Day 21 of 100

Volume 1, Chapter 11

THE BREACH SHIP WAVERIDER
(ARGUS designation)
THE TIME SHIP WAVERIDER
(GRANT INNOVATIONS designation)

MED BAY

Winn had led the way, guiding Roy as he carried Miss Grant in his arms and Rory as he trailed behind them, as they brought the injured stowaway from her secret home of years and up to the med bay. Upon arrival, he'd incited the man to set her down carefully on one of the two chairs.

"Cat, we…" he'd started, absentmindedly calling to the ship AI, before remembering she wasn't an AI, and she was the one presently in need of assistance. With a frown at his own mishap, he had moved to start the scan himself. "If you hadn't seen her…" he breathed out, looking to the two aliens standing by. In all the time she had been down there, unknown to the rest of them, all the times the ship had met turbulence like this… Had she ever been incapacitated this way before? No, she couldn't have, or else they would have run diagnostics upon finding that 'Cat' wasn't responding, right?

"Who is this woman?" Rory asked the question Winn had yet to answer for them. He looked back at them with a sigh.

"Long story," he told them. Maybe he could get her back down there before anyone else found out, asked the two of them not to say anything… fix that hole in the wall…

"How about you start telling it?" He looked up at the sound of Rip's voice. He stood there, along with Gideon, Slade, and Ralph. They approached now, looking at the woman laid unconscious before them. Another sigh, and he told what he could.

"This is Catherine Grant, CEO of Grant Innovations, the creator of the ship you're standing on. Also she's from the future. Also she's Cat," he motioned around them as some shorthand to indicate the AI they all knew. Already this piece of information had them all silently stunned. "Far as I know, she was on the ship when Leonard… acquired it… and she's been hiding down in a hidden compartment of the ship, passing herself off as an AI the whole time, and none of us knew she was there, until I found her quarters by accident and she revealed herself to me. When the ship was hit coming into War, she sustained some injury I am now trying to identify, and was knocked out. Roy here saw her through the floors with his… eyes… and then we got her out and brought her here. Sidebar, there is a hole in a wall somewhere, which will be repaired. Also the repairs to the ship are not completed yet."

He stopped, gave a tip of the head to indicate he was done.

The six standing around the med bay, having listened to this explanation now stood in sustained silence. There was little to no space for any of them to find fault in the tale. Those of them who had been calling the Waverider home for any amount of time had of course seen the markings of Grant Innovations here and there throughout the ship. They had never given it that much thought, truth be told. They had never even known where this ship had come from, only that it was able to cross the breaches. Still, could they believe that this person they had never met before could have been in their midst all along without their knowing it?

Whether or not they could, the truth was they didn't have time to give it proper consideration, not now.

"Right... Will you stay here and see to her for now?" Ralph asked Winn. He nodded. "There's a situation out there, we're off to join the group at Stein Labs."

"Wait, you guys, you're... you're going out there? Into War Quarter?" Winn frowned, surprised.

"Unfortunately we don't have much of a choice. We'll keep you posted."

"Okay..." was all Winn could say as the four of them left the med bay. He turned back to Roy and Rory. "Don't suppose you two could see about the ship repairs while I look after her?"

"We're on it," Roy agreed.

"Would you like us to close that hole in the wall?" Rory added.

"Please," Winn sighed as they left. "Alright, Miss Grant, let's see about waking you up."

X

There would be three more to join the four of them heading off ship and past the ARGUS gates. M'gann would follow her teammates, along with J'onn, while Mike, seeking to assist his friends in what way he could, would also join them. Their added presence would either help matters or make them worse.

Ralph, Rip, Gideon and Slade, the four of their crew to have come out of this quarter had at one time been jokingly referred to as the 'WarRiders,' and the name had come to stick. It bordered on irony, as War Quarter was the one place where they wouldn't go, not out in the open, not usually. They were protected, so long as they remained within the bounds of ARGUS, but through those gates they remained fugitives... deserters... Under normal circumstances, they would remain on the ship, leave the rest of the team to handle whatever situation would take them out into the quarter, but this was not an option, not today. They would just have to take that risk and hope no one recognized them.

"No wings, no speed," Ralph had still reminded them as they moved toward the gates. Gideon had given him a pointed look for it. They had done their best to cover themselves up without giving off the distinct impression that they were trying to hide who they were. "Sorry..." he'd told them. He was nervous, they understood. They were all nervous.

They had grown up in this quarter, they had all gotten to the point where they had enlisted, and in one way or another their lives had been veered off course because of the programs.

Slade Wilson had seen Project Mercury formed around him, following the incident which gave him his speed. He would never have suspected that he would one day find himself with any sort of power beyond what personal attributes and training had brought him, and then from one day to another he had become a speedster. Until he'd come along, there had been none of these special projects, but after Mercury had come attempts to replicate his incident with purpose and with varied results. It wasn't long after this that he'd come to understand what his worth had become to his superiors. And after that he had fled.

And then there were the Hawks. There was Rip Hunter, who had volunteered for special projects, as plenty of his fellow soldiers had done, though few were selected... He had been selected, and he had submitted himself to whatever treatments had been necessary. Whatever inconvenience he had run into along the way, he had gone right along with it... until he'd met her. Actually, before he'd met her... until he'd felt her. He had felt her anguish first, though he hadn't understood what it meant, not until he'd met her, another recruit to Project Horus, but with unfortunate results... She had no memories of her life before Horus. She only had one name left... Gideon.

It hadn't even been because of this that they'd escaped, not really. It was just... everything, what they'd been put through in order to get to what they'd become, through to the realization that, in the end, the two of them were expendable. Him and Gideon in particular, the first wave, with that unintentional deep link... They didn't want that for the next waves of Project Horus. It hadn't been for his sake, it was her... He'd needed to protect her, and he had. He'd taken the both of them out of there, and that was how they'd come across Slade, how they'd lived on the run for a while.

And Ralph Dibny, well... he'd been one of those they'd been running from, hadn't he? He hadn't been part of a project, no, they wouldn't have him. It was an old injury, the same one which had almost sidelined him entirely, and searching for the fugitives had been his way of regaining what he'd lost of himself. But in the end, when he HAD found them, he hadn't turned them in: he'd helped them. And now that they had become part of the Waverider team, he was just as much of a deserter as they were... and they were friends, family.

None of the four of them had gone past those gates since the day they'd been taken aboard the Waverider for the first time, and with good reason. Now, going back... it felt like the worst idea they might have had. But there was no choice to it. The situation was too dire, and their knowledge of the terrain, of the people, along with the absence of the majority of their team, left them no choice. It was time to cross the gates.

"Are you sure about this?" M'gann asked them as they stood there. "I can take the others with me."

"No," Slade told her, never looking away from the gates. "We're going." There was no need to ask the others. They all had that same sort of determined look on their faces. If they weren't ready now, they would never be.

The gates opened, and they walked through. Almost as soon as they'd cleared them, they were closed again, the guards stepping back into place. The echo went on resonating in their ears, a feat in and of itself, in the din of the city opening out before them.

"It hasn't changed at all, has it?" Gideon asked Rip. Even without her memories, it seemed like she knew, and he had shaken his head in confirmation. To some extent, the loss of her memories had never been an issue to her. It was hard to miss something she didn't remember, much as other people around her insisted that she should want to remember who she was before. They saw her as empty, barely a real person, didn't they? Well, she didn't. She knew who she was. And Rip, he knew it, too. Rip was as much a part of her as her wings.

"I do wish you hadn't brought the Atom suit with you," M'gann had told Mike, all the while keeping an eye on J'onn as he took in his surroundings, unsure what being in a place like this would do to him.

"Only a precaution," he promised her. He understood why she wouldn't want him to pull it from his pocket, to put it on. In a place like this, if any part of that suit fell in the wrong hands...

X

BREACH EARTH, WAR QUARTER

STEIN LABS

They were waiting. There was trouble out there, but they were waiting for backup, for some way to approach the site that Doctor Stein had located, an 'incident' earlier that day which they now knew to involve the Mist water. Their masks wouldn't protect them this time, so there was nothing for them to do BUT to wait, and they did. Some of them were working through the information they had, hoping to come up with something, while the rest could only stand, or sit, walk about...

Alexandra had been waiting, not only for the Waverider team, but for a moment, a window of opportunity. When she'd found it, she'd taken it.

"Sorry, excuse me, Doctor Zeta?" she'd approached the woman, sitting at the small desk which had once belonged to her husband, Eliot. She looked up. "I... I realize the time might not be the best, it's just..."

"You want to talk about Kara's time here," Laura Zeta guessed, and Alexandra nodded. The woman indicated another chair nearby. As Alexandra sat, Laura reached into a drawer, pulling out a framed photograph she now handed over. There stood Laura Zeta, with a man who had to be Eliot Zeta, and between them... Kara was just a bit older than she'd been when she'd disappeared here, maybe sixteen or seventeen, but it was striking nonetheless, having nothing of the gap between her disappearance and her return.

The girl in that photo looked happy. She smiled... She smiled in a way Alexandra didn't know that she'd ever seen her sister smile since her return to Haven. It took her breath away just a bit.

"She should take it with her, when she goes back home again," Laura declared, looking across the room to where Kara stood talking with Seeker. Alexandra looked, too. Laura was so convinced she would leave again... Alexandra wasn't so sure she would.

"Our father was killed, in that same moment when Kara was thrown into this quarter," she told Laura Zeta. "For a long time, I was lead to believe she'd died, too. When she... when she came here..."

"She was lost, scared. She didn't know who she was. Eliot and I, and Doctor Stein, we did our best to help her, just to keep her alive at first, and then after that. We didn't know about the breaches, the other quarters, though Doctor Stein did, and when he realized this child was not from here, he had told us. But she was alone, could have come from any one of them, and she didn't remember who she was, couldn't have pointed us in the right direction, and then... the best we could do was to look after her, to protect her."

"And turn her into a meta," Alexandra added, though there was no animosity in the statement. Laura still bowed her head, bearing her personal shame.

"The way she was, when we found her, it was the best we could do to treat her, knowing it might... unlock some dormant potential in her. She might not have survived if not for it." She looked down at the picture sitting between them. "We should have told her earlier, explained to her the possibilities, but we..." They'd loved her, and they'd sought to protect her. They had been her parents. Alexandra had wanted to know that she had been cared for in all those years, and there really was no doubt to it, was there?

Across the room, Kara had been left alone as the wait had started, the feeling going around being that she needed some time to herself, to process all that she had discovered in returning to this place. Eventually, she had become aware of Seeker's now standing at her side, without saying a word.

"I lost my father and brother when I was ten, lost my mother when I was seventeen," she spoke after a few seconds. "Before that, I'd been kept hidden away in our home, away from the war to the point where I didn't even really understand there WAS a war. Then one day my mother was killed, and suddenly I was all on my own. A year after that, I got the power that made me Seeker. I've never set foot back in my old home, and I can only imagine what being back here must be like for you. I also remember, when I did leave it for the first time, seeing what the world was like out there, realizing I'd been kept in the dark..."

"I should have asked you to wait before you took me to Haven," Kara had finally spoken, cutting in. "I should have told them I was going, should have said goodbye... Maybe I wouldn't have gone, or... I don't know..." she shook her head.

"Maybe your father wouldn't have died?" Seeker had made a guess at what the unspoken end of that sentence would have been. Kara let out a breath. So they'd both figured the same cause for Eliot Zeta's demise, hadn't they? "Questions like that, you might be better off putting them aside, not digging. You might not like what you find out," Seeker pointed out, drifting away just a bit, thinking of her mother.

X

WAVERIDER MED BAY

When Catherine Grant regained consciousness, it took a few seconds of her eyes scanning the room before she understood exactly where she was. For one, she wasn't in her quarters. Also, she was in the med bay.

She tried to sit up, which turned out to be a mistake, which sent her head spinning.

"Woah, hey, take it easy, you're still recovering," Winn had caught hold of her and helped her lie back down.

"What am I doing here?" she asked, closing her eyes until the world would settle down.

"Do you remember crossing into War? The ship took a hit, you fell in the turbulence, you were injured, we found you and brought you here."

"The ship..." she asked, and he frowned.

"Being repaired as we speak. But how are you feeling?"

"Repaired by who?" she asked, once again showing more concern for the ship than herself.

"Superman and Valor," he informed her, and she laid there for a moment until she remembered who they were. "Alright, I suppose."

"You'll be alright, you just need to rest."

"Who else knows I'm here?"

"Ralph, the Hawks, Slade... Probably whoever they took out into War with them..."

"They went out into the quarter?" she asked, startled. "Call them back, they can't be out there, if they're caught..." The world started to spin again, and Winn nodded, helping her back down.

"Again, you need to relax, okay? They'll be fine."

X

OUT IN WAR QUARTER

They were almost at Stein Labs when they came across a situation on the street. A man and girl were running away from a group of soldiers, each hauling bulging bags of what looked like food, stolen, by the sound of the soldiers' shouts. The four WarRiders and their friends had stood there, watching as the girl touched a red jewel around her neck. The jewel glowed bright, and then with a wave of her arm, the girl had sent out a mighty gust of wind, knocking the soldiers away from them enough that she and her partner could get away.

"What was that..." Mike blinked, looking after the escaping duo.

"Seen her before. I think they call her Mistral," M'gann told him. "We shouldn't stay here, we should keep moving."

They were about to do just that, and they would have... only they were surrounded. There had been another group of soldiers coming along, backup for the first group maybe, until they'd spotted the seven of them standing there, and somehow they'd recognized the four fugitives, because they had their weapons trained on them. And looking forward again, the first group of soldiers had recovered, only to pull out their weapons, too, seeing the second group's targets.

"Everyone stay calm," Ralph spoke slowly. "They may not know..."

"Wilson, Hunter, Gideon, Dibny. On your knees, hands behind your heads," one of the soldiers stepped forward. "Heard a rumor you were running with those Waverider people," the man declared, waving his weapon toward M'gann. "Never thought you'd have the guts to show your faces. Now. On your knees. You're under arrest."


TO BE CONTINUED (tomorrow, in volume 2)