The Last Great Time War: part III

The Fall of Arcadia, part II

The Renegade looked at how his knuckles whitened as he turned the lever to pull the TARDIS out of the time vortex. That was not the only sign of his advanced age. His joints ached even more than the Doctor's had before he regenerated. His hair was almost white. Every day was a little more exhausting than the last, and each time he slept it gave him less respite than before. His body only had a few more years left at most. The fiery warrior potion that created it had made it last longer than an ordinary regeneration would have, but that potion was almost dried up. It had been nearly nine hundred years since he drank it. Nine hundred years on the front line.

Still, the Renegade's body wasn't dying just yet, and until it did, he wasn't going to stop fighting or slow down. At last the end of that horrible War was in sight. Even if the assault on Gallifrey failed, even if all his other plans failed, the Renegade had set up a final backup plan. The War and suffering would be over at last, one way or another.

The TARDIS and the rest of the remaining NTA fleet phased into the Gallifreyan system. The Daleks were already there with well over a million saucers, obscuring Gallifrey from view as they hammered away at the sky trenches and fought with hundreds of thousands of Time Lord warships.

The NTA fleet fired indiscriminately, trying to clear a path to the weakest point in Gallifrey's defenses. Wave after wave of violence rippled through the fleets. The Time Lords were turning the full power of the Eye of Harmony into driving away the attackers, while each relative second their sky trenches and other barriers repelled enough firepower to reduce an unshielded planet to subatomic particles billions of times over.

The conflagration filled Gallifrey's entire galaxy. The vortex pathways were full of fleets and living paradoxes fighting their way to Gallifrey. All battles were converging on it. Gallifrey was now at the center of the War. Just as Susan predicted, the sky trenches were weakening. The transduction barriers around the system were already breached. Soon Gallifrey's surface would, for (possibly) the first time, become a battleground in the War to end all Time Wars.

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Soldiers and citizens looked to the skies in the city of Arcadia, Gallifrey's main military base. It had been chosen as such in the early days of the War because it was on the opposite side of the planet from the Capitol and therefore drew enemy attacks away from it.
Ripples and splashes of glowing energy, almost like lightning, surged through the orangish-black skies as the sky trenches weakened. Millions of guns pointed upward, waiting for a crack to appear. The main spire of the city spewed a continuous stream of energy and missiles at the attackers in orbit. Mothers held on to their children as they shivered with terror. The fathers and older siblings were all gone fighting. The moment children were old enough to know how to operate a TARDIS, they were taken away to be given a rushed training and then sent to battle. Every woman was always pregnant in order to produce as many soldiers for the War as possible, and those were just to become TARDIS captains and other important positions. The rest of the soldiers were artificially grown ("loomed") by the trillions and conditioned to follow orders without mercy or conscience. Now, the unborn and unloomed children might never even get the chance to die endless deaths in battle and be labeled "missing in action" or "trapped in action" as so many had before. "Killed in action" had not existed for a long time, as it was meaningless in a Time War where almost nothing was fixed and anything could un-happen.

A hairline crack appeared in the sky. Every weapon on the surface for miles around fired at it as attackers poured in, creating a massive explosion that hurled flaming and molten debris everywhere. The hellish rain bounced off emergency deflector shields just above the buildings as armies of Daleks, Degradations, Travesties, Meanwhiles, and Neverweres filled the skies. A secondary layer of sky trenches activated that ran under the ground and cut Arcadia off from the rest of the planet.