Fanfic / Fleet of the Homeward Bound

Fleet of the Homeward Bound is a multi-crossover fanfic by Sora Neki.

The NCC-1701-D USS Enterprise finds herself warping through a strange universe. Tracking her path, she finds the space station Babylon 5 trying to contain a strange anomaly, one they realize has brought them there. They manage to partially close it but not before several more objects shoot through it at superluminal speeds. More ships, which begin making their way back.

Now the Enterprise, Babylon 5, BBY-01 Yamato, BSG-75 Galactica, Normandy SR-2, and the Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera, among many others, find themselves in an unknown corner of the multiverse. Their crews are strangely inactive, yet they can move and operate on their own... But why do they all look like cute humanoid females?

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This fic contains the following tropes:

• Batman Gambit: Chapter 6 makes it clear that Galactica was 'cheated' into the events of the story by the Cylon God to ensure that the Borg Cube didn't assimilate all of time and space. It would have worked (at the cost of Galactica's life) if Normandy hadn't Paragon Interrupted.
• Base on Wheels: After the confrontation with Chimaera and the Sword-class, the fleet fits Babylon 5 with a copy of Galactica's jump drive so she doesn't have to be left behind if another hostile ship shows up.
• Beam-O-War: Yamato uses the Wave Motion Gun against Anubis' superweapon. Japan is suitably hyped.
• Blood Knight: The Firestorms are all-too eager to tear into any "X-Ray" ship and steal whatever they can get their hands on, no matter the size. They're introduced harassing Jupiter 2(for being a flying saucer), and only hold back from attacking Hyperion and Spirit of Fire only because they're obviously Human-made. They're all but salivating at the chance to attack the Hiveship.
• Broken Masquerade: The fleet ends up in the Stargate-verse, and people with telescopes pick up several supposedly-fictional ships(and the Normandy^note As it is only 2004 in the Stargate-verse, Mass Effect hasn't come out yet) hanging around in space with the Prometheus. Word gets out before the SGC or NID can do anything about it, just as Anubis' fleet shows up...
• Cast Herd: There are currently two fleets — Enterprise's group, and a "B Team" consisting of UNSC Spirit of Fire, the Battlecruiser Hyperion, the Jupiter II, about a dozen Firestorms, and the Archangel.
• Celebrity Paradox: The people of Stargate Earth actually recognize several of the ships in the fleet except for Normandy(as mentioned above). But as it’s only 2004, Yamato and Chimaera are mistaken for their original series and Legends counterparts.
• Cherry Tapping: Yamato kills Anubis' mothership with a salvo of Type 3 shells to the face
• Combination Attack: Hyperion's Yamato Cannon can't penetrate the hull of the Wraith Hiveship very well, but its damage doesn't regenerate. While Spirit of Fire's MAC cannon penetrates extremely well, But the breach heals after a short time. So to defeat the Hiveship, Spirit of Fire blasts another hole, which Hyperion and the Firestorms and Gundams pour all their fire into.
• Continuity Nod: Being a crossover between many long-running series, the fic is littered with these. Some examples:
  • The author unintentionally added references to the Star Trek series ENT, TOS, TAS and DIS - the four Star Trek shows set before Enterprise-D's TNG - in that order.[1]
  • Galactica identifies Babylon 5 as Daidalos, the space station from the game Battlestar Galactica Deadlock.
  • When Normandy thinks over how the First Contact War started, she includes information from the Mass Effect: Evolution comics.
• Contrived Coincidence: Weaponized. When Spirit of Fire says she needs five minutes to charge her MAC, Jupiter 2 calls up Chronos to literally buy the time needed. She then later wanders off, promptly finds the stranded Archangel out in deep space, and brings her to the fight. Archangel's Anti-beam charges, CIWS, and Gundams Duel and Strike Rouge are able to blunt the attacking Darts long enough for Spirit of Fire's gun to recharge again.
• Dented Iron:
  • Galactica; despite her advanced age, poor state of repair and ailing mental state, she will fight to protect her friends.
  • Likewise, Archangel(and her Mobile Suits) is still damaged fresh from Jachin Due, but readily fights to defend Spirit of Fire and Hyperion from the Wraith.
• Divine Intervention: Six is not the only force involved in the Fleet. So are Q, Lorien, Teresa, and The Force itself(repesented by Qui-Gon Jinn).
• Eating the Enemy: Babylon 5 uses the healing device from "The Quality of Mercy" to drain Anubis and heal Galactica.
• Enemy Mine: How Chimaera ends up joining the fleet. A Borg Cube showed up after they disabled her, and they weren't going to leave her to that.
• Forced Sleep: Each ship's crews are non-responsive, and when they query about them, the only answer they get is that they're "asleep in their quarters" This even includes any AI whose self-awareness breaches a certain threshold like Analyzer, Data, and EDI, most of which don't sleep or even have quarters.
• Foreshadowing: In the entries from the Borg Cube's point of view, Galactica is given a designation number vastly lower than the rest of the fleet, and her name was already known to the Collective. Later, Galactica comes to the realization that the Borg were originally Cylons.
• Fusion Dance: Going by the the example of Prometheus, each Shipgirl's consciousness seems to be formed from a gestalt of her crew, filtered through the ship's own history/service record.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Prometheus, in true SGC fashion, asks for some technology from the fleet after the battle. After Chimaera's Leonine Contract, and some advice from Galactica and Babylon 5, Enterprise agrees to a limited gift, mostly of medical, logistics, and construction technology.
• Glamour Failure: When the fleet sort-of-transports themselves to the Stargate universe, they still appear to people on Earth as their normal ship forms, though they (and Prometheus) still look like shipgirls to each other.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Enterprise uses the Sword-class' own Void shielding to shunt her into a pocket dimension. Later, she supercharges the plasma shields of Anubis' fleet, causing their magnetic bottles to draw them all in together in one massive ball.
• Hope Bringer: Stranded in the void between star systems, Archangel despairs of ever being found in time to save her crew, and is even already writing her own epitaph until one of her Mistrals finds and brings her the Strike Gundam's still-functional cockpit. She is instantly galvanized, because if Mu can survive, than so can she! Then Jupiter 2 shows up.
• Leonine Contract: Earth makes a deal with Chimaera after the battle with Anubis, exchanging cultural data for Planetary Shielding.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Aside from the whole shipgirl theme, the main point of the fic.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: Each ship is turned into a shipgirl, but of a species that reflects the race(s) that built them. So Yamato, Galactica, and Babylon 5 are humans, Normandy looks almost like a Human/Turian hybrid, and Enterprise looks like a mashup of Human, Vulcan, Andorian, and the other races whom have contributed technologies to the Federation.
• No Sense of Direction: The Robinson's wandering in the series is expressed as Jupiter 2 easily getting turned around.
• Omake: Side-stories include tales with shipgirls planned to show up later in the main story, or other ships fans want to see that might not be fitting for the story.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: The Firestorms are slightly oversized Fighter-Faries but hit like small capital ships.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Galactica, who was already at retirement age when her series started, and has not had an easy time since. She keeps seeing the other shipgirls as the closest analogues to ships in her history, such as Yamato as the Pegasus, or the hostile Chimeria and Sword as Basestars.
  • As the story progresses, we see more and more hints that Galactica knows that these are ships she's never met before, but she still seems to recognise them anyway...
• Sneeze Cut: Hyperion bringing up the Yamato Cannon triggers the lady herself.
• Split Personality: Jupiter 2 can switch between the personalities of the Robinsons(and Dr. Smith and Robot).
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Normandy likes stealthing around, getting lost from everyone's sensors until she speaks up.
• Team Mom: Babylon 5, being a space station and all.
• Token Evil Teammate: Chimaera is a ship of the Empire, and acts accordingly. She would've been the group's first true antagonist had the Sword-class Frigate not shown up.
• Token Mini-Moe:
  • Normandy. As a frigate, she looks like a preteen, and at only 170 meters long is tiny compared to the other girls.
  • The International Space Station in the Stargate universe looks like a little girl around six or seven years old in a spacesuit.
• Took a Level in Badass: By Galactica's reckoning. Cloud Nine was a resort ship in the Rag-Tag Fleet. Now she's Enterprise.
• Units Not to Scale: Averted hard. Each shipgirl is still exactly as tall as her original form was long. This includes the eight-kilometer-long Babylon 5.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Given that Yamato is the Trope Namer. There's also Archangel's Positron cannons, Spirit of Fire's MACs, and Hyperion's Yamato cannon, but they don't quite have the same fleet-ending power of the original.

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