Renegades

<snip>
They all got out the car, Cass and Plisken berating Kenneth for his uselessness. Suddenly Kenneth glowed a bright cyan.
“YES! People we have networking!” He said, exultant.
“So where are they?”
“If this is right… directly behind us…”
</snip>
Pulling the light amps down over her eyes, Cass turned to scrutinise the dark alleyway behind them, a broad smile immediately blossoming on her lips
"Jay!" she beamed effusively "Am I glad to see you! Come on out!"
Two shapes detached themselves from the shadows at this, and her erstwhile paramour slunk into view with Jamie trailing along in his wake
"Who's that?" Jay nodded towards Kenneth as he approached, his eyes narrowing with suspicion
"It says its name's Kenneth" Cass glanced back over her shoulder at the nondescript hologram behind her "Claims to be an AI from another dimension; which, I guess, could explain why we're here and not in New Amsterdam where we're meant to be"
"What do you mean we're not meant to be here?" Jay asked, his brow knitting with consternation
"Look, I don’t know exactly what happened" Cass sighed “But I’m guessing that one of Kenneth’s dimensional jumps intersected our Time Gate; his drive has been flatlined and the energy kicked out from such a collision would explain why we were all scattered to the winds
"We're meant to be in New Amsterdam for a bit or R&R while we fix a simple paradox involving Alex and one of his great-great-granddaughters" she continued, ignoring Jay's quizzical grimace of distaste "But instead..." Cass raised her hands to gesture vaguely around her "Here we are in Old Las Vegas, about fifty years before the nuke, and with no idea what the temporal anomaly is that we need to fix to escape this timeline"
"Oh for fuck's sake" Jay sighed "That could be anything from mass murder to just picking up a piece of litter!"
"Listen – It's not a problem" Cass soothed "This is just a glitch; it’s nothing we can't sort out"
Startled, Jay raised his eyebrows in surprise
"When the hell did you become so optimistic?" he teased
Her eyes met his for the briefest of instants before she glanced away, smiling shyly
"Alright, break it up you two!" Jamie huffed, making Cass start and turn quickly away "We need to organise ourselves!" the engineer added brusquely
"Agreed" Cass nodded, colouring slightly as her eyes flicked between her companions faces "We've got to find the others and we need to identify the temporal anomaly; but first: We need money, equipment, and somewhere to stay; now if you give me half an hour, I can chew through these primitives banking systems and create us a few fictitious accounts for the money, but..."
"Jay? Jay are you there?" Jamie’s communicator stuttered to life
"It's Katrina!" Jay said excitedly and wheeled to extend his hand, beckoning at Jamie who duly handed him the device
"Kitty!" Jay could hardly keep the relief out of his voice "Are you okay? I..."
“Yeah, I'm fine” Katrina cut him off “Listen: I saw Williams and Khan”
“Who?”
“Williams and Khan!? The renegades!?”
“The... You fucking what!?”
“You heard”
“Jesus Christ” Jay hissed, taking his own name in vain “What the fuck are they doing here!?”
“Like I'd know” Katrina replied tersely “They were dressed as cops though. Have any of the others had trouble with the police?”
“I, ah... I don’t know, I just met up with them” Jay glanced up from the communicator to regard the others “Have any of you had a run-in with the cops?”
It was Jade who hesitantly raised her hand
“That'd be me" she admitted "Kenneth here helped out. They were asking after Cass and me by name...”
“Bloody hell” Jay grumbled, shaking his head once more as he proceeded to report what she had said, back to his wife
“What's all this!?” Cass mouthed, but Jay held up a hand to silence her as he thumbed the communicator over to private conversation mode, and lifted the device to his ear to listen to what his wife had to say in response
"Yeah, I agree" he continued, ignoring Cassandra's quizzical stare "No, I've no idea, but it's not good”
“Oh, I don’t know” Jay murmured again after a bit of consideration “Thirty, fifty years?
"You're joking!? The ultimate Kebab!?
"Yeah, okay; we’ll meet you there... Yeah, I got that: Caesars
“I love you too babe” he grinned after a moment, Cass suddenly snatching her gaze away from him, her expression clouding
“See you in a couple of hours” Jay smiled and thumbed the communicator to end the call
Observing Cassandra's reaction Kenneth nudged Jade and discreetly nodded towards Cass and Jay
"What's with those two?" he asked, his voice barely more than a murmur
"Long story" the doctor sighed, with a tired shake of her head "I'll fill you in later"
"Right!" Jay announced before anything more could be said "We've got trouble; Kat's spotted a couple of extremely dangerous STCP renegades here in town; it seems as though they're posing as police officers, which would explain how the cops Jade had trouble with knew both her and Cass by name"
He paused to look between his compatriots and let what he’d just said settle in
"The trouble" he continued "is that Khan and Williams both went rogue years before I did, so there's no way they should know any of your names"
"That's our paradox right there" Cass nodded, studiously avoiding his gaze as she addressed the others "Either that, or someone from the STCP is feeding them information"
"Whichever it is, this is bad news" Jay said with a frown, wondering what had just gotten into her "Together, Williams and Khan have more than fifteen hundred years of experience between them; they're every bit as capable as I am, and we're going to need at least one of them alive for questioning
"Now, I've arranged to meet with Kat and the others at Caesars Palace, which is a massive place down on the strip here; although even in spite of its size, given that the cops managed to track Jade down, I’m more or less counting on them being able to do it again, so we should go in expecting trouble – It won't be immediate, but it is coming our way, and we need to not only be prepared for it, but also to be able to take the fight straight back to these rogue Enforcers and resolve this paradox”
"Also, don't forget" Cass interjected "that while the technology level of this era is way below what we'd call sophisticated, their surveillance technology is effective enough, as are the law enforcement agencies, so we can't just assume that this is going to be easy
"As soon as we get to the Palace, I'll start on compromising the internal surveillance systems, so I can mitigate some of the risk for us; but if anyone is stupid enough to start a firefight in there in the meantime, you're utterly fucked"
"Yeah, Cass is right" Jay nodded grimly "We’ll have more cover once we’ve subverted communications and surveillance, but until then: any gunfire will likely be met with SWAT teams and even army involvement; now the good news there is that, even as police officers, Khan and Williams aren’t going to want to blow their own cover and start any overt trouble, and it’ll probably take a while for them to find us and to make their move, so I think the best thing we can do is try to make their job as easy as possible by attracting as much attention to ourselves as we can”
“Bloody hell, you two don’t half enjoy the sounds of your voices” Jamie grumbled “So what you’re basically saying is that we hit this Caesars Palace, and have a good time, so we can get noticed by two of the most dangerous people on the planet?”
“Uh...” Jay at least had the good grace to look a little deflated “Yeah...”


<tag>
It’s all about me, me, me – How do you go about attracting some attention to yourself without getting arrested?
A somewhat contrived excuse for a party, I know, but let’s make the most of it until the bad things start happening ;-)
John / Jaxx – shall we say that Jaxx and co. are staying at Caesars Palace? – might make things a little easier
Mike / Artie – A quick check of the map seems to show that Crystals is only a few hundred metres away, so someone can easily pop out to meet Artie and anyone else that might have turned up, having somehow have been able to decipher the cryptic cypher of his message – the Yakuza, or the cops maybe?
</tag>