More Sci-Fi AU!
Title: Lost and Found
Author:
bastet_in_april
Rating: G
Characters: Cass, Dick, Tim
Word Count: 1932
Summary: Dick and Tim have a strange visitor who is searching for something important.
Notes: Written for
roguecatwoman. More of the Sci-Fi AU. Not entirely happy with the abruptness of the ending.
The clatter of Tim’s fingers across the keyboard and his frustrated sighs were the only audible sound, other than the mechanical white noise of all of Tim’s modified and jury-rigged electronics and the noises normally associated with the day to day functioning of the salvage yard. Those were mostly subdued now, since Dick was occupied with watching Tim rather than mucking about with the innards of any of the old ships and space junk that cluttered the yard.
“Problems, little brother?” Dick asked, settling down in a chair with a mug of tea, and sliding the other mug he carried onto the table, near Tim’s elbow.
Tim picked up the mug gratefully. “I’ve been trying to access the black box files of that ship you pulled in last week- the one with the weird hull breach?”
Dick nodded. It had been a barely space-worthy craft to begin with, but whatever had happened to it, it hadn’t been a mechanic failure. That hole, with its edges as clean as though someone had cut through warm wax with a scalpel…
“I’ve managed to load the files into my system but I can’t get it to read the logs. The files are partly corrupted, and the fact that the ship and its tech is so obsolete doesn’t help…” Tim shook his head in dismay. “It’s going to take longer than I’d hoped. I may need to call in some favors and get Oracle’s help on this, assuming Oracle contacts me anytime in the near future.”
Dick’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Ah, yes, your mysterious hacker friend who you won’t tell me anything about.”
Tim looked at him flatly. “Because I don’t know anything to tell you. Oracle contacts me, not the other way around, and I’ve no idea who he or she is or where to find them. I just know that Oracle’s skills make mine seem pale in comparison. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”
“All right, all right,” Dick held his hands up in surrender. “I’ll try to hold off teasing you until there’s actually something to tease you about.”
“I suppose I’ll just have to be satisfied with that,” Tim shot back wryly, taking a swallow of his tea.
Suddenly, as one, both dark heads turned towards the door that led out to the salvage yard.
“Did you hear…?”
“Shh.”
The sound came again, a sort of scuffling sound followed by a faint metallic clatter.
“Did Jason say he was going to be dropping by?” Tim whispered.
Dick shook his head, bewildered. “Jason’s off-world with Selina. Won’t be back for another two weeks.”
Tim’s eyebrows went up. “I thought you said you didn’t want to know the details of Jason’s work?”
“I don’t. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to know when to expect him back safe. It’s not that I don’t think Selina will watch his back out there, I just…”
“Feel the need to be hypocritically overprotective? It’s not like what you do out there is any less dangerous, Dick.”
Dick glared at him. “It’s Jason. It’s different.”
Tim softened. “I know, but don’t you think-”
Tim was cut off abruptly by the loud crash of a large piece of metal being tossed aside.
“Okay, there is definitely somebody out there,” Dick said, getting up and setting aside his mug. He shook his head in incredulity. “Seriously, why would anyone bother stealing from a salvage yard? Nothing out there is space-worthy. Anything we’re actually repairing and restoring is put away in the hangar.” He stalked towards the door, visibly curious.
Tim hastily abandoned his own tea and moved to join Dick.
The two young men stepped out into the yard, where they could hear even more clearly the sound of someone rummaging through the scrap parts and wrecked ships. They picked their way through the salvaged wrecks of lost or abandoned ships in the direction of the sounds. As they closed in on the noises, it became clear that whoever was making them was actually inside the very wreck that they had discussed earlier, and whose black box files had so stumped Tim.
Making their way between torn up bits of metal and the skeletal structures of half-stripped ships, Dick and Tim reached the ugly matte gray and rust red ship with the perfectly circular hole marring its otherwise intact form. The doors to its passenger area were gaping open. Dick and Tim paused briefly to eye one another before hauling themselves up through the doorway, paint flaking away under their fingers whenever their hands clutched the metal sides of the door. They were making their way into the belly of the ship when the intruder emerged from a passage, glanced at them blithely and simply brushed past them back out of the ship. Dick and Tim stared blankly after her for a moment and then scrambled to follow.
By the time they caught up with the intruder, it was because she had paused to wait expectantly for them in the doorway leading back into the home. She graciously punched the button to open the still-unlocked door and gestured for Dick and Tim to precede her inside. She was carrying a small object clasped to her chest, presumably it was whatever she had come to find. Dick shrugged and nodded at the young woman. “All right,” he said. “We may as well talk this over inside. You never did finish your tea, Tim.” The young woman nodded firmly, and went to perch on the edge of the table, leaning on the space beside Tim’s computer equipment, as Dick and Tim resumed their seats in their chairs. Dick made as if to get the stranger an extra chair, but she waved him off. Tim sat back to sip at his cooling tea, studying their guest pensively.
The intruder in the scrap yard was a young woman of Asian descent about Tim’s age, or perhaps a bit older, with a small, graceful figure, brown eyes and black hair cropped to just above her shoulders. She was wearing a plain black flightsuit with no adornments or insignia. The young woman was still clutching whatever she had pulled out the ship, as if it were deeply precious to her. As far as Tim could tell, it was a tiny portable file compact, and couldn’t be storing anything large or any valuable information that would be carrying security tags and encryptions.
Dick made all three of them fresh mugs of tea, handing them out before settling down again. “So, you were obviously looking for something specific and knew where to find it. Something of yours was on that ship?”
The young woman nodded, clutching the file compact possessively, shooting a fierce glare at them.
Tim hastily reassured her. “We aren’t going to take it away from you. It’s just that we’ve been trying to find out what happened to that ship. Were you on it?”
The stranger relaxed slightly, but shook her head, staring down at the object she had rescued from the ship’s wreckage forlornly.
“You knew someone who was,” Tim concluded quietly. The woman still hadn’t said a single word during the entire exchange, and it was beginning to discomfit him.
The young woman’s face crumpled and she hid it quickly in her hands, slumping in her seat, her shoulders heaving.
Dick was immediately up out of his chair, patting their guest on the shoulders and murmuring whatever comforts came to mind. Tim bit his lip, at a loss for what to do other than scoot closer to the stranger, in hopes that that might help. Finally, her shaking subsided, and she wiped her face, looking up at them again.
“What is your name?” Tim asked, after a moment.
The young woman opened her mouth, paused, frowned, and then shook her head.
Dick blinked, frowning, coming to the same realization that Tim had. Their visitor hadn’t said a word, this entire time. She clearly followed their conversation, so it wasn’t that she spoke another language. Dick tried signing Tim’s question again, in hopes that knowing that he could read signs would urge her to communicate with them that way if she was holding back because she thought they wouldn’t know signs, but she only shook her head in incomprehension. Some sort of recent injury that had caused the loss of her voice, and she hadn’t had the chance to learn to sign yet?
The dark-haired woman looked deeply frustrated. Abruptly she turned to Tim’s computer, and ran a hand across it. The screen minimized the files Tim had been attempting to restore opening a new command prompt box. Tim had started out of his seat in alarm, but he subsided, watching the screen in fascination. The stranger carefully kept her hand in contact with the computer as she pulled up a couple of partial specs that were enough to make Tim’s blood chill. Carefully bolded for their reading convenience was the script: Project Name: Cassandra.
Tim was actually shaking, he was so angry at what had been done to her. “You can’t talk to us at all, can you? Someone made you this way, changed you when you were a child, so that you can talk to machines, but as a consequence you can’t speak at all!”
Cassandra nodded.
Dick shivered. He couldn’t even imagine what changing a child to that degree would entail, but it would have been terribly physically and mentally taxing and very illegal. That Cassandra had even survived that degree of modification was a miracle. “Is that what you were looking for? Were the people who did this to you on that ship?” he asked, wanting to hit someone.
Cassandra shook her head, looking mildly affronted. She leaned over and plugged the file compact into Tim’s computer, so that they could see what it contained, and settled back with a wistful look.
It was a fragment of a video file labeled “steph”. A blonde girl about Tim’s age had her head tilted back and was laughing joyfully, her blue eyes full of tears of mirth. Cass’s fingers traced the girl’s grin wistfully, as the clip repeated endlessly on loop.
“Oh,” Tim said quietly. “She… was on that ship?”
Cass nodded. Stopping the file and removing the storage cube from the computer, she turned to face them. The computer next to her pulled up a search box.
“You’re trying to find out what happened to her,” Dick concluded. “Well, so are we, so we might as well look together.”
Tim raised an eyebrow at Dick.
“What? We were already trying to find out what happened to that ship, and she was on it, so we’re trying to find out what happened to her, as well. Besides, you can’t tell me you don’t want to help find her, Tim.”
“I do,” Tim agreed immediately, his mind flitting to the girl in the video. “It’s just strange; she seemed familiar.”
Cass cocked her head and Dick stared in surprise. “You know her?” he asked.
“No,” Tim clarified. “It’s more like I’ve seen her picture somewhere but can’t place where.”
“Looks like you’re going to end up owing Oracle a lot of favors whenever you manage to contact him or her,” Dick told Tim. “We still need help with those files, we could certainly use that kind of information-gathering expertise in our search for the girl in the video, and we’re going to need help finding a way to help Cass learn to talk, despite what’s been done to her.”
Author:
bastet_in_april
Rating: G
Characters: Cass, Dick, Tim
Word Count: 1932
Summary: Dick and Tim have a strange visitor who is searching for something important.
Notes: Written for
roguecatwoman. More of the Sci-Fi AU. Not entirely happy with the abruptness of the ending.
The clatter of Tim’s fingers across the keyboard and his frustrated sighs were the only audible sound, other than the mechanical white noise of all of Tim’s modified and jury-rigged electronics and the noises normally associated with the day to day functioning of the salvage yard. Those were mostly subdued now, since Dick was occupied with watching Tim rather than mucking about with the innards of any of the old ships and space junk that cluttered the yard.
“Problems, little brother?” Dick asked, settling down in a chair with a mug of tea, and sliding the other mug he carried onto the table, near Tim’s elbow.
Tim picked up the mug gratefully. “I’ve been trying to access the black box files of that ship you pulled in last week- the one with the weird hull breach?”
Dick nodded. It had been a barely space-worthy craft to begin with, but whatever had happened to it, it hadn’t been a mechanic failure. That hole, with its edges as clean as though someone had cut through warm wax with a scalpel…
“I’ve managed to load the files into my system but I can’t get it to read the logs. The files are partly corrupted, and the fact that the ship and its tech is so obsolete doesn’t help…” Tim shook his head in dismay. “It’s going to take longer than I’d hoped. I may need to call in some favors and get Oracle’s help on this, assuming Oracle contacts me anytime in the near future.”
Dick’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Ah, yes, your mysterious hacker friend who you won’t tell me anything about.”
Tim looked at him flatly. “Because I don’t know anything to tell you. Oracle contacts me, not the other way around, and I’ve no idea who he or she is or where to find them. I just know that Oracle’s skills make mine seem pale in comparison. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”
“All right, all right,” Dick held his hands up in surrender. “I’ll try to hold off teasing you until there’s actually something to tease you about.”
“I suppose I’ll just have to be satisfied with that,” Tim shot back wryly, taking a swallow of his tea.
Suddenly, as one, both dark heads turned towards the door that led out to the salvage yard.
“Did you hear…?”
“Shh.”
The sound came again, a sort of scuffling sound followed by a faint metallic clatter.
“Did Jason say he was going to be dropping by?” Tim whispered.
Dick shook his head, bewildered. “Jason’s off-world with Selina. Won’t be back for another two weeks.”
Tim’s eyebrows went up. “I thought you said you didn’t want to know the details of Jason’s work?”
“I don’t. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to know when to expect him back safe. It’s not that I don’t think Selina will watch his back out there, I just…”
“Feel the need to be hypocritically overprotective? It’s not like what you do out there is any less dangerous, Dick.”
Dick glared at him. “It’s Jason. It’s different.”
Tim softened. “I know, but don’t you think-”
Tim was cut off abruptly by the loud crash of a large piece of metal being tossed aside.
“Okay, there is definitely somebody out there,” Dick said, getting up and setting aside his mug. He shook his head in incredulity. “Seriously, why would anyone bother stealing from a salvage yard? Nothing out there is space-worthy. Anything we’re actually repairing and restoring is put away in the hangar.” He stalked towards the door, visibly curious.
Tim hastily abandoned his own tea and moved to join Dick.
The two young men stepped out into the yard, where they could hear even more clearly the sound of someone rummaging through the scrap parts and wrecked ships. They picked their way through the salvaged wrecks of lost or abandoned ships in the direction of the sounds. As they closed in on the noises, it became clear that whoever was making them was actually inside the very wreck that they had discussed earlier, and whose black box files had so stumped Tim.
Making their way between torn up bits of metal and the skeletal structures of half-stripped ships, Dick and Tim reached the ugly matte gray and rust red ship with the perfectly circular hole marring its otherwise intact form. The doors to its passenger area were gaping open. Dick and Tim paused briefly to eye one another before hauling themselves up through the doorway, paint flaking away under their fingers whenever their hands clutched the metal sides of the door. They were making their way into the belly of the ship when the intruder emerged from a passage, glanced at them blithely and simply brushed past them back out of the ship. Dick and Tim stared blankly after her for a moment and then scrambled to follow.
By the time they caught up with the intruder, it was because she had paused to wait expectantly for them in the doorway leading back into the home. She graciously punched the button to open the still-unlocked door and gestured for Dick and Tim to precede her inside. She was carrying a small object clasped to her chest, presumably it was whatever she had come to find. Dick shrugged and nodded at the young woman. “All right,” he said. “We may as well talk this over inside. You never did finish your tea, Tim.” The young woman nodded firmly, and went to perch on the edge of the table, leaning on the space beside Tim’s computer equipment, as Dick and Tim resumed their seats in their chairs. Dick made as if to get the stranger an extra chair, but she waved him off. Tim sat back to sip at his cooling tea, studying their guest pensively.
The intruder in the scrap yard was a young woman of Asian descent about Tim’s age, or perhaps a bit older, with a small, graceful figure, brown eyes and black hair cropped to just above her shoulders. She was wearing a plain black flightsuit with no adornments or insignia. The young woman was still clutching whatever she had pulled out the ship, as if it were deeply precious to her. As far as Tim could tell, it was a tiny portable file compact, and couldn’t be storing anything large or any valuable information that would be carrying security tags and encryptions.
Dick made all three of them fresh mugs of tea, handing them out before settling down again. “So, you were obviously looking for something specific and knew where to find it. Something of yours was on that ship?”
The young woman nodded, clutching the file compact possessively, shooting a fierce glare at them.
Tim hastily reassured her. “We aren’t going to take it away from you. It’s just that we’ve been trying to find out what happened to that ship. Were you on it?”
The stranger relaxed slightly, but shook her head, staring down at the object she had rescued from the ship’s wreckage forlornly.
“You knew someone who was,” Tim concluded quietly. The woman still hadn’t said a single word during the entire exchange, and it was beginning to discomfit him.
The young woman’s face crumpled and she hid it quickly in her hands, slumping in her seat, her shoulders heaving.
Dick was immediately up out of his chair, patting their guest on the shoulders and murmuring whatever comforts came to mind. Tim bit his lip, at a loss for what to do other than scoot closer to the stranger, in hopes that that might help. Finally, her shaking subsided, and she wiped her face, looking up at them again.
“What is your name?” Tim asked, after a moment.
The young woman opened her mouth, paused, frowned, and then shook her head.
Dick blinked, frowning, coming to the same realization that Tim had. Their visitor hadn’t said a word, this entire time. She clearly followed their conversation, so it wasn’t that she spoke another language. Dick tried signing Tim’s question again, in hopes that knowing that he could read signs would urge her to communicate with them that way if she was holding back because she thought they wouldn’t know signs, but she only shook her head in incomprehension. Some sort of recent injury that had caused the loss of her voice, and she hadn’t had the chance to learn to sign yet?
The dark-haired woman looked deeply frustrated. Abruptly she turned to Tim’s computer, and ran a hand across it. The screen minimized the files Tim had been attempting to restore opening a new command prompt box. Tim had started out of his seat in alarm, but he subsided, watching the screen in fascination. The stranger carefully kept her hand in contact with the computer as she pulled up a couple of partial specs that were enough to make Tim’s blood chill. Carefully bolded for their reading convenience was the script: Project Name: Cassandra.
Tim was actually shaking, he was so angry at what had been done to her. “You can’t talk to us at all, can you? Someone made you this way, changed you when you were a child, so that you can talk to machines, but as a consequence you can’t speak at all!”
Cassandra nodded.
Dick shivered. He couldn’t even imagine what changing a child to that degree would entail, but it would have been terribly physically and mentally taxing and very illegal. That Cassandra had even survived that degree of modification was a miracle. “Is that what you were looking for? Were the people who did this to you on that ship?” he asked, wanting to hit someone.
Cassandra shook her head, looking mildly affronted. She leaned over and plugged the file compact into Tim’s computer, so that they could see what it contained, and settled back with a wistful look.
It was a fragment of a video file labeled “steph”. A blonde girl about Tim’s age had her head tilted back and was laughing joyfully, her blue eyes full of tears of mirth. Cass’s fingers traced the girl’s grin wistfully, as the clip repeated endlessly on loop.
“Oh,” Tim said quietly. “She… was on that ship?”
Cass nodded. Stopping the file and removing the storage cube from the computer, she turned to face them. The computer next to her pulled up a search box.
“You’re trying to find out what happened to her,” Dick concluded. “Well, so are we, so we might as well look together.”
Tim raised an eyebrow at Dick.
“What? We were already trying to find out what happened to that ship, and she was on it, so we’re trying to find out what happened to her, as well. Besides, you can’t tell me you don’t want to help find her, Tim.”
“I do,” Tim agreed immediately, his mind flitting to the girl in the video. “It’s just strange; she seemed familiar.”
Cass cocked her head and Dick stared in surprise. “You know her?” he asked.
“No,” Tim clarified. “It’s more like I’ve seen her picture somewhere but can’t place where.”
“Looks like you’re going to end up owing Oracle a lot of favors whenever you manage to contact him or her,” Dick told Tim. “We still need help with those files, we could certainly use that kind of information-gathering expertise in our search for the girl in the video, and we’re going to need help finding a way to help Cass learn to talk, despite what’s been done to her.”