Way before you were born, there was a cartoon called 'Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.' The coyote was lupine from earth, extinct around CY107. The roadrunner was a similarly prehistoric avian. The cartoon was a simple three-dimensional animation: just a flat plane and time. The cartoon was about Wile E. Coyote trying these outlandish schemes to catch the Roadrunner. Of course, in order to keep the series running, he never managed it. Viewers watched to see Wile E. Coyote bested by a preternaturally speedy bird with a brain the size of a walnut. That might not make much sense to us now, because we're used to normal, four kilo walnuts. The prehistoric walnuts, however, were really, really small.
Rather closer to your time, there was a being who called himself the Gingerbread Man, for some reason. He was probably nothing more than a really skilled con artist, but half the galaxy was ready to swear that he had an alternate FTL drive. This put him right at the top of many people's "Most Wanted" lists, including the local slipstream vendor, Sliptech, which very much liked its famous slogan, "Slipstream: not the best way, the only way."
His habit of announcing each failed kidnapping attempt with an all-spectrum broadcast of, "You can't catch me! I'm the Gingerbread Man!" made it all the worse. The local news stations soon all had a thirty-second program detailing his latest exploits, which the masses followed like the "Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner" flicks of old. If anybody tried, and failed, he became the laughingstock of thirty billion beings—for thirty seconds, anyway.
My father was one of these people, but unlike the others, he never got his thirty seconds of fame. Ignatious Valentine, you see, didn't try to shoot the Gingerbread Man down. He became his mechanic. And after every shootout, my father would go in and putter around. "Your ancillary A.G. generator's got some shrapnel, sir," he'd say, and cheerfully replace it, adding, of course, an extra thermocouple here, and a little wad of GTI-2 there, and maybe a few inches of blasting cord in that.
The next time, of course, the Gingerbread Man would greet him with a wink and tell him, "You left some stuff in my A.G. generator, Valentine. Want it back?" Ignatious would reply, "So I did. Thank you, sir," and reinstall them all in the antiproton tank, or the Torr compensators, or whatever he was replacing that time.
It was a friendly sort of war, one that stretched on for a few years, until my father had probably replaced the entire ship, one bit at a time, all with his specially rigged parts.
Interestingly enough, the Gingerbread Man soon developed a queer little problem: frayed wires. He'd be speeding along whatever he used for FTL transit, and suddenly his overhead lights would die, and when he opened the panel up, the wires would be stripped of their colloidal insulation. The wires themselves would be unharmed, just touching and short-circuiting each other. It never seemed to touch the more important breakers, such as the ones feeding the slipstream core (or maybe that was because the slipstream core was just a dummy), so he let my father continue his tinkering.
"Valentine, I've got the strangest problem. These wires just seem to strip themselves when I'm not looking. It's never anything important, but it's always annoying. Like my food processor just conked out twenty days in last time, but all the wires were fine when you left. I've popped my circuit breakers twelve times from short-circuits in the lights alone, and it's driving me crazy."
"Well, sir, let me put in some of this special insulation. It's some mudfooter plant, actually, and it's sticky as all . If this strips on you, I'll refund you every throne." Then my father would put in the most ridiculously expensive insulation he could find, and then something entirely useless on top of that, so he could up the prices. Edible rubber (I think he was kidding about the edible part, but with mudfooters you never know), usually, or once even pinewood.
I guess when you're as rich as the Gingerbread Man, you don't mind throwing insane sums of money away on pinewood-paneled insulation.
While most people fought a grand, flashy war against the Gingerbread Man for his mythical FTL drive, the Gingerbread Man fought a much quieter, but much more intense battle of the wits with his mechanic, and that was his downfall. The Gingerbread Man, you see, didn't realize that Ignatious wasn't his enemy. His enemy was the breeding pair of mudfooter rodents that Ignatious had snuck onto his ship, and their descendants whom he had nourished with his 'edible rubber.'
The Gingerbread Man continued in his ignorance until what the ballads like to call the Last Transit of the Gingerbread Man.
Despite what the popular ballads may say, the Drago-Kasov legions were absent, as were the Than and the Magog. It was just a strip of databus insulation replaced with 'edible rubber,' and a little letter demanding the secret to the Gingerbread Man's FTL drive, preferably delivered before the rats chewed off the insulation between his slipstream control buses and the main power line.
The Gingerbread Man chose not to believe Ignatious, and then we all found out that his FTL drive splatted just like an unpiloted slipstream core.
The moral? Planets are horrible, awful places that breed horrible, awful things.
And Valentines always have an ace in the hole.