Another teaser, this one still something of a work in progress and the prologue for a short story.

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Very faintly, the implant in his temple buzzed twice, like the brush of a gnat's wing.

Good, the agent thought, and moved in a crouch from the doorway out into the sand storm.

Red dust billowed around him, scouring his armor and faceplate with the steady hiss of billions of micro-impacts, but he ignored the noise and then, after re-routing a few neoneural circuits, lost awareness of it altogether; his world became a sea of red and silence. The implant buzzed once more and his thin lips stretched tight into a predatory grin.

His hand dropped to the bulky armor of his thigh, and a panel slid open long enough for him to retrieve the enormous pistol-- almost as long as his forearm and nearly fifteen pounds of licensed destruction-- a model affectionately known as a "'borg-buster" or "hand cannon" among his fellow agents. He waited patiently until his nanos invaded the control chip and chirped an affirmative at him, and then hefted the pistol into a firing position and inched forward into the storm until the ragged silhouette of a car loomed out of the darkness; he braced himself against it, peered over the eroding, sand-blasted hood...and waited.

Finally, the sand storm's fury howled its last and died, leaving only a thin red dust in the air which drifted down like snow to settle over the abandoned urban decay of the street-- and the target moved into the open.

"Now, Jeeves!" The agent barked.

Something huge exploded from one of the upper-story windows of the crumbling skyscraper to his right in a shower of glass-- twice the size of a man, a fleshless steel gorilla with floodlights for eyes-- Jeeves, hurtling towards the fleeing target like a rocket, massive arms outstretched. In that instant, the agent stood and fired, the 'borg-buster's muzzle exploding with a retort that shattered the remains of the car's windshield. But something was wrong.

The target-- an unfinished cyborg, naked and hairless and unreal, like a store mannequin-- spun, a glass rod clutched in its skeletal right hand...and time slowed to the consistency of porridge, strands like spider-webs spraying from the tip of the rod faster than the agent could track to snatch the bullet-- moving as if through the universe's thickest jello-- from the air.

Oh shit! He's got an Artifact! wormed through the agent's mind, limbs frozen, and then the target was spinning the trapped bullet like a rock in a sling and letting loose.
Right at him.

Time returned to normal, and the agent's head exploded.