God hates me, Captain William Weaver thought. I should go back to being an astrogator. Hell, I should go back to being a scientist.

Once upon a time, that is exactly what William Weaver, Ph.D., had been. With doctorates in everything from engineering to astronomy, he’d been one of the corps of specialists, often referred to as Beltway Bandits, who solved problems for the military and other branches of the U.S. government, generally having acronyms that had an “A” on the end. NSA, CIA, DIA…

Which was why he’d been shanghaied one Saturday afternoon to explain physics to the National Security Council when an experiment in same had gone wrong.

Subsequent to the explosion in Orlando that had created the Chen Anomaly, he’d been blown up, shot, travelled to other planets, gotten stuck between universes and ended up saving the world. The Chen Anomaly, a black sphere that sat precisely where the University of Central Florida High-Energy Physics lab used to reside, had spawned a host of magical particles. The particles, at first referred to, incorrectly, as Higgs bosons, had the ability to link two particles and create a gate, one that looked very much like a mirror, between any two points. Some TV reporter had called them Looking Glasses and the name stuck. Since there were inactive bosons, apparently left over from some predecessor race, on other planets, the vast horde of particles spun out by the Chen Anomaly had created multiple gates to other worlds.

Some of those worlds were inhabited. Notably, some of them were inhabited by a species humans called the Dreen. The Dreen used biological forms for most of the processes humans used machines for and were apparently ravenously consuming Earth’s corner of the galaxy. They’d linked to some of Earth’s bosons and were intent on conquering the planet.

One of the bosons, however, had linked to a more friendly race called the Adar. About a hundred years ahead of humans in most sciences, the Adar had a weapon that could close the gates. The only problem being, it had to be shoved through one and if it went off on the wrong side it was going to destroy the sending planet. Though they had had a run-in with the Dreen as well, they’d chosen to go for stopgap measures rather than risk losing their planet.