Cyber Wars of the 250th Millennium
The Cyber Wars of the 250th Millennium (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) were a series of Cyber-Wars fought primarily between the Cyber Legions and humanity. During the Cyber Wars, the Cybermen devastated the Tiberian Spiral galaxy (PROSE: Ghost in the Machine, A Girl Called Doubt) and used it as their "hibernation galaxy". (PROSE: The Mondas Touch) Although humanity won the Wars through the Tiberian Spiral galaxy's total destruction, at the cost of "a million million lives", remnants of the Cyber Legions survived. (PROSE: The Mondas Touch, TV: Nightmare in Silver)
History
Origin
The Cyber Wars of the 250th Millennium began when the Cyber Legions formed, speculated by one source to be the result of cross-pollination between the Cybermen of two separate universes. (PROSE: The Whoniverse) The first were the Cybermen of N-Space itself, who had fought humanity on countless prior occasions, (TV: The Tenth Planet et al.) including numerous previous Cyber-Wars. (TV: Revenge of the Cybermen, Earthshock et al.) The second were the Cybermen of Cybus Industries, (TV: Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel) who, after failing to conquer their universe's Earth, and then the Earth of N-Space, (TV: Army of Ghosts, Doomsday) were scattered across N-Space (TV: Cyberwoman, PROSE: Made of Steel, COMIC: The Power of the Cybermen) and the Void, (TV: Doomsday, The Next Doctor) although one Cyberman briefly escaped into another parallel universe before being returned to the Void by the Eleventh Doctor. (COMIC: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who)
At least twelve Cyber Legions were active during the Cyber Wars, (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) although the Cybus Cybermen also appeared to fight in the Wars as a separate faction to the Cyber Legions, as evidenced by Webley possessing two empty Cybus Cyberman bodies as part of his collection based in the abandoned Hedgewick's World of Wonders, a thousand years after the Cyber Wars ended. The Tiberian Spiral galaxy was a significant battleground during the Cyber Wars, (TV: Nightmare in Silver) eventually becoming known as the Cybermen's "hibernation galaxy" as a result of the Cybermen's actions in the galaxy. In addition, despite their highly advanced evolutions, the Cybermen retained a weakness to gold throughout the Cyber Wars, (PROSE: The Mondas Touch) although this was eliminated during the Battle of Hedgewick's World of Wonders a thousand years after the Wars ended. (TV: Nightmare in Silver)
Early Cyberman activity
For a significant portion of the Cyber Wars, the Cybermen of the Cyber Legions possessed Cyber-bodies identical to the Cybus Cybermen, albeit with a blank circle imprinted on their chest plates in place of the Cybus Industries logo. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War, PROSE: Ghost in the Machine)
Although, as the name implied, these Cyber Wars were fought during the 250th Millennium, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) evidence of activity from the Cyber Legions was present as early as the 52nd century, during which the Twelfth Cyber Legion, which monitored a quadrant of space twenty-thousand light-years away from Demons Run, was infiltrated by the Eleventh Doctor and Rory Williams, the latter of whom breached all fifteen levels of the Twelfth Cyber Legion's flagship and confronted the Legion's Cyber-Leader. Demanding to know the location of his wife, Amy Pond, Rory offered the Cybermen a message from the Doctor; when the Cyber-Leader asked what the message was, the rest of the Twelfth Cyber Legion's Cyber-ships exploded. With almost all of its army destroyed, the Cyber-Leader conceded and revealed the location of Amy to the Doctor and Rory, and the duo left to rescue her from Demons Run. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War)
Conquests of the Ninth Cyber Legion
After acquiring a fragment of the Eternity Clock, the Ninth Cyber Legion time travelled to Earth in 2012 and conquered London, where they set up a Cyber-factory and began mass-converting the city's population. However, the Eleventh Doctor and River Song successfully infiltrated the Cyber-factory and shut down its thermionic core, escaping through a time corridor with the Legion's Eternity Clock fragment immediately before the Cyber-factory exploded. The remains of numerous Cybermen remained scattered across London as far as 2106, when the New Dalek Paradigm attempted to invade Earth with their own fragment of the Eternity Clock. Ultimately, following the defeat of the Paradigm's Dalek Emperor by the Doctor and River Song, the Ninth Cyber Legion's invasion of London, as well as all the other conquests achieved by the Daleks, Silurians and Silents with the Eternity Clock's fragments, was erased from history. (GAME: The Eternity Clock)
The Ninth Cyber Legion also invaded numerous other places during the Cyber Wars, and subsequently fought humanity and several other species on many occasions, including Judoon, Slitheen and Daleks.
Thousands of Cybermen of the Ninth Cyber Legion invaded Hȳf and fought the planet's Racnoss population; the Legion's Cyber-Controller used the battle to test a new model of Cyber wrist blaster and assess the possibility of incorporating it into future Cybermen. During the battle, the Cybermen inflicted greater casualties onto the Racnoss than the Cybermen sustained themselves. After departing Hȳf, the Ninth Cyber Legion allied with the Eleventh Cyber Legion to conquer Agrippina in the Tiberian Spiral galaxy, with both Legions fighting at opposite poles of the planet. The battle was a far greater strain on both Cyber Legions than the attack on Hȳf had been for the Ninth Legion; thousands of Agrippina's human population were converted, but thousands of Cybermen were in constant need of repairs. (PROSE: Ghost in the Machine) Although the Cybermen's conquest of Agrippina was ultimately a success, thousands of heavily-damaged Cybermen were left behind, particularly in Agrippina Primus, as the Cyber-Leaders of the Eleventh Cyber Legion considered the energy expenditure necessary to repair these Cybermen to be greater than if the Legions simply converted other worlds to replace the damaged Cybermen. However, the Cyber Legions seeded Agrippina with a small number of Cybermites following the invasion, who eventually reproduced into a colony numbering in the billions. (PROSE: A Girl Called Doubt)
Following the battle of Agrippina, the Cybermen of the Ninth Cyber Legion began using significantly sleeker and advanced Cyber-bodies, with blue power cells replacing their chest plates. Locations invaded by the Ninth Legion following this included Delastrio, Xexos, Aaster, Niami Majora Quintus, Tagarn, Quell, Barranos IV, Cadogan, Praxes, Houndstooth, the sky galleon Drowning Vale, and Erodas. After these, the Ninth Cyber Legion launched an attack on the space station New Cadmus, during which they sought to destroy the Cadmus Engine; said attack also led to the destruction of 9.9P-VIV, the former designation of a Cyberman who, after hallucinating the appearance of a human girl across the Ninth Cyber Legion's battles since their attack on Hȳf, had gradually been driven insane by its inability to have corrected what it and the Legion's Cyber-Controller perceived as an error. 9.9P-VIV destroyed itself when it overheated its wrist blaster from rapid-fire use, and was examined by the Sixth Doctor and Peri, who were on New Cadmus during the Ninth Cyber Legion's attack. (PROSE: Ghost in the Machine)
Aftermath of the invasion of Agrippina
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As a result of being besieged by two Cyber Legions at once, Agrippina was reduced to a ruined wasteland. Eventually, a small number of humans who survived the Eleventh Cyber Legion's attack on Agrippina Primus - Sergeant Terrick, Raoul, BaDoris and Memnis - banded together to locate and destroy the planet's Cybermite hive before the Cybermites could begin repairing the thousands of abandoned and damaged Cybermen still left on Agrippina; they also intended to destroy all the remaining Cybermen to eliminate the possibility of the Cyber Legions returning to Agrippina and the Cyber-Leaders ordering the leftover Cybermen to destroy what was left of the planet. To assist in locating the Cybermite hive, the four survivors recovered and reprogrammed individual Cybermen into believing that they were humans so as to ally with them and seek out the hive.
Eventually, "Doubt", one of the many Cybermen the survivors reprogrammed, located the Cybermite hive inside one of Agrippina Primus' old churches, where the Cybermites had already begun to repair the Cybermen left on Agrippina. As Sergeant Terrick prepared to detonate a bomb to destroy the entire hive, the Doctor's TARDIS crashed through one of the church's stained-glass windows, and the Fifth Doctor emerged, having arrived to assist the survivors in destroying the Cybermites. It was at this point that Doubt learnt of its true identity, and Sergeant Terrick prepared to destroy the reprogrammed Cyberman; although the Doctor and the other survivors attempted to persuade Terrick not to kill Doubt, he fired anyway. However, Doubt was repaired by the Cybermites, although it retained its reprogrammed state. From this, it decided to seek out the remaining Cybermen on Agrippina and issue them a new order: to plant crocuses. (PROSE: A Girl Called Doubt)
The birth of "Handles"
By this point in the Cyber Wars, the Cybermen had fully transitioned from their Cybus-style Cyber-bodies to the sleeker and more sophisticated Cyber-bodies that the Cybermen of the Ninth Cyber Legion had used in their attack on New Cadmus. (PROSE: Ghost in the Machine, The Heist, The Scruffy Piper)
Unbeknownst to the Cyber Legions, Dorium Maldovar acquired twelve Cybermen and reprogrammed them to function as a squad of guards for the Maldovarium, as an extra layer of security against burglars; Dorium also severed the twelve Cybermen from the Cyberiad and modified them to function on their own personal neural net. However, all twelve Cybermen were decapitated and destroyed by Kiz the Head-Taker's sword, comprised of pure Gallifreyan zinc, during a heist of the Maldovarium alongside Agrakos and Vertebrae. The latter initially kept one of the Cyber-heads, which an Auton copy of Dorium specifically engineered to assist in the heist nicknamed "Handles", but eventually decided to use Handles as a door stop to maintain access to an escape route when the three thieves completed the heist. However, Dorium's Ood eventually moved Handles and cleaned it up, before placing it in the centre of the room that the escape route was located, thereby preventing Kiz, Agrakos and Vertebrae from escaping the Maldovarium.
Sometime after the failed heist, (PROSE: The Heist) Handles had its organic components completely removed, and was put up for sale in the Maldovarium. The Cyber-head was eventually bought by the Eleventh Doctor, and accompanied him as his sole constant companion during the first three-hundred years of the Siege of Trenzalore before finally shutting down completely; the Doctor was unable to properly fix Handles, due to the technology of Christmas being insufficiently advanced to perform proper repairs. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
The Third Cyberwar
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In the early years of the Third Cyberwar, a force of Cybermen used a swarm of hundreds of Cybermats to attack the space station Hamlyn. However, the Cybermat attack was thwarted by the Second Doctor, who used his recorder to lure all the Cybermats away. (PROSE: The Scruffy Piper)
The End of the Cyber Wars
Sometime during the Cyber Wars, several Cyber-Planners devised, and eventually built, a vast Cyberman repair facility located underground on a planet that had been previously ravaged by the fighting between humanity and the Cybermen. After creating the repair facility, the Cyber-Planners used a valkyrie that they had also built to transport critically-damaged Cybermen from the battles of the Cyber Wars and gradually repair them. These Cybermen remained in hibernation within the repair facility for the remainder of the Cyber Wars and beyond, safely hidden from their enemies.
Ultimately, the Cyber Wars of the 250th Millennium ended when humanity destroyed the entire Tiberian Spiral galaxy, destroying the vast majority of the Cybermen in the process. However, as Emperor Ludens Nimrod Kendrick Cord Longstaff XLI would remember, the victory had come at the cost of "a million star systems, a hundred million planets, [and] a billion trillion people".
Re-emergence of the Cybermen
Following the end of the Cyber Wars of the 250th Millennium, humanity widely believed that the Cybermen were extinct, although one security protocol regarding the Cybermen remained: if even a single Cyberman were found alive on a planet, the planet in question would be imploded. (TV: Nightmare in Silver) Over the next thousand years, among many cultures across the universe, knowledge of the Cybermen either passed into legend, or was forgotten near-entirely, with Queen Lydia of Catrigan Nova even doubting whether the Tiberian Spiral galaxy had actually been destroyed to end the Cyber Wars. (PROSE: The Mondas Touch)
However, there were at least two instances of surviving Cybermen attempting to fully resurrect the Cyber-race. (PROSE: The Mondas Touch, TV: Nightmare in Silver)
On Catrigan Nova
Several years after the end of the Cyber Wars, a mythical "gauntlet" - the Cyber-hand and forearm of a Cyberman (PROSE: The Mondas Touch) identical to those of the Ninth Cyber Legion, that first fought on Delastrio (PROSE: Ghost in the Machine) - was pursued by Seeker Sylen of Catrigan Nova, as the gauntlet was traded across the universe over the span of more than a year. Sylen eventually bought the gauntlet and returned to Catrigan Nova, where she presented it as a gift to Queen Lydia. Interested in testing the "legendary" powers of the gauntlet, Lydia donned the gauntlet and touched it against the armour of Royal Companion Litarsas, inadvertently infecting him with Cyber-nanotechnology and causing Litarsas to begin experiencing a gradual form of cyber-conversion.
Over the next week, Litarsas' conversion continued, but despite this, Queen Lydia (who, like many people across the galaxy, knew next-to-nothing about the Cybermen) became obsessed with the gauntlet, using it to radically improve the technology of the Nova Palace, and even began converting the Royal Companions into "Royal Champions". Eventually, the Twelfth Doctor, who had been pursuing the gauntlet for a long time too, broke into Lydia's bedroom and attempted to persuade her to destroy the gauntlet, only to be imprisoned in the Palace's dungeons by Litarsas and some Royal Champions. The next day, Lydia accidentally touched her daughter, Mida, with the gauntlet partially upgrading one of Mida's arms; devastated by her actions, Lydia found the Doctor and agreed to help him stop Litarsas and the Royal Champions from upgrading all of Catrigan Nova.
The next day, after manually reversing Mida's partial conversion in the Palace dungeons, the Doctor flew in a ship, along with Queen Lydia and Seeker Sylen, to Catrigan Nova's gold whirlpools, by which point the Royal Champions, now converted into full Cybermen, had begun "conscripting" people across the planet to the Nova Palace. Having fallen for a lie sparked by the Seekers that that the Doctor and a gang of aliens had kidnapped Queen Lydia, the Cybermen, led by Litarsas (now a Cyber-Leader), travelled to the gold whirlpools and confronted the Doctor, only for the Time Lord to use his sonic screwdriver to deactivate the water stabilisers in the whirlpools, creating high-power water currents filled with gold from underneath the whirlpools. Seeker Sylen then ordered her fleet to fire at the Cybermen, knocking them into the whirlpools and effectively dissolving them. Although Litarsas endured the whirlpools and briefly fought Queen Lydia in a one-on-one brawl, Lydia defeated Litarsas and forced him into a whirlpool, killing him and also destroying Lydia's gauntlet, which by now had fused with her left arm. (PROSE: The Mondas Touch)
On Hedgewick's World of Wonders
- Main article: Battle of Hedgewick's World of Wonders
A thousand years after the end of the Cyber Wars, three million Cybermen became active on Hedgewick's World of Wonders. They attempted to convert the Eleventh Doctor into a new Cyber-Planner however he resisted and eventually prevailed against the conversion. Emperor Ludens Nimrod Kendrick Cord Longstaff XLI set off the Desolator to destroy the planet, killing every Cyberman there before they could escape, however a single Cybermite survived. (TV: Nightmare in Silver)
Alternate timeline
In one of many timelines visited by Siblings Same and Different during their quest to construct the Paradox TARDIS, the Doctor died during his visit to Agrippina. Afterwards, the Cybermite hive of Agrippina attempted to upgrade the Doctor's TARDIS, provoking a war between the Cybermites and the TARDIS' internal security systems. During the war, the TARDIS' chameleon circuit was terminated, causing the ship to swell to the size of a planet. (PROSE: The Paradox Moon)
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