Black and Red Chapter 10 Assault

Tim had snuck around Wayne Tower before. Sometimes, he, Dick, or Cass, (whoever happened to be around) would play hide and seek, or manhunt, or some other game of that sort while waiting for Bruce. The penalty for getting caught by adults (responsible adults, Dick not counting) was no more than a figurative slap on the wrist and a stern word from the Wayne patriarch about getting underfoot.

However, this bit of fun and games was not a case of the CEO's children playing around. This was teen vigilante Red Robin infiltrating the Tower with the intent to take over the supercomputer in the basement. Quite a bit more bother if caught. Good thing he knew the Tower so well.

Sneaking into the central security office was surprisingly easy. It was accessible via the vents, a weakness his Bruce counteracted by fitting narrow grill over the entrances (with a special catch in case one of them needed to sneak around), but this Bruce had merely ensured the ducts were too narrow for a full-grown man to fit through. Clearly he had yet to meet Selina Kyle. Well, Red Robin had always been a bit on the small side, so that wasn't a problem.

Before sliding into the surveillance office, he dropped some sleeping gas pellets. The two guards collapsed, and would wake with fuzzy memories and assume they'd been napping on the job. With luck, there would be no traces he'd ever been there.

"Oracle," he whispered into his earpiece. "I'm redirecting the camera feed now. Standby to create the loop." He inserted a computer disc and started sending the signal from each camera in turn back to his homemade PC in the Gordons' spare room, watching the slight lag as each one took an extra half-second to come back. After a minute or so with each one, his partner whispered an affirmative, and he moved on.

It took the best part of an hour to loop enough cameras for Tim's purposes, and the guards were starting to stir. "Okay, step two," he muttered, removing the disc, pulling the guards into their chairs and returning to the ducts. "Got the plans at hand?"

"Yeah," Oracle replied. "Third right, then second left to the main vertical shaft."

Two nights ago, Red Robin had traced the route he'd be taking through the Tower's ducts, and come across numerous inconsistencies with the official blueprints. Although it had been half-expected, given his Bruce had been known to make additional ducts purely for the sake of easier clandestine movement and 'forgetting' to file the changes, it had turned into an extremely frustrating night of dictating distances to Oracle to make a new map alongside the blueprints and back-tracking through annoyingly narrow passages, leaving him thinking longingly of the Tower back home, where the ducts were big enough for Bruce to crawl through.

"Reached the main vertical shaft," Red Robin reported. "How many floors do I go down again?" The ducts were not direct, the main shaft as narrow as any other and did not go down to the basement, meaning he needed to go to the one level the complex maze connected with the elevator shaft, on the other side of the Tower.

"Twelve, then you cross to the elevator shaft," Oracle reminded him.

"Right. Give me some radio silence." Red Robin reached into the storage compartments in his gauntlets and pulled out electromagnetic climbing pads. He slipped the strap over the back of his hands, pulling them tight, with the magnet on his palms and the switch nestled by his thumbs. He rolled onto his back, glad he'd had the foresight to retract his wings, and slapped both palms against the metal of the shaft above him. Then he wriggled until his legs hung down the shaft and his grippy boots planted firmly against the wall, pushing his lower back against the opposite wall to take the pressure off his arms and shoulders. By toggling the power on and off in the climbing pads, he had a safety hold in case he slipped.

The most difficult part was keeping track of the floors. Not all ducts entered the shaft from the same direction, and it required conscious effort to track each floor. After what seemed like an hour, but was more likely a few minutes, he reached the right opening, dropped below it, and crawled in headfirst.

"Which way now?" he asked, breaking the requested radio silence and pulling off his climbing pads.

"Uh, first right," Oracle answered, a slight rustling of paper coming over the comm as she shuffled the maps.

Red Robin followed her directions across to the elevator shaft that went down to the lower basement levels omitted from the filed plans. He'd found them while looking around previously in search of an area corresponding to the Bunker, the secondary cave Dick had favoured at the start of his tenure as Batman. He had indeed found signs of it, although with the cameras watched by security, he hadn't risked entering. It was most likely used as a base of operations after Wayne Manor had been burnt down (forget "Drunken Billionaire"; that was the same night the League of Shadows made their strike, and no way was that a coincidence.

Soon enough, he reached the elevator shaft. Carefully looking up and down, his night-vision lenses couldn't spot the elevator itself, lurking the gloom above. Rather than waste time with the magnets, he flicked out a pair of climbing hooks built into his gloves and jumped. The hooks caught on the cables and controlled his rapid descent, until he landed heavily at the bottom of the shaft.

The next stage was one that Red Robin privately found harrowing. He had to open the elevator door from within the shaft itself, and if the elevator descended before he could do so, he'd be crushed. Of course he had no reason to suspect Bruce would come down, unless he'd found the loops on the cameras, but…

First step was planting enough explosives to blow open the door, without hindering their ability to open. Doing so would eliminate any stealth elements, but was a necessary backup plan if he needed to get through the doors in a hurry. Next, he pulled out a cutting tool, located the most likely location of the opening mechanism, and cut. By carefully keeping track of every movement, he should be able to repair the damage enough to allay any suspicions. Once the mechanism was exposed, it was the work of but a moment to trip the controls to get the door open without damaging the mechanism.

The bunker was a large, white, open area. Various cases and work benches dotted the room. It took Red Robin a moment to re-orientate himself before reporting to Oracle. "I'm in," he said, turning back to the open doorway, popping the maintenance hatch over the call button, and closing it behind him.

"What's it like in there?" Oracle asked curiously.

Red Robin tilted his head slightly as he looked around, wondering what he could say without giving too much away about the bat-gear. "Like a storehouse of really cool stuff," he said eventually. "Got to have a look round when we're done."

"And the computer?"

"I see it." Red Robin padded silently over to the mainframe and sank into the chair. "Booting it up now."

As he waited, he caught sight of a strange, tank-like vehicle at the top of a ramp near the elevator. It was painted black, easily betraying its use, but it bore no resemblance to the sleek Batmobiles he was used to. Next to it stood a motorcycle- if you could call it that- that looked more like leftovers from the tank than a vehicle in its own right. Red Robin shook his head before returning to the computer.

It was now operative, with only a few passcodes needed to get in. A (relatively) simple algorithm showed the number of characters required for each, and Bruce's tendency to use his parents' deaths as his codes made it easy to get in. "Right, I'm connecting to our computer now," he reported. "Standby." Lines of code scrolled across the screen as he worked, hacking his homemade computer through pathways they'd left open just for this. "Okay, you should be able to access it now. Transfer the sentinel program across, I'm having a look around."

He switched his comm to receive only, and walked over to one of the display cabinets. It was the Suit. A very stiff-looking, heavily armoured suit that he couldn't quite picture his Bruce wearing around the cave, cowl around his neck and gloves tucked into his belt. The few photos Gordon had shown him presented a very stern, brutal Bat, and it had been hard to find the slight softenings of his features to make the visage he knew so well. He found his fingers drawn to touch the material, a Kevlar-Nomex weave they tended not to favour, preferring more flexible polymers. Of course, this Bat hadn't been introduced to the fast-flipping acrobatics of Dick Grayson.

Red Robin sighed. He hadn't anticipated seeing what gear a Batman never tempered by a Robin would create. A cabinet of batarangs. Drawers full of explosives. It was only when he came across a completely different shaped grapple that he realised what the real difference was.

When Bruce had been away, WayneTech had had to opportunity to bid on a large number of military contracts. Lucius Fox had only ever taken up a few, and never for arms. Some of the equipment was similar, if more advanced, than those pieces.

Batman was using reformatted military technology, rather than modifying, designing and creating his own. Red Robin frowned; this felt very different. He felt the strange, childish urge to run to his adoptive father, hug him, and reassure himself he was not…what? A soldier? A killer? He knew and understood that his Bruce had been tempered by years of experience, three sidekicks, the death of one and crippling of another. He knew this Bruce was different, but he still found himself responding as though…it was his Bruce down here in the bunker, gearing up as though for war and not the Mission.

He forced himself to put aside his unease and keep going. There were some fairly impressive analytical analysis tools for the sort of work they'd do manually, with good old fashioned detective work. He made a mental note to retrieve the plans for them and put them on a computer disc to take home, but mostly it was just spare equipment,

"Red Robin, I'm done," Oracle reported. He started, having almost forgotten about the partner in his ear.

"Yeah, I'll just bury our program," he muttered, flicking the link open, somewhat abashed as he returned to the computer. He started by removing the remote link he'd initiated, and waited for Oracle's confirmation the link she'd initiated was still there before systematically hunting down the sentinel and burying it beneath layers of protocol and firewalls, encoding it with a standard password among his family.

"That's it, we're done," he said at last, finishing the cover-up and shutting down the computer.

"Heading back now, then?" Oracle asked.

"Not just yet. I'd quite like to look around a bit more," he told her, moving back into the depths of the bunker, not looking at the suit and so maintaining is objectivity a little better.

Some of the gear could be useful. If he ran out of some things, he might be able to steal some more, but only if he got desperate. Stealing from the Bat was a bad idea.

The only person who'd even sort of gotten away with it was Jason Todd…

He'd take a proper inventory later, when he could raid the computer's files.

He should probably leave it now; time was progressing. Turning away, Red Robin headed back to the elevator, not looking forward to the repair work he'd have to do, nor relishing re-entering the cramped ducts. But it had to be done.

The elevator pinged, and the doors whooshed open. Red Robin crouched, and threw himself out of sight as a tall, bulky figure in a balaclava emerged.

AN: Next week, for the first time since I started regularly updating this piece, we will have two Black and Red updates in consecutive weeks. I will warn you, though: you may not like or approve of the direction I go. Rest assured, I have a plan. If you're really unhappy, please let me know, but watch your language on the publicly visible reviews, if you don't mind.

Also, I'm closing the poll next week. I intend to say a word or two about how I'm interpreting the results in the AN, so keep an eye out for that.

This week in Family Ties, Tim's got a thing or two to come to grips with...

See you next week

Katara