The Adar hadn’t wanted to risk it but when the Dreen were swarming through multiple portals the humans, specifically the president of the United States, had been willing to try anything. Weaver, with the support of a short division of mech infantry and a SEAL team, had managed to stick the explosive device on the far side of a portal in Kentucky. That was the second time he was pretty sure he’d died. But he’d been spit back out after a strange conversation with an entity or entities that might be God.

Shortly after they’d stopped the invasion, the Adar had given him another strange device. On first tests, it had appeared to be the world’s most powerful nuclear hand grenade. Any electrical power sent to it, so much as a spark of static, and, well, there was a boom. A really big boom. “There should have been an earth shattering Ka-Boom!” boom. Putting three-phase on it had, in fact, erased a solar system.

The Adar didn’t know what it was supposed to do but Weaver had basically guessed that it was, in fact, some sort of Faster-Than-Light drive. It took nearly a year of tinkering, and two more planets, to figure out that it was, in fact, such a drive. It had taken another year to create the first prototype starship.

By then, Weaver had switched sides in the ongoing sales war, leaving the Beltway and taking a direct commission in the Navy, which was the lead service in developing the world’s first spaceship. He’d pointed out even before switching sides that the Navy just made more sense. The President wanted a presence off-world as fast as possible. They’d picked up enough intel in the brief war to know that the Dreen had some sort of FTL as well. Finding out where the Dreen were, whether they were headed to Earth through normal space, was a high priority. The only way to make a spaceship, fast, was to convert something. The obvious choice had been one of the many ballistic missile submarines that were being decommissioned.