Last Train Out. A Star Gate Babylon 5 idea

LAST TRAIN OUT

UNEXPECTED EXIT
A small B5 refugee colony seed fleet known unofficially as “Last Train Out” is trying to sneak out from under the Minbari hyperspace observation of Earth roughly six months before the battle of "the line." The fleet of ship's initially started traveling separately across the solar system making as much use as possible of Earth's normal interplanetary traffic flow until they all link up in a Neptune grazing orbit that sling shots them down and out of the orbital plane of Earth's Solar system. Each of the star ships in the seed colony fleet have modified ion drives that allow them to be used as low energy signature high specific impulse ion drives and they immediately switch to this mode from their normal high thrust mode once the sling shot around Neptune is completed.

Earth has experience with sending space ships large distances in normal space and the small fleet of ships have been modified for traveling long distances in normal space with the hope that the Minbari aren't aware of Earth's experience with sub light interstellar travel or the sub light manned missions sent out before the Centauri discovered Earth.

Instead of opening a jump point or using a jump gate the small fleet stays in normal space slowly accelerating outward intending to travel well beyond the Sun's Ort cloud on a heading that is down relative the planetary plane of their own solar system. Finally reaching an area in deep space just over thirteen light weeks from Earth's sun the “Seeker” the fleet's only Explorer class ship starts picking up weak radio signals originating from a suddenly nearby and clearly visible sun that is much like Earth's star. Any passive means of ranging shows this star to be impossibly close. Running under strict radio silence, but communicating using low power lasers the small fleet is confused and frightened by the primitive signals, but can't imagine how an unknown nearby star could be discovered by traveling mere light weeks from Earth. They finally decide it can't possibly be a Minbari trap and give in to their curiosity and alter course for a closer look not realizing that the decision has put them on a course that will take them through a portal that exits into another universe.

The primitive radio signals are leaking from another universe through a distortion that barely grazes the B5 universe forming what is essentially a two dimensional circular opening seven light seconds across. It extends from the B5 universe into a Star Gate universe through another essentially two dimensional opening that is also seven light seconds wide. These two circular portals appearing in both universes, but due to the portal's extreme size in the higher dimensions the curvature of this hypersphere's interface with the two normal universes has a thickness less than the width of a hydrogen atom and effectively only exist or can be entered when approached from a single direction.

The massive spherical multidimensional distortion or hypersphere's has at least one pair of two dimensional windows “hanging” in the normal space of two universes, one in the B5 universe the other in the star gate universe. These two openings have been gravitationally locked by the two different universe's suns.

The star gate universe's portal is locked face on toward their sun, while the B5 portal is locked nearly edge on to that universe's sun.

In the B5 universe the portal is broadcasting Star Gate Earth's sun light and radio signals in a cone that is pointing into deep space several light weeks below the B5 sun's planetary plane well beyond where any probe or space ship has ever been sent, at any distance greater than a six light months the sunlight and radio signals from the Star Gate universe merge almost seamlessly into the other other earth's background noise and sun light.

The small fleet of refugee ships turns and follows the signals unaware they are accelerating into a grazing entrance(Security is 1/100 of a light second from an edge.) into a hypersphere portal and after much less than a second or possibly weeks(different types of clocks and people claim to have perceived different amounts of duration including ?negative? duration.) in what appears to be a non-causal reality the small fleet follow the radio signals and light from the newly discovered sun and manage to navigate into a new universe that is almost the same as the one they had just left.

It is the loss of FTL signals and the altered positions of the planets and other details that quickly provide the information that they have moved in time and then later Radio intercepts and telescopic astronomical observations make it clear they have also crossed into another universe.

The fleet's relatively high speed and desire to remain stealthy means it is impossible to immediately return to the now invisible portal. The commanding officer decides to continue coasting silently on their current coarse across the solar system until the near exact copy of their Earth passes behind it's sun in roughly two weeks.

The planet was to the side of it's star relative to the “last train out” fleet and is an easily tracked radio beacon slowly moving along it's just over 365 day orbit(The B5 universe's Earth is in a 366 day orbit to within a minute.) that will eventually take it behind the sun relative to the small fleet.

The fleet doesn't have a single sensor that can detect or track the portal from this new universe and they are unable determine if it vanished, has an orbital path or is fixed relative the local star. This is because the portal's other side is looking into empty space and there are no detectable signals passing through it from the fleet's home universe. All they can do is estimate the portal's location at their moment of exiting it with a tentative hope that it will be possible to refuel and then send a ship back in a few months to search the area, where they lost all reception of FTL and light speed radio broadcast from their home universe.

Once the planet moves behind the sun the fleet starts deceleration at it's maximum safe rate aiming to intercept several outer planets and use them to get the fleet back to orbital speeds that match with with this Earth's solar system and put themselves back into the planetary orbital plane.

Before the planet passes behind the sun the technicians, historians and scientist going over radio intercepts and telescopic observations determine that they have not simply time traveled, but are in an alternate universe, one where the planet's land masses seem to be an incredibly close match at first glance, but on the second even closer examination show unexplainable differences from their own version of Earth.

In spite of these odd geological difference the radio/TV intercepts are in languages that closely match their own and show a world history that at least on the larger scales is a partial match for their own Earth's history, at least through the first half of this Earth's current date in August of 2002.

This version of Earth, while having a similar history, has both missing nations and nations that never existed in the refugee's universe and then there are mentions and images of ancient massive artifacts called Pyramids,?Stone henges? and other apparently paleolithic mega-structures that never existed on their own version of Earth. Their are species of animals mentioned that don't exist on the Refugee's Earth especially dozens of species from an unknown Island continent called Australia that is often said ”To be a land down under?”

The refugee fleet doesn't know it, but the hypersphere portal is the direct result of the Star Gate universe's version of the Babylon 5's Unified States using a prototype F-302's fighter to carry an overloading Star Gate into deep space on a malfunctioning hyperdrive. The combination of the not quite fully functional fighter hyperdrive and the overloading Star Gate produces a multidimensional explosion that warps space in at least nine dimensions. The explosion occurs far enough out in the solar system that the bubble of distorted space is able to form a stable opening between the Star Gate Earth starting in year 2002 and the Babylon five Earth starting in year 2244.
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This is the first break point if you want to stop here and just use this as a starting point for any SG/B5 Crossovers please do, but I'll be posting more replies with segments from one of the directions I role played out the idea.

THEY ARE DISCOVERED AND FOUND TO BE CONTAMINATED

Star Gate Earth has been out of sight for less than five days when the events that cause the premature launch of the United States star ship Prometheus occurs. The Asgard eventually return the Prometheus to Earth and notice the refugee fleet still performing deceleration maneuvers on the far side of the sun from Earth.

Thor informs Prometheus's crew and at the request of SG1 uses his far superior technology to secretly scan the unknown fleet's various computer databases, even going to the point of transporting out copies of the various captain's personal logbooks. Using the Asgard's superior computing technology and transporter technology Thor easily decodes the unknown fleets data bases and build up what he calls a civilization survey synopsis of the Refugee fleet.

SG1 are joined in the Prometheus by all the SG teams currently on Earth as well as sixty additional experts under Star Gate Command all helpfully beamed aboard the Prometheus by Thor currently parked in an orbit that keep's Earth's moon blocking them from Earth. These experts and Thor's star ship take a week to go over the copied logs and searching the large archives and data bases of the refugee fleet.

Unknown to SG1 or anyone else in America's Star Gate Command Thor's scan of these refugee humans has revealed something that has focused Thor's attention, his council and ultimately the attention of all the Asgard on Earth and the Refugee fleet. The refugee humans and by assumption all that other universe's humans have been subjected to a species wide genetic engineering in their relatively recent past.

Thanks to this crude genetic tampering the other universe's human species was far closer to the edge, survival wise, than even the Jaffa the Gou'ald had created just before the Asgard had forced them to sign the protected planet's treaty. The modeling of the badly spliced DNA shows an increase in genetic defects mostly manifesting as a significant reduction in lifespans, lower birth rates and a weaker immune system coupled with higher rates of cancer and mental insanity.

Currently Thor's humans are unaware of his genetic discoveries and are unaware of the anger those discoveries had stirred in the entire Asgard species. Since the discovery Thor had been in almost constant communications with the rest of his species and for the first time in over a thousand years the Asgard have paused their search for a cure to their own genetic problems and instead turned their study to the problems they have discovered in that other universe's humanity.

The council's first thought is to destroy the refugee fleet to prevent it's badly corrupted DNA and alien warped society from contaminating their Earth's promising development, but Thor and others argue that his Earth has already spontaneously produced worse societies on a smaller scale and is already being exposed to several far worse Gou'ald distorted societies and civilizations. Thor and a slight majority of Asgard argue that his Earth with just a little immediate help can be put into a position where it won't be dominated by the refugee fleet's slightly more advanced technology.

However the Refugee's genetic contamination can not be allowed to stand for both humanity and the Asgard themselves. The people of Thor's Earth have been reaching the mental potentials of their ancestors and the Asgard study of this redevelopment is greatly helping them with their own problem. The Asgard will not allow the genetics of their humans to be contaminated and to that end all of Asgard's genetic experts had started working on several possible options.

There had been many ideas passed among the Asgard the simplest non-lethal idea was to sterilize the refugees by cycling them through Asgard ship transporters as they slept, but that was needlessly cruel and did not address the issue of the other universe's billions of genetically modified humans only a few light weeks from the Asgard's version of Earth and it's promising humanity.

One idea had been to modify one or more of the many symbiotic microorganism that shared his Earth human's bodies and use them to keep the two versions of humanity from producing viable offspring together. This had several drawbacks, the biggest being something the Asgard had gained through hard won and sometimes sadly lethal practical experience. Stated simply “An organism that was in a long term symbiotic balance with a host organism might not have DNA that was actually symbiotic with the host.“ By their very definition symbiotic organisms didn't exist in isolation and it was nearly impossible to exactly predict how their DNA interacted with the host organism or the DNA of the nearly countless other organisms present within the host. In other words their symbiotic nature might be an emergent property of the organism's DNA interacting with the DNA of dozens of other organism found in the host.

The idea the Asgard had settled on, if very reluctantly was a virus scale silicon/carbon machine really in human terms a more accurate description would be a nanometer scale robot that manipulated DNA, but it was unlikely the Asgard council would ever inform their humans that the Asgard were protecting them and trying to correct the attempted genetic level enslavement of another universe's humanity.

The Asgard were by any measure true experts in building DNA manipulating silicon/carbon constructs having taken their first steps in the technology before the Vorlons had left their home solar system.

In comparison to the Asgard's current abilities the Vorlon's genetic engineering was barely out of the human equivalent of the early stone age, barely functional and ultimately mostly lethal to the species it was used to modify and control.

Once the decision had been made it had taken the Asgard less than a day to design, assemble and start testing the silicon/carbon based micromachine and in just under four days they are ready to transport a batch into one of the smaller refugee ships to see if anything unexpected happened during or after the genetic repairing of the crew was completed, follow that up with a few clandestine transports as the test subjects slept and they could be sure it would “take”. Eventually if it became necessary the Asgard planned to spread it to that other universe's human population.

It had been almost too simple the unseen alien slavers genetic engineering was so primitive it had little to none of the error correction needed to maintain it's long term stability and the aliens didn't appear to have advanced to the point of being able to exploit the natural error correction in human DNA or include their own tamper protection, of course given the obvious instabilities they simply might not have cared enough to make the effort for such a short term project.

Sadly from Thor's view Loki has already tested most of the silicon/carbon based micromachine's sub assemblies and complex coding on his humans, but to be sure the micromachines were tested with cell samples quietly transported from a billion people on the Asgard's Earth and from every individual of the refugee fleets population. These cells along with the micromachines were put through a 1000 year interaction test using the standard accelerated time chamber.

The silicon/carbon based micromachines weren't programmed to change the DNA in every cell of a refugee human, this was consider to be very dangerous to the already fully mature refugees, instead the micromachines would multiply slowly and silently until they found the human's reproductive cells, check for the introduced genetic tampering and then alter only the DNA in the person's reproductive cells using carefully chosen sections of DNA stored in it's memory.

It is doubtful that Thor will tell SG 1, but the council at his suggestion has used copies of DNA from Jack, Sam, Daniel and a few million other carefully selected humans to overwrite the alien genetic engineering. All refugees that conceive children after the micromachines have saturated the fleet would no longer produce children with the unstable telepathic or enslavement DNA. Instead the children will be related both to their parents and the Asgard selected Star Gate Earth human.

The Asgard's calculations and simulations indicated that these children will have a IQ between at a minimum of 20% to a rare maximum of 40% higher than their parents and have an average life expectancy nearly 50 % greater than their parents at least based on the renewed stability of their DNA.

Passing the external testing phase in both the Asgard's native humans and the human refugees the micromachines along with an extensive hidden array of sensor were transported into key hull locations of the refugee ship named “Security” and carefully observed for several days before being introduced to all other ships in the refugee fleet in concentrations high enough to have them all infected and modified by the time they are contacted by the Asgard's Earth.

Just before the Asgard introduced their DNA altering micromachine to the refugee ship named “Security” the Asgard council sends two of their smallest and oldest repair ships to Earth and they take up the same Lunar orbit as the Prometheus performing high resolution scans in preparation to create copies. These scans reveal the Prometheus's power system and FTL Flaw and America's Engineers in area 51 replace the human built drive with the Al'kesh's smaller FTL drive.

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This is the second break point for this idea I actually tried several ideas for "Earth's Fleet", but I'll only post one direction I tried a little later.

By the way what do you think the Asgard would do Given the above?