The holy journey of shrapnel. He is wearing a jacket made of flak. He is drinking one of the few coffee varieties to get off planet before the coffee rust killed it. He has money. Where do you spend platinum backed standard? Here – about the only damned place left that isn’t asking for a pound of flesh; gene-stock was the thing these days, and he knew for a fact that what was packed into his double-helix was worth more than any little metal disc.
He dialled in a worm-whole and watched it unravel from the tesseract insertion point – this one had programmed parameters for an instant dig and lock. He had been doing this all around the city, and at some point this place would be totally wormed. He wanted to farm it, so this is what you did – and who the hell had the tech in a place like this? No one from around here, that was true. But he knew that someone had been dropping bard-birds and they were early and trying to catch the worms.
Ted Turbulent, a punk rocker who fell out of the seventies through a time gate, was what they needed to cut up the timestream. He disrespected all the rules he told him needed to be observed when he had been taken for indoctrination as the Central Reality Enforcement And Management Organisation, but he didn’t like CREAM in his coffee, so he went off to join an arm of Anti Reality Enterprises.
Carter Brecht sipped on his long tall glass of milk and pointed his Correction Gun at Ted. You only took the shot if you had a clear shot, and you weren’t supposed to use explosive rounds, but Carter had been using Turner Rounds for a long time. Turner Rounds weren’t legal – he was supposed to be using Constables.
The bullet flattened on Ted’s flak jacket and fragments of the shatter tore the room apart. Carter Brecht was the only one there apart from Ted with strong enough Existential Anchors to stay fixed in the room, but their onboard safety protocols were unfolding them through localised tesseract frameworks that were quantum entangled exits.
Carter Brecht went where? Sat in a bar in So-who, L’undone, Ted didn’t care.