Batman/Command & Conquer: Red Gotham

By Christopher W. Blaine

e-mail: darth_yoshi@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMER: Batman and related characters and situations are ©2003 by DC Comics Inc./Yuri and related characters and situations are ©2003 by Westwood Games. All are used here without permission for fan-related entertainment purposes only. All original content is ©2003 by Christopher W. Blaine.

CHAPTER 6

At one time she had been a living weapon. She had studied fighting techniques under the Batman and criminal investigation techniques by listening to her police commissioner father. She had donned the costume of the original Batgirl and fought crime in Gotham City next to its primary protector.

Then years later she had decided to retire and looked forward to enjoying life as a simple civilian. She had wanted to marry and have children. She wanted to serve the people in a capacity that did not require her to beat the snot out of them. She received her doctorate in her early twenties and served one term as a United States congresswoman. By the time the Joker had shot her through the spine she had lived a life it would have taken four normal women to live.

But from there she did not stop. She refused to accept her disability as a handicap but instead looked at it as a challenge. She developed her mind so that it became as lethal as her body had once been and she put behind her all of the problems associated with the loss of her legs. She even found true love with a wonder, faithful and loyal man named Dick Grayson and there was the hope that one day they could have been married.

Then the Soviets invaded and pushed back not only America's super-heroes but also all of the troops that came to repel the invasion. Grayson, who was also Nightwing, refused to stand by and let Bludhaven, his adopted home, suffer under Communist rule. He had left her to protect a city that had never welcomed him and now she knew he had paid with his life for his naivety.

And still she grieved because she loved him for the simple philosophy that had guided him through life.

Barbara Gordon signed off of the videophone and left Bruce Wayne to handle his own broken heart. Bruce was used to tragedy and he would deal with this in his own way. Right now, though, there was no time to grieve. He had not asked her to do anything because they both knew that the communications were being recorded. The Allied command had hacked into the Batman's personal Gotham network in order to save time and it would be an entire week before Barbara could get the secondaries up and running with new encryption programs.

That didn't mean, though, that she could not hack into the Allied mainframe!

In order to use the Batman's network, there had to be a line linking the two. Barbara knew that the Allies used several hacking specialists in their network operations and she had a feeling she knew who had managed to get into the one she had designed. Her call sign was simply the "Lieutenant" and Barbara, as Oracle, had encountered several times before. Usually it was when the both of them trying to get into a Soviet network. In fact, Barbara had started to consider the Lieutenant an ally until this latest invasion.

She didn't completely blame the other hacker, but it would have been nice if she had just asked. Military types normally did not do that, however; the only thing they understood was force.

It took Barbara a good half hour before she found out exactly how her system had been broken into. It had been initially impossible because she could not guess who had done it. There were hundreds of military hackers but now that she knew that it had been the Lieutenant, she could find the hole.

A simple check of a chat room communication that she and the Lieutenant had a few months back revealed a small Trojan horse program that had slipped through the anti-virus software and firewall. It had lain dormant until it was activated by the time and date. This had been planned long in advance.

A way in was two-way street, however, and Barbara knew that she could use their own line of attack as a path for her own counter-attack.

Five hours later she pulled off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. Her mind was reeling from the information she had come across completely by accident. It had started with two hours of hacking and coding to get through a very impressive firewall. The reason it had been so impressive was because Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle and one-time boyfriend of Barbara had written it. Ted had been killed during the invasion of Hub City and his company had been federalized by President Luthor after the official declaration of emergency and martial law.

An hour later, using the authorization of Captain Atom, a super-hero that worked for the United States Army and had been a member of the Justice League of America (before he died in Moscow), Barbara was where she wanted to be. Luckily, the military was slow in recent months to audit command codes and authorizations. That happened when people were dying in droves to save civilization.

The Commander's personnel file was too classified even for Captain Atom, but there were some reference files that she was able to get into but not after writing a program that made her appear to be President Luthor's national security advisor. In those files she found a sub-folder that was under the name of Albert Einstein.

History indicated that at the end of the first American-Soviet War, Dr. Einstein, the most brilliant scientist that the Allies had employed, had disappeared from the public eye. It was assumed that for a job well done that he was given the opportunity to retire in relative obscurity. The file had indicated otherwise.

According to what she had read, Albert Einstein had done more to influence the future of the world than probably anyone else save Jesus Christ. In a transcript of an interview with the man, he revealed that he had built a time machine that had allowed him to travel back to the 1920's. There he had murdered an amateur artist and World War veteran named Adolf Hitler. Einstein had claimed that Hitler would eventually become leader of Germany and would drag the entire world into another World War.

Barbara had at first snickered at the thought. After the fighting had ceased in 1918, Germany had been a devastated nation. The idea that it could have built itself back up into a world power so quickly was ludicrous. But Einstein had insisted that what he had said had been the truth.

Unfortunately, Einstein had commented, his meddling with the past had allowed Stalin's Russia to build up its military until it got to the point it could challenge the whole world. In Einstein's true reality, Russia had been one of the Allies against Germany; now the Soviets were the enemy.

Einstein, unwilling to try and fix the past for fear of what else would happen, instead directed his energies to helping defeat Stalin. That war was won by the Allies and Einstein, before he could be properly honored, had hopped in his time machine to race to the future. He had appeared only months after the new Soviet invasion and he was now working with the Allies.

If that were true, then it meant that Einstein had a working time machine…

"I have my hands full here," was the reply to Barbara's request. She bit her lip to keep from interrupting the conversation. "We've beaten back every Soviet attempt to establish a base or stronghold here."

"Tatsu," Barbara began as she once again tried to convince Katana to aid her in her plight. "I know you have one of the old Justice League cargo jets there in Boise…"

The Japanese woman smiled. "Yes, the spoils of war." In reality the vehicle, designed to ferry large cargo from the Earth to the Justice League satellite, had been in Boise undergoing repairs when the war had started. Katana, a former member of the Outsiders (a group of heroes once led by the Batman) had "appropriated" the ship several months before when she out together her own resistance effort. "How is Bruce?" Katana asked.

Barbara sighed and slowly detailed the events of the past few days and as she did so, Katana's expression changed from one of mirth to anger. She had barely known Nightwing, but had respected him based upon his reputation. "I did not know that the war was going so badly on the east coast. We've had some really good successes here."

"This Commander thinks that he can get the ball rolling here, but I have another idea," Barbara replied. Katana asked if the Batman knew what she was doing. "My job is to anticipate the Batman's needs before he realizes he has them. Is that a problem?"

There was a pause as Barbara's grave words and stern tone sank in. Katana shook her head slowly. "This war, this conflict…it has changed all of us. Of course I will help you but I will require more help. I'm no super-hero anymore."

Barbara thanked her and started typing at her keyboard. The video screen split and both women were soon looking at a wire frame map of the United States. It started to zoom in on the state of Montana. "The Canadian military has established a free fire zone in this area; I know that Goldstar, the former partner of Booster Gold, is here coordinating refugee efforts. I think she can be convinced to help out."

Katana tapped the screen. "I don't know; I'd prefer someone with more experience…"

"Everyone with experience is dead," Barbara reminded her. "The League was taken down in Moscow, along with the People's Heroes and the Rocket Red Brigade," Barbara reminded her. It was the only consolation when discussing the loss of the Justice League; at least there were no Russian super-teams plaguing the Allies. "The Justice Society was hunted down one by one' the Titans and Outsiders disbanded…there is nobody else."

"I've got a line on some operatives that are on the gray side of the law," Katana mentioned. Were the Batman listening in, he would have forbid it. The rule of law still existed as far as he was concerned. There would be no villains working for him. The Batman had even sent the Catwoman away…though most of the Batman's inner circle agreed that he had done it for more personal reasons. "Moonbow escaped Pittsburgh and has made her way out to Salt Lake City."

Barbara agreed to the plan. "You realize the full ramifications of what I'm asking?"

Katana blew out. "You are asking me to retrieve something for a friend; that much I can do. That much I owe Bruce and you and everyone else in Gotham City who treated me well when I lived there. Japan, too, has suffered in this war and let us not forget my people have no great love for the men of Russia."

For a moment Barbara was struck by the irony of the situation. She was asking Katana, a woman of Japanese origin, to kidnap a German scientist and his time machine so an American could go back in time and set the past right. If successful, then Japan would become a world power of awesome proportions. But Japan and Germany would not survive intact and would instead suffer greatly in a World War that would change civilization forever.

But Katana knew none of this and Barbara was not sure she believed it. What of old Einstein was simply insane? What of none of this would do any good? There was a school of thought that said you could not change the past and you could not predict the future.

Then she had to consider why she was doing this. Would the Batman really approve? Was she using the war as a justification for playing God in order to save the life of one man? Was a single soul worth tearing apart the time stream? At least Einstein had mentioned six million souls…

"You don't want to know why I want…"

Katana shook her head. "The less I know, the better I'll feel. I will do this for honor's sake and nothing else. The reasons are not for me to worry about." Her warm smile then returned and for a moment, the scars that covered her face, a result of Soviet torturers, seemed to melt away and she was the beautiful young woman Barbara remembered. "I have missed being a hero."