The Circle Must Be Broken is a Crossover Fic featuring the worlds of Babylon 5 and Warhammer 40,000 written by Todeswind. It can be read on Fanfiction.net through this link here
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In the dark age of the 41st Millennium, Inquisitor Daul rides the commandered merchant ship The Endless Bounty in pursuit of a rogue Inquisitor turned archheretic named Soren Faust. Tracking his target to the planet Belzafest, Daul engages his enemies forces, only for Faust to escape by sacrificing Belzafest to create a warp current of unprecedented strength and power, hurtling himself and the Endless Bounty into strange, unfamiliar stars. Cut off from the greater Imperium, the battered denizens of the Endless Bounty must swallow their pride, stay their hands, and barter with the aliens who inhabit these unknown worlds, aliens who direct them to a neutral hub of trading and diplomacy: the station Babylon Five...
This work includes examples of:
- Absolute Xenophobe: Imperial culture demands the destruction of the alien as a matter of both secular and religious principle. Zigzagged in that the Imperials are a varied lot; simple pragmatism demands they trade for what they need rather than try to raid and steal it, and whilst there are individuals who do remain racist, prolonged contact with the aliens of Babylon Five actually leads to an increasing amount of sympathy towards them amongst the denizens of the Endless Bounty. Lampshaded at several points, such as when Abbas Saclair, a young bastard son of the captain of the Endless Bounty, muses to himself that it's easy to mistrust a blood-soaked Eldar corsair, but a lot harder to do the same for a smiling Narn noodle seller who keeps trying to offer him a free sweet-cake when he passes by her stall. That said, they don't open up to all aliens equally; the Narn and Centauri earn something akin to trust and favor when they come to the aid of the Endless Bounty against Vorlon attackers, but the Imperials as a rule hold nothing but hostility for the Minibari, who so recently warred with the local humans.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: The Imperials find it extremely frustrating that the humans of Babylon Five refuse to take the threat of daemons or anything relating to them seriously.
- Cross Cultural Kerfuffle: The fic revolves heavily around the frequent cultural miscommunications that ensue between the Babylon Five races and the Imperials, and to a lesser extent between the Babylon Five races themselves.
- The Imperials find themselves unknowingly revealing far more than they ever intended when reporters from the ISN begin conducting interviews with them, as the Imperium hasn't had a concept of "free press" for over ten thousand years or more.
- Exotic Extended Marriage: Captain Saclair of the Endless Bounty has a single official wife, five recognized concubines, and an unknown number of casual lovers on the side, which gives him a correspondingly large number of children.
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Faust's "halfbreeds" are able to procreate by violently implanting larvae into female captives, which chew their way out of the mother and grow to full size in about a month.
- Gentle Giant: Whilst Galut the ogryn is capable of extreme violence if he feels the need for it, he is presented as a surprisingly docile figure with a child-like mentality who adopts a stuffed bunny as a toy and likes watching cartoons. In chapter 13, he immediately throws himself into harm's way to try and bar the Babylon Five hospital daycare from an attack by Daemon-risen zombies, fighting with all he has to keep the children safe and not caring whether they are human or alien.Galut truly intended to work himself to death if it meant protecting someone else. Stephen wondered if it was a trait of Galut's entire species or purely of Galut; the possibility that a sentient species wholly devoted to the protection of others might exist was greatly heartwarming.
- Heir Club for Men: The fact that Captain Saclair's wife is having her first son makes her sixth pregnancy and the baby it's gestating massively important to Saclair, despite already having five daughters by her and fifteen sons by various lovers and concubines; neither daughters nor bastard sons can inherit his mantle as a Rogue Trader.
- Human Subspecies:
- The Endless Bounty includes a small population of Ogryns; ogrelike abhumans who evolved on cold, dark, high-gravity worlds.
- The Imperials are convinced that the humans of the Babylon Five galaxy are a splinter race of their own humans who have degenerated over centuries after being cut off from the "true" Terra during the Age of Strife, with the genetic and physical differences being due to this.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place:
- The Warp is basically Hell, being a twisting, tumultuos place inhabited by murderous demons who want only to devour all mortals.
- Hyperspace proper is not inhabited by daemons, but is just as eerie to the Imperials, who compare it as the Purgatory to the Warp's Hell; an endless, empty, lifeless void, a terrible ghostly netherrealm. It takes only their first trip through hyperspace for Captain Saclair to sympathize and fully agree with the natives' view that being stranded in hyperspace would be a Fate Worse than Death.
- Irony: Imperial Preacher Al'Ashir sets up a church to the God-Emperor aboard Babylon Five, hoping to convert the "heathen" humans of the station. He finds himself completely at a loss when aliens begin attending his sermons and even even express interest in converting!
- Massive Numbered Siblings: Captain Saclair has five daughters by his wife when the story begins, with her being pregnant with his first official son and thus his primary heir, and fifteen sons by his various concubines.
- Mythology Gag:
- Fans of the Warhammer 40,000 universe well recognize Faust as representing a deranged, extremist member of the Xenos Hybris, a faction of radical inquisitors who believe that the Imperium's Absolute Xenophobe beliefs are actually holding humanity back, and thus humanity should instead by trying to work with the aliens of the galaxy who aren't Always Chaotic Evil — or at least stealing and using alien tech for their own advantage.
- The Vorlons refer to anything connected to the Warp as being "of the Third". In the series Babylon 5, "Thirdspace" turns out to be another dimension that the First Races accessed, but sealed away due to it being inhabited by terrible alien creatures.
- Organic Technology: Faust's creations include bizarre spaceships of bio-engineered tissue, very similar to those used by the Tyranids.
- Super-Soldier: Faust's "halfbreeds" are nightmarish abominations created by splicing and fusing humans with alien DNA harvested from different species, producing monsters almost as terrible as the Adeptus Astartes.
- Time Travel: It's mentioned at one point that the one of the more spectacular side-effects of warp travel is that it can result in ships traveling to random points in time, sometimes creating a Stable Time Loop where ships end up responding to their own distress calls. Hints scattered throughout the story suggest that the Endless Bounty was not flung into a distant galaxy, as its occupants believe, but rather that it has traveled tens of thousands of years back through time, to long before the Dark Age of Technology and the rise of the God-Emperor.
- Wisdom from the Gutter: During their first time visiting the Babylon Five market, several of Inquisitor Daul's servants get lost. Galut the ogryn, a typical example of a race generally written off by Imperials as Dumb Muscle, walks over to an alien-managed stall whilst they bicker over what to do, then returns and informs them where they need to go. At their confusion, he explains he asked for directions and points to a nearby map of the station. His compatriots privately decide that they have to keep this a secret, as they'll never live it down if it gets out that an ogryn a) learned Alliance Common faster than they did, or b) figured out the sensible course of action to take first.
- The Xenophile: Zigzagged with Abbas Saclair; though his Imperial teachings means he regards the idea with disgust, at the same time, he also finds he can't help but notice how attractive some alien women are. It first starts when he meets the human/Minibari hybrid Denenn, then in chapter 16 he initially recoils when he spots an Alliance human kissing an alien woman described simply as "a blue scaly something with tentacles", even noting that the Alliance's casual acceptance of "bestiality" is one of its points against it, before he catches himself thinking about it in a more positive light. When he spots a sign of a multispecies brothel, he literally turns and runs, trying to get away from the feelings stirring inside of himself.
