Cyberon War

The Cyber-War, also called the Cyberon War, was the protracted conflict between the Cyberons and the Earth Alliance.

Nature
Once, while aboard a Cyberon vessel, Captain Harcourt Ross noted that one of the reasons the Cyber-War was taking long to win was because the Cyberons could convert both living and dead organisms. (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons) A few centuries later, with the war long won by humanity, it was sarcastically called an expensive "war on drugs" by one time-traveller. (PROSE: Barnyard of the Cyberons)

Beginning
The Earth Alliance encountered the Cyberons towards the end of humanity's first phase of galactic expansion; war was immediate. (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons) Intent on "liberating" the Earth-people from their "limited minds and bodies", a fleet of Cyberon battle-cruisers led by Cyberon Cyberleader One made their way to Earth in a surprise attack thanks to extensive shielding. They landed in all major cities, which were woefully unprepared, with New York City falling within the first hour of the invasion. Five hours later, London was bombed "down to atom". This destroyed the sentient computer Box, whose extensive knowledge had allowed her to foresee how the entire War would go in advance, though she was helpless to stop it. Before being destroyed, Box shared her knowledge with the immortal shapeshifter Lauren Anderson, (COMIC: Before the Storm) who had faced future Cyberons thrown back in time, much earlier in her personal timeline. (PROSE: Cyberon, COMIC: Before the Storm) The War quickly engulfed the whole galaxy, and would for a century. (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons)

Early stages
During the first half of the War, the Cyberons had the advantage, (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons) but the Earth Alliance opposed them all across the Galaxy. The Cyberons found their way to a pocket universe known as Ecto-Space, but they were ultimately repelled by the Mistress. (COMIC: Before the Storm) Jokastarnan forces, including Sergeant Dro'Ken, had also fought against the invasion. (PROSE: The Choice)

The New Cyberon Era
In the second half of the century of war between the Cyberons and the Earth Alliance, the Alliance began to gain an advantage on the Cyberons, having discovered the effectiveness of bastic bullets against them. Over a nex few decades, multiple planets were retaken, (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons) with even the original Cyberon homeworld being destroyed in 2989 along with the Cyberon King. (COMIC: Before the Storm) However, this was a pyrrhic victory as the retaken planets had, without exception, been ravaged and turned into lifeless mechanical wastelands. Humanity failed to press its advantage to a full victory, and were desperate for a further edge against the Cyberons, leading to frantic black-ops scientific research.

One of the avenues was the recovery of the head of the ancient vampire Dracula, which the Alliance hoped to study on a secret space station orbiting Mars to learn how to duplicate Dracula's physical capabilities, creating an army of vampiric "supersoldiers" who could hold their own against the Cyberons. The Cyberons learned of this plan, and, having lost their original leader, stole the head from the cruiser The Demeter. Dracula accepted the role of Cyberon Controller and, after being mounted into a new mechanical body, declared the beginning of a "New Cyberon Era". (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons)

Eventually, the Cyberons detected human transmissions about a great weapon being hidden in the remote Asteroid B-725. Dracula took a ship there personally only to find a woman in a wheelchair who explained that she was dying of a degenerative, contagious disease affecting her brain, and had retreated to this laboratory to work in peace without endangering others. Unable to develop a cure as she'd initially hoped, she had chosen to help the War effort another way by actually making the disease more infectious and then luring the Cyberons here. Dracula and his Cyberon party were now all contaminated, with Dracula's Cyberon bodyguards dying almost instantly. Before they died, they pinned Dracula in place, and held him firm even in death, so that he couldn't spread the infection to the wider Cyberon race. The woman mocked the trapped Controller with her last breath, declaring that he had been beaten by "weakness" and declaring herself "the Weapon and the Warrior". (AUDIO: The Weapon and the Warrior)

In 2992, the "ancient horror" who had become Cyber-Controller was destroyed by the "last scion of the Clan Van Helsing", who "launched it into the Sun". However, the Cyberon hive-mind itself survived. By 2996, a new leader had been found in the form of a more traditional Cyberleader. (COMIC: Before the Storm)

Final phase of the War
By either 2777 (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt) or the early 31st century, (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons, Cybergeddon) specifically 3009, (COMIC: Before the Storm) the War was coming to a close, with the Earth Alliance now under President Forrester. (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons) It lasted for long enough to fill the Jathar Expanse, a frequent battlefield located near the border of human space, with a "graveyard" of thousands of ships from both species. (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons) During the V-Time era, the Superiors became involved in the Cyberon conflicts, and needed large amounts of gold to keep the cyborgs at bay. Their agent Chris Cwej was aware of this; this prompted him to reflect that it would have been more convenient for the Superiors if Isaac Newton has lastingly turned his genius to alchemy. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)

The Cyberons began developing a new kind of Conversion Engine using experimental nanites to create a "conversion field" that would convert any living things in the Engine's vicinity. One such experimental Conversion Engine was placed inside a mostly-intact Earth transport vessel in the middle of the Expanse, converting all recovery teams who found it into Cyberons before they could report on its failure. With the experiment a success, a Cyberon vessel was sent to recover the Engine and deploy it in a populated area. However, they were detected by the Oblivion Spark, who damaged their ship and pursued them to Gulliver's Rest in the Laputa system. There, the damaged Cyberon ship fled through the Merrapine Scar, a rift in space and time.

A single Cyberon survived the jump through the Merrapine Scar, which had damaged the Conversion Engine. It found itself in the Sol system in 2000. Infiltrating the medical research facility PKD, it tried to create a new population of Cyberons in the 21st century by passing off the Cyberon drug as a medical cure, but Lauren Anderson managed to put a stop to these plans, with remaining Cyberon traces later being mopped up by P.R.O.B.E. over the following two decades. (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons, Cyberon, Silver-Tongued Liars, HOMEVID: The Only Cure)

End of the Cyber-War
Eventually, with the original Cyberon population of Aurichall neutralised, it came to be that destroying the Cyberleader of the remaining Cyberon fleet would mean final victory in the War. The Cyberleader's Cyberon fleet occupied the planet Menos. Earth Alliance forces, under the leadership of the Caradan Commander Myna Nevaryin of the warship Cydonia, attempted to launch a sneak attack, but to their surprise, their complex creative strategy was anticipated by the Cyberons, who'd somehow learned to think creatively, and all their ships were destroyed, including the Cydonia. The cause of this was the creation of a new Cybernet with two positronic intelligences at its core, one logical and one creative, to which all Cyberon systems were connected. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

However, after crashing on Carson's Planet, a mysterious space travelled known as Fred discovered one of the experimental nanite-based Conversion Engines and was able to reconfigure it to track down and tear apart Cyberons, instead of tracking other organic beings and converting them into Cyberons. His hopes that this would bring an end to the Cyberon War (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt) proved justified, with the Cyberons being more or less completely destroyed. (PROSE: Barnyard of the Cyberons)

The surviving Cyberons, under the leadership of the Cyberleader, decided on a strategic retreat, waiting for "mission parameters" to become favourable once again: (PROSE: Cybergeddon) the nanite swarms remained active long after they'd put an end to the War, ensuring the Cyberons couldn't return to power even if any were to reemerge from hibernation. (PROSE: The Blue Scream of Death) They hid out in a mobile base disguised as an innocuous asteroid, having stockpiled millions of bodies in cryo-stasis, ready to be thawed out and converted into new Cyberwarriors once the time came. They waited for over nine hundred years, during which the Alliance's memory of them slowly faded, aside from long-lived individuals such as the Caradan Jyaxx Nevaryin, niece of Myna Nevaryin, who'd been alive as a little girl at the end of the Cyberon War. (PROSE: Cybergeddon)

Behind the scenes
The Cyber-War against the Cyberons first appeared in the Audio Adventures in Time & Space story Cyber-Hunt, in which a mysterious "Fred" (implicitly an amnesiac version of Nicholas Briggs' Doctor) allies with a team of human soldiers on Carson's Planet and discovers a secret Cyberon facility developing nanite conversion methods, which the Wanderer tampers with so that the nanites attack Cyberons. Cyber-Hunt was adapted from an unproduced BBV Productions film called Cyber-War, which was at one point an adaptation of Sword of Orion and at another point was planned to feature Cybermen and Ice Warriors in conflict. (REF: Downtime – The Lost Years of Doctor Who) It was later novelised under the same name by Callum Phillpott; this new version of the narrative is the only one covered by this Wiki, as it introduced DWU elements into the plot, such as Aurichall. Nevertheless, it postdated Flight of the Cyberons, which thus stands as the first use of the Cyberon War in a valid DWU story.

Arcbeatle Press's Cyberon and the NiT&S Cybergeddon both place the end of the Cyberon War around 3009, suggesting the brunt of it took place in the 30th century. However, the Cyber-Hunt novelisation seems to operate with an earlier time-scale in mind, placing the end of the War in 2777 and thus presumably placing the War in the 27th century and 28th century.