This is an Elseworlds tale. What if Clark Kent wasn't an only child? What if the event which brought together the Kents and their little orphan from the stars was repeated not once but several times? Would there be a Superman?

Smallville, the Luthors, Superman (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Power Girl, Supergirl, Jakita Wagner, John Cumberland, Apollo, Big Barda, Mr. Majestic, etc are the property of DC Comics.

I own nothing, except my imagination and how I use these fantastic characters and locations.

Thanks to Siegel and Shuster, those two young Jewish kids who wanted to change the world, and to Phillip Noa Wylie who marked the way of the modern comic book and graphic novel with his novel “Gladiator”.

Preface

The universe is vast, unimaginably so and, contrary to popular belief, it is almost always random and chaotic. This, would not be one of those times.

1969 was a good year for the town of Smallville, Kansas. The harvest had been exceptionally good and the local produce was being sold and shipped all over the country fetching a higher than average price. If that wasn't reason enough for its farmers and co-dependent residents to feel good about themselves, Luthor Corp had inaugurated a brand new agricultural research plant not ten months before and its dividends, as well as the first results of the lines of research being conducted there were beginning to be felt around both the county and the state. Life was good.

Which is why it should not have come as a surprise to all of those farming folks so fond of popular wisdom something terrible would follow such wealth and abundance. But abundance breeds complacency, and no one did see it coming.

On December 25^th, 1969, Smallville's subsidiary of Luthor Corp, its newfangled Agricultural Research Plant, was blown to kingdom come by what was later reported to be a failure in its power core, killing all 1500 employees and causing tremendous material damages to the whole of the town and most of the county's surrounding farms. No family was spared; everyone lost someone, however removed.

For a good long time, Christmas Day would not be the same in the town of Smallville, Kansas.

But, that selfsame popular wisdom farming folk are so fond of also states that every cloud has a silver lining. And for one family, hurt and bloodied by both nature and the “Smallville Catastrophe” (as it had been dubbed by the, oh so caring, people of the media), the aftermath of the disaster would mean a new beginning and the culmination of their yearnings for parenthood.

Chapter 1.

Everything within the universe (one could argue the whole of the universe) is constantly in motion. Every single item affects every other item surrounding it, whether it be on a quantum level or on a cosmic one, so one can imagine the effect an exotic explosion may have on the world which surrounds it or even, the fabric of reality.

The 1969 destruction of the Smallville Agricultural Research Facility was anything but ordinary. What everyone thought to be the United States' leading facility in agricultural research was in fact the pet project of Luthor Corp's CEO; Lionel Luthor's personal obsession.

Early in Luthor's career, some nineteen years before, he had been approached by three particularly eccentric yet brilliant scientists bent on pushing past the boundaries of accepted knowledge in regards to the world which surrounds us. Drs. Walter Bishop, William Bell and Robert Dowling presented Mr. Luthor with an alternate understanding of the reality within which we dwell. According to them, the universe was in truth a multiverse, "a theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833 dimensional space." If their theory proved to be correct, they posited the potential access to an equal or higher amount of parallel realities which would be available to be explored and from which unprecedented knowledge and technology could be retrieved.

By 1954, 27 year old Lionel Luthor had already established an economic empire worthy of the greatest moguls of his time, and had done so by eschewing such burdensome annoyances as morals or scruples. So when presented with the possibility of groundbreaking technology available only to him and those he chose to share it with if the purposed adventure into science fiction produced the results promised, he jumped at the chance, footing the bill for what would become the greatest scientific miracle brought along by accident in human history: Project Winter.

Allegedly a research facility tasked with countering a projected global warming, Project Winter sought to break the barriers which limited our reality in order to access its mirror images. Surprisingly enough, their endeavor was met with success, after a fashion. After managing to achieve a few glimpses across the dividing veil, the stress put upon the membranes between realms by the radically new supercomputer designed by the driving intellects behind Project Winter (namely Bell, Bishop and Dowling), caused a chain reaction of unforeseen proportions across all pressure nodes and although finally piercing the universal walls into the multiverse's circulatory system, it derived in a catastrophic explosion of the computer core (which, incidentally, was being powered by a new type of nuclear reactor), the result of which was the complete and total destruction of the Smallville Agricultural Research Facility and the demise of all personnel involved.

That was the end of Project Winter as far as the world was concerned.

However, there were a few items which were not reported as widely as the research facility's destruction, or at all, whether by design or ignorance.

One, none of the lead scientists involved in the project were actually in the facility at the time of the explosion.

Two, in one of those quirks which the universe seems to be so fond of, at the time of its most abject failure, Project Winter achieved a momentous breakthrough, quite different from the desired objective; it did in fact manage to break through the walls between realities but instead of opening a doorway into those other, parallel universes, it created a... nexus of sorts into our reality turning Smallville, Kansas, into Parallel Grand Central. Of course, amidst all the pain, chaos and mayhem caused by the fortuitous destruction of the facility in question, no one was the wiser about this teeny development.

That is, until things started to come through.

  Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek, nor BSG old or new, nor do I own the Harringtonverse, or any of the dozens of different science fiction literary works, tv series and fanfiction works which I mention and/or use in this my personal work of fiction. More's the pity, I could certainly use the money.

Star Trek: Way of the Battlestar

Preface

Due to the incident between the U.S.S. Kelvin and the mysterious Romulan ship, and after a series of heated deliberations, Starfleet determined their current style of ship design was overly optimistic. Already preoccupied by the early experiences of the NX-01 Enterprise and United Earth's near-destruction at the hands of the Xindi, Starfleet came to the conclusion their ships were unable to meet the challenges the universe continued to present the Federation with and were incapable of protecting the lives of either Starfleet personnel or Federation citizens in any meaningful way. Therefore, in order to correct these deficiencies in design, a project to exponentially improve every facet of Federation ship design and construction was chartered by the Federation Council, Starfleet Command and Starfleet's Office of Shipbuilding.

A general cry went out to all astronautical engineers to come forth and contribute to the next phase in the defense of the Federation.

Inspired by 20^th century military history, specifically by the naval aircraft carriers and super-carriers, and their ability to project a wide radius of dominance around themselves, the project was thus named: Project Carrier. Very soon however, military historians pointed out that while able to project and maintain a wide area of sea-air dominance and threat, these battleships were woefully vulnerable to attack. This prompted project engineers to search for a solution to this apparent weakness while keeping the inherent concepts of asymmetric warfare of the proposed carrier analogs.

One such R&D team came across the early 20^th century television science fiction drama Battlestar Galactica and its 21^st century re-imagination. Intrigued, they continued scavenging ancient audiovisual records and discovered a series of films about a Galactic Empire and its opponent, the Republic Alliance; the members of the research team were awed by the technological wonders imagined by their ancestors and portrayed throughout the films: a form of FTL capable of traversing a galaxy in one day, planetary shields, hyperspace capable space superiority fighters, incredibly powerful weapons, etc.

Fascinated by the concept of the Colonial Battlestars and the Cylon Basestars both for their durability, offensive capacities, space superiority and recon crafts as well as their decidedly unconventional FTL drive and the latter models' production facilities, Starfleet Command pushed for a parallel research project intended to see whether these concepts were viable and whether they could be duplicated (and possibly improved) by Federation technology; for the idea of a Battlestar or Basestar built to modern specifications was incredibly appealing and would mean a quantitative jump in force projection and defensive capabilities for Starfleet.

Curious about what other innovative technologies could be found amongst ancient literary texts and audiovisual records, a great interest developed within the scientific community and more and more science fiction novels and entertainment shows were recovered and scrutinized for any technological “discoveries”. One particular theme, Space Opera, became fertile ground in which to find new lines of research. A series of novels dealing with the space fleet engagements between several warring star nations and empires proposed a truly interesting missile doctrine, with long distance engagements and astronomical yields, which resulted extremely attractive to the strategists within Starfleet. That, along with groundbreaking point defense systems, intel platforms and drones, quickly became a line of research considered worth pursuing.

It took some time at first, but with modern understanding of mathematics and physics, and with all member races contributing to the endeavor, the first fruits of the new research saw the light of day within a few years. New ceramic alloy battle-steel with off-the-charts resistance levels and ablative armor, capable of withstanding weapon yields well above anything being able to be brought to bear by any Federation member or any of its known hostile neighbors.

That one dual engineering breakthrough, achieved thanks to an audiovisual entertainment series more than two hundred years old, was the opening salvo of the technological race which would cause the rebirth of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet. From that moment on, no idea, however farfetched, was beyond the pale as far as Federation scientists were concerned. After all, it might have been a cheap gimmick in its day, but who would turn their eye away from a ship's engines which could simply be recharged by dipping into the nearest star, with no worry for its passengers for the ship's shields could withstand a star's heat and ignore its magnetic field? It was a free for all, and although for every success there were an exponential amount of failures, by 2258 Starfleet was a whole different animal.

To reflect the Federation's new policy, Starfleet revised its motto:

Αν θα έχουμε ειρήνη, προετοιμαστείτε για πόλεμο. Μίλα απαλά και να φέρουν ένα μεγάλο ραβδί.

{An tha échoume eir-ín-i, proetoimasteíte gia pólemo. Míla apalá kai na féroun éna megálo ravdí.}

(If you would have peace, prepare for war; speak softly and carry a big stick.)

Non-human societies had often commented imagination was humanity's greatest weapon; they were finally using it.