As per usual, I don't own Babylon 5. This is an alternate universe story, and if you like it please let me know what you think of my little story.
A New Space Age.
President Luis Santiago stood in the control room of the launch room of Space Fleet control. The launch room was brightly lit with monitoring consoles displaying the status reports being sent to Earth via the satellites that had survived the Battle of the Line; the Minbari had been overwhelming obsessed with the destruction of the human race, they had gone to all of the trouble to destroy everything made by humans, and it had extended to devastating cities, burning books and artwork in a disgusting display of wanton destruction that went above what most people would expect from civilised war.
The Minbari had wanted to ensure everything human was completely gone, and to ensure nothing survived. They didn't care about the destruction of a culture. Why should they when they believed everything created by other races was beneath them?
But this was the moment everyone had been working together towards for the past twelve years since the end of the Earth-Minbari war.
A voice shook Santiago out of his thoughts.
"Mr President?" Dr Daystrom, a brilliant scientist who was responsible for this entire project, spoke.
Santiago turned expectantly. "Yes, Doctor?"
"We're ready to begin."
Santiago nodded while he took a deep breathe while inwardly racking his brain for something meaningful to say to the scientist and engineer who'd made all of this possible. In the end, he couldn't. "Go ahead, Doctor. This will be a moment that will live in history."
Daystrom turned and walked to a nearby console, and he donned a headset.
"Phoenix, prepare for launch," he ordered.
"Phoenix, ready."
Santiago sighed, hoping this worked out for the best. For the last thirteen years following the Earth-Minbari war, the human race had struggled to rebuild from the horrifying surprise attack of the Minbari when the ships sent out to sacrifice themselves to give the rest of the human refugees time to escape to a part of the galaxy where the Minbari would not find them following Michael Jankowski's insane attack on them for military and personal glory, proving forever the man despite being good in space combat, was utterly useless in representing the human species in peaceful first contact.
Earthforce had been brutally beaten back, and the Minbari had fired on the refugee ships, even jumping in a pre-emptive strike to destroy them and preventing them from escaping. Millions had died in the first wave, but the Minbari had turned their weapons on Earth, devastating the planet and destroying cities which had stood for centuries, even destroying all traces of ancient human civilisation.
And then… they had launched an invasion. Even now many people were furious and bitter about what the Minbari had done during the ground campaigns, and Santiago couldn't blame them; the Minbari had been vicious and their so-called 'honourable' warriors had committed terrible atrocities before their harsh negotiations. They had offered the surviving humans a compromise; the planet and its people would become a vassal world of the Minbari Federation while the humans were refused access to space and to colonise other worlds. In the end, the surviving remnants of Earth Dome had relented since the Minbari had threatened to use bioweapons on them, which had made many bitter towards their own scientists for refusing to work on biogenetic weapons of their own.
But there was nothing that could be done. Santiago himself had been disgusted by the idea of humans becoming like the Dilgar.
What made the Minbari occupation worse was the Minbari would not allow humanity to rebuild their world, essentially everyone became slaves on their own planet. And if the warriors murdered and mutilated anyone as a consequence of the resistance movement, then it only made more humans join up and commit their own acts of resistance. But the Minbari only stayed near Earth for two years before they withdrew from the planet, but their final act of ensuring humanity couldn't interact with the rest of the galaxy stayed. They had used their superior knowledge of Jump gate mechanics to lock off the jump gates in Sol.
The Minbari, before they had left, had informed humanity that one day when they felt it was ready for them to forgive the people of Earth, they would return and allow them access to the gates. The idea of being allowed anywhere was infuriating. What made it worse was how the Minbari said it so arrogantly as if they owned the whole galaxy which was ironic because that was what the Centauri had claimed when they'd first met them.
In any case, there was no way for them to leave Sol anyway; the Minbari had been thorough when they'd gone after every human ship to ensure humanity couldn't leave the planet. They had fighters, shuttles, but that was it; there were no ships capable of opening up a Jump gate anymore, and without one they couldn't find any other ship which had survived, and the Minbari had made sure to destroy the shipyards in Sol, and the various colonies in the system.
And then a ship was launched using an old fashioned but still highly effective fusion rocket. The rocket had been easy to detect before something weird had happened, and it was a very bizarrely shaped rocket, with a bulbous aft section. But it wasn't until the rocket had entered orbit above the planet that its aft section remodelled itself and a circular ring emerged from it.
The rocket had been invented by Dr Daystrom, an astrophysicist who had wanted to give humanity a different technology rather than the norm. He had been annoyed by how dependent Earth was on hyperspace, hyperspace beacons, jump gates and jump points, and how it wasn't uncommon for ships to get lost. Daystrom had been one of those individuals who had wanted to break the human race from the norm. He wasn't the only one who believed they were becoming a race which only took from other species, even ones who had gone extinct millions of years ago.
Many of those people wanted to combine humanity with cybernetic implants, or genetically engineer them. But they were trapped; their technology had followed the technological path common to the rest of the galaxy. But Daystrom had wanted to change it.
He had conducted Earth's first warp experiment. Faster than light technology had long since been believed to be science fiction, especially since the Centauri had given them hyperspace on a plate, and as a result, any research going into things like warping space was abandoned. But Daystrom had carried on, and he had found a way of combining warp technology with Jump space mechanics, and tachyonics.
Santiago wasn't sure how it all worked, but he knew the basics. Warp technology essentially created a bubble in normal space while using tachyon particles to generate the FTL field, and with a formula derived from Jump space, they were able to build a truly faster than light ship. Daystrom's experiment had worked wonderfully, and the ship had travelled from Earth to the other side of the solar system, and then he'd brought it back. Once he had Daystrom had gone from a virtually unknown astrophysicist and pilot to a celebrity. He had told everyone how the human race had made a mistake relying on aliens to give them technology when they should be building it all for themselves. It had incensed a few people, of course, but many had accepted it.
That was over nine years ago, and the entire solar system had been recolonised slowly while work began on building ships with more powerful warp drives, and as they worked the President of the Earth Alliance at the time had come up with a radical decision; they had completely restructured Earthforce and transformed it into Earth Space Fleet. There had been very little left of Earthforce left for them to work with, and the new technology hadn't fitted.
Their jobs included defending Earth and whatever colonies that sprang up, and to explore space. In some ways, their mission had not changed from their predecessor, but it had changed since more scientists were encouraged to join the organisation in order to take advantage of the new mission parameters.
After five years of increasing development of warp technology as well as studying other methods of space propulsion for slower than light travel while improving upon the life-support systems and other technologies used by Earth prior to the Earth-Minbari War, even uncovering how to generate artificial gravity on their ships without relying on gravimetric technology or rotating sections after another scientist and mathematician inspired by Daystrom's work had come up with a formula which worked with M-theory.
The work had given them access to gravity fields and bubbles which allowed for ships to lift off planets, and impulse fields which provided them with the means of generating thrust using energy.
Once the technologies were perfected, at the time, a ship was under construction built using minerals from the asteroid fields to venture out of the Sol system as Earth's first interstellar ship. Crewed by Earthforce veterans, the starship left the solar system to explore the long-term effects of warp travel. And then they had discovered something else, an anomaly which brought humans in contact with what they now termed 'Underspace,' a network of corridors which were a different domain to normal Jumpspace which extended for millions of light-years beyond Earth, and they provided a more stable means of interstellar travel.
With access to warp travel, the Underspace corridors, and increasingly more powerful ships using artificial gravity, hydrogen ramjets for extra power, artificial gravity, and better computer systems, there were plans for a new space fleet to be constructed, but first, the Phoenix was the prototype ship designed with the latest warp drive systems and Underspace mapping technologies. She was armed as well, with new plasma beam technologies, and Neutron blasters which were a weaponised form of the Queller-drive, an STL drive which generated a stream of neutrons which propelled ships around for thrust and proved more devastating for organic life.
It was also planned for the Phoenix to return to the planets once owned as colony worlds under the Earth Alliance; it was hoped the Phoenix would be the first vessel to recolonise those planets. The Phoenix fleet, when it was constructed, would explore and map out the Underspace, and hopefully visit worlds it would have otherwise taken months for Explorer-class ships to discover, which would become colonies in turn.
"Launch in T minus twenty seconds. Status, please?" Daystrom's voice shook him out of his thoughts.
"Main drive online. STL systems ready; warp drive operational. We have set a course for the main colony worlds for re-survey."
"Understood. T-minus fifteen seconds. Fourteen…..thirteen…..twelve," Daystrom read off the timer while the Phoenix glowed blue as the tachyon field started to come on, "eleven….ten…..nine….eight….seven….six…..five…..four…..three…..two…..one….BLAST-OFF!"
The Phoenix shot out into space as the warp field activated.
Santiago grinned as the Phoenix left the Sol system. "Our new space age," he said as he stood near Daystrom.
The scientist looked up at him, a smile on his face. "Yes, Mr President. Our new space age….and so much is out there."
"From what I've heard," Daystrom commented, "there's a theory that says the Underspace corridors extend throughout the universe."
"Do you believe its true?"
"Could be," Daystrom shrugged, but the look in his eyes reminded Santiago of an excited child about to rush to a sweet shop. "If it is true, then we will have extragalactic capability soon enough, but there's plenty of time to discover if we're right. I know one thing; the idea of getting away from the races in this galaxy would be a godsend."
Santiago had problems taking that. Before the outbreak of the war, he had been one of many politicians who'd advocated stronger relations with other races despite so many others taking the opposite view. But things had changed. Now many people did not want the human race anywhere near aliens. But it was different for the scientist near him. He could understand what Daystrom was saying since the scientist had never liked the idea of humans relying on aliens to solve their tech problems.
"You might be right," he said, not taking his eyes off of the screen from where the Phoenix had been.
She had truly been the namesake of the mythical bird which rose from the ashes of its rebirth; it was appropriate for the human race right now, who'd spent the last decade trapped in their own star system by an alien race determined to wipe them out. But now the human race had been reborn, they had rebuilt their technology and now they were back.
And they were not going to be locked away again.
Author's Note - I've always looked at the Babylon 5 verse and how humanity seems to be interested only in gathering technology from other races - old and new - to be lazy. This diverges in canon when Jeffrey Sinclair was found late in the resistance and the Grey Council discovered the truth of Minbari souls when they'd decided to occupy the planet, knowing the humans would be needed in the upcoming Shadow war but had decided they were better off out of galactic affairs.
I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you think.