Have space craft; will escape
I don’t know why I turn the viewer on, but I do.
Our small craft slips away from the space port without particular note – just one of the thousands daily to come and go.
All the money I paid for the craft, it better have the correct signatures to get through security.
Guilt perhaps makes me look back.
I glance at the woman strapped in their other chair, her face still pale with fear of pursuit.
She does not understand crime.
She still lives with that three-d view of the 21st century crooks who robbed banks with large guns, carting away their loot in sealed radiation-proof containers, roaring through cities in super fast air cars with police in pursuit.
That vision was rarely real even then.
Now, two centuries later, theft is a matter of changing accounts, alternating codes, then escaping to the place where you have transferred the goods, hoping that your anti-trace programs won’t allow the law to track the trail of circuits your shipment took.
Getting physically away is always a chore.
Despite advancements in teleportation, small space ships still provide the least traceable avenue in case something goes wrong.
No feeling is quite so pathetic as getting into a teleport beam, thinking you are going to some exotic hideout on the rim to have the police halt your transmission, suspend it until concluding the investigation and trial, then alternating your destination so that jail guard are handing you prison garb when he get out.
The woman is scared because she believe space travel this way is far less safe.
She’s right.
Each time society perfects a new technology, it lets its old ones rot. Shipping and rail roads faded as automobiles and cars came in.
But I assure her that I am a good pilot and ours is a good ship, and we should have no problem getting to another world where we can safely teleport to our final destination.
But her fear as spread into me.
I watch the screen upon which I should only see the fading image of the space station.
Instead, I see a steady blip I soon realize is following our emission trail.
No doubt it is the police.
And I wonder how bad the penitentiary planet will be and if I will ever see this woman again.