I don't own Doctor Who or elements of Blake's 7, Mass Effect, or Halo, where elements have gone into this story.
Enjoy.
Xxxx
Commander Shepherd flinched hard as the Sontaran fighters continued to hammer the ships' hull; the ME fields and the EM forcefields were, fortunately, holding the Sontarans back while the turboblasters and ME kinetic cannons opened fire in retaliation. Shepherd hid a tight smug smirk when he saw 9 of the fighters vanish from the scopes, but there were still so many of them; Shepherd had to admire the Sontarans for trying, but since the whole damn race were clones, it made sense they would launch a battle with millions upon millions of soldiers.
The hard part was making sure they didn't turn their backs.
"Got 'em!" A fighter pilot cheered over the communications circuit.
"Don't get cocky," Captain Turner snapped over the communications circuit; her face flushed from the battle, a clotted cut on her forehead from where a piece of shrapnel had slashed her face but luckily didn't do any more damage. "There's more of them incoming!" She barked into the circuit.
Shepherd grimaced as he saw Turner was right, and he was surprised Turner had taken the trouble to reprimand a pilot, but he had bigger fish to fry. "Captain, we're losing too many ships, and the Sontarans are targeting our engines and thruster banks."
"Did our distress call get through, Commander?" Turner grimaced at the news.
"I think so. But the Sontarans are blanketing the system with interference. They want this place," Shepherd replied.
Turner nodded darkly. That was an understatement. This system was one of the Terran Empire's largest industrial facilities; with a really large pair of stars, barren moons and planets and asteroids with an Oort Cloud three times larger than that of Earth, the mineral wealth was beyond imagination. Captured or destroyed, its loss of mines, factories, and supply routes would be a massive loss to Earth's resources.
The Terran Empire was losing the war with the Sontarans. Founded after the Dalek invasion of Earth and made use of whatever pieces of Dalek technology were left behind after the last of the mutated filth were destroyed to get back into the stars, cracking the secrets of Mass Effect technology as well as hyperspace technology before the disaster of a First Contact with the Turians and then fighting to Palaven and making sure the Turians backed down for good, the Terran Empire had used the time to rebuild and then accelerate their exploration mission through the galaxy.
And they had encountered the Cybermen, the Kraals, and even the Dominators, but while each race they encountered eventually lost pieces of their technology to the Empire, the Sontarans were gaining more and more ground because of their clone armies. And in a race which reproduced with just cloning, there were millions of armies.
The Sontarans had launched this war because they had wanted to gain a foothold in this galaxy to help them with their never-ending war with the Rutan Host (Turner shuddered as she thought about the Rutans; the jellyfish-like aliens with changeling abilities and had the power to deliver vicious electric shocks had taken notice of the war, and had begun their offensives to take away the advantage the Sontarans wanted more than anything; she had encountered the Rutans more than once, and she had hated the encounters), but fighting the Sontarans was not easy. So far the Terran Empire's armies and navies had held them back, that was about all.
With each battle, the Sontarans slammed into the Empire's defences like a wrecking ball demolishing a tower block. Some pieces of Sontaran technology did find their way into their hands; dead bodies, translators, power cells, shattered fighters and destroyed warships which still contained a lot of military hardware and some weapons. The most valuable pieces of technology though were the data cores, which contained a lot of information on the Sontaran's communication codes and their plans, but some of them were so corrupted that Earth barely had a clue of where their main bases were and even how many Sontarans there were.
"Pull back! Pull back!"
Turner snapped back to attention when she heard the panicked shouts from the pilots, and she checked the tactical displays. More Sontaran fighters had appeared out of nowhere, and they were speeding towards the remaining fighters.
"Quick! Get the turbo lasers on those fighters!" She demanded.
"Captain, it might be a trap-!"
"Keep half of them on the Sontarans," Turner decided quickly when her mind realised the Sontarans could see a crack in their defences, and she didn't want or need that. "Fire the other half of the weapons at the Sontaran fighters. We need to hold them off and we need the fighters to do that properly."
Turner knew from long experience the Sontarans were not the type of race to bleed easily, but with a bit of luck reinforcements would arrive or they could find a way of cracking the Sontarans' weaknesses. The bridge seemed to explode when the Sontarans suddenly got through the minute crack, but the Dalek and Cyber derived weapons made short work of the Sontaran warfighters.
"Fire Disruptor torpedoes as soon as the Sontarans are in range," Turner snapped. More than once she wished they had a way of knowing what was going through a Sontarans' mind. Ever since their first contact the Sontarans had been beyond vicious, even more so than the Covenant; from what they'd learnt, the Covenant had been battered down themselves thanks to the Sontaran's superior battle tactics and their different tech base.
A console chirped.
"Captain, something's happening. Our battle computers are being reprogrammed!"
"What?"
"Confirmed. Captain, we're receiving transmissions from the other ships. They are reporting their battle computers are being reprogrammed, but all ships are reporting no loss in momentum in fighting the Sontarans."
Turner was struggling to comprehend what was happening. "How is this happening? How did our computers suddenly get reprogrammed in the middle of a battle?" She turned to the communications and security officers. "Get security to the computer cores. I want to know if someone got in. Instruct the other ships to spare a few bodies to do the same."
"Captain, whatever or whoever did this…it wasn't harmful, and the battle computer itself doesn't seem to have been compromised," Even as the officer reported it, she sounded dubious. "Our computer has received a massive upload on Sontaran battle tactics, weak points in their hull armours and shields."
Turner was not sure about trusting a computer that had just been tampered with, but the decision was taken out of her hands when something happened, "Captain, our weapons are locked onto the Sontaran ships. Sensors are cutting through the Sontaran stealth fields."
"What?" Turner knew enough about Sontaran technology to know while they didn't care about death, given their nature as clones, they had a love of warfare in the same way a hunter loved sportsmanship. Their ships were designed accordingly. They were protected by stealth countermeasure baffles which reflected the sensor beams away, just ever so slightly. The Sontarans loved it when an enemy wasted their firepower firing in different directions, giving them the optimal firing solution. As a tactic it was nearly perfect, it was as sadistic as the Sontarans were. Many of her friends had died because of it, and she had longed to pay them back.
"Opening fire, now," the weapons officer shouted.
Turner studied the screen in shock along with most of the crew as the waves of Sontaran fighters suddenly found themselves being blasted into oblivion. While she would love to see the expressions on those squashed faces, with their piggy little eyes, Turner knew her squadron would be torn apart by the techs back home as they struggled to work out what had just happened.
Xxx
As she looked upwards using her enhanced macro binoculars, the Doctor reflected on how easy it was to change the effects of the battle. The Sontaran war in this century was a guaranteed human victory after painstaking intelligence had allowed humanity and their allies to find the clone world, and the resultant gravity bomb like the one which had destroyed Ockora had levelled the solar system and defeated the Sontarans. With their foothold gone, it had been easy to drive the Sontarans away. For the next two centuries, the development of humanity and the other races, augmented by the pathetic wars waged by the Turians, and the Covenant against humanity, the Daleks and the Cybermen had accelerated. But the loss of life had hit them hard and it had taken longer for the allies to defeat the Sontaran stranglehold.
By doing this, the Doctor hoped to buy more time and safeguard more lives. Hacking into the battle computers was easy, thanks to the vortex manipulator which was centuries beyond anything the humans had. And after this, humanity and their allies would adjust their computers and begin fighting the Sontarans on a much more level playing field. The Doctor knew she was meddling in history, delving into the kind of philosophy that the Monk preached. But she was no longer that white-haired Time Lord who'd travelled through the universe, trying to keep hold of his TARDIS and keeping Susan safe; she hadn't been him for a long time. And ever since the day she had confronted Bennett after exposing his crimes to Vicki and the survivors of Dido after facing the Daleks on Earth, the Doctor's views on time meddling had changed. While she refused to change history since it would give her too much power, the Doctor knew she could still tweak the future.
The Doctor shook her head, letting her blonde hair fly. She flipped open the top of the vortex manipulator and tapped in some new coordinates. With another glance upwards, the Doctor triggered the device.