikee has never been wrong about the physics. That is the problem.

Hunted across the galaxy by an Alliance that has outlawed his technology, Brandt drives Xyphon toward a third-order solution he cannot describe and cannot prove exists. He is certain it is there. He has been certain before, and every time he has been right, someone else has paid for it.

So he makes his crew a promise. One month. If the answer does not come, he surrenders.

It is not enough for them. His pilot is assembling a case: that Gyrfalcon, Goefugr, the ambush, and every grave behind them share one cause, and that the cause is still on the bridge giving orders. The Alliance is closing. The clock is running. And the question waiting for a vote is not whether Brandt Rikee can save them again.

It is whether anyone should let him try.