by B C Bamber
‘Finally,’ he said to himself as the salesman completed the paperwork and handed over a chip with the registration details on it. He took it from him and stood up and left. He needed another cab. He found one quickly. It was a SkyCar. Exactly what he wanted. A ground vehicle would have taken ages. A flying car could travel four or five times faster, unimpeded by traffic and buildings and traffic controls. He flew over the city. He hoped this would be the last time he’d be here. He then realised he had his hand clasped around his gun. He’d been so tense he hadn’t realised he was doing this, his knuckles white, with the strain. He was in a self-driving car. There was no driver, but all these cabs have camera’s. Much of what he’d done while on this planet would have been caught on camera. The big advantage to facial DNA surgery is that he now looked like umpteen different people who had chosen the same face as he did. And he could get DNA surgery on his face anywhere and change again. Just to be certain.
He stood about fifteen meters from his ship and stared at it. It was mostly black, with a pointed nose, closed in by glass around the cockpit. Underneath this was a large machine gun and underneath the wings, a laser pulse weapon – one on either side. He rolled the box over to it, his bag of clothing over his left shoulder. He opened the door and lifted the box inside, before climbing into it and opening up the secure storage box at the back of the ship and pushing it inside. He then walked to the controls and fired it up. ‘Waiting for clearance,’ he said as he put on his ear piece which communicated with the air control AI.
‘Negative,’ came a cold reply. Don knew immediately that he wasn’t getting clearance. But he knew that there was virtually nothing they could do, if he just took off and left. The police wouldn’t get there quickly enough if he did it straight away. He fired up the lifting jets and took off up to two hundred meters then fired off the light drive. He shot up into the sky and took three minutes to get clear of the atmosphere. He then programmed the navigation computer and fired off the light drive to speed through the warp stages to just under the speed of light. Once the AI kicked in he had no need to have his hands on the controllers. He looked through the glass to see if there were any obvious threats. There was nothing. He checked the computer tracker on his EyeSpec, which was detecting other ships around him. Nothing obvious. He was too nervous to get out of his seat until he knew he was away cleanly. He arrived at the first warp gate. The first of seven to get to the space station he’d selected. Once he was through he could relax, the Empire behind him forever.