Flinx Transcendent Read Online Free PDF Page A

options. Experience had taught him to always be ready to utilize a different approach. He could not render his foe fearful. Very well: he would try something else.
    Not twenty meters from Flinx the first enforcer suddenly began to slow. Double eyelids blinking, she lowered her weapon to her side as she came to a gradual halt. Her tail stopped switching. A second enforcer drew up alongside her. Bemused, he found himself staring down at his own gun. One by one they were joined by the rest of the flashily uniformed patrol. Querulous phrases of soft bafflement were exchanged. Dropping down into the distinctive AAnn squat, one enforcer methodically began taking his weapon apart. Next to him his companion started to disrobe.
    After considerable trial and error in the course of his frantic life Flinx had discovered that confusion was much easier to project than fear.
    Turning, he resumed his flight. How long the mental projection he had laid upon his pursuers would last he did not know. He never knew. The time frame was as unpredictable as everything else about his Talent. It didn't matter. Their befuddlement need last only long enough for him to get away.
    He knew he had made his escape when he was able to slow to a normal lope without any sign behind him of his pursuers. Moments later, he realized that same escape might be only temporary when he prepared to engage a transport, only to see that every nye in the hiring line in front of him was being required to present themselves before what was normally an inert, rarely used security scanner.
    Edging off to one side while carefully staying out of the scanner's range and away from the AAnn lined up ahead of him, he debated how to proceed. Was the suddenly enhanced security only local, or had it been extended citywide? What should he do next? What
could
he do? The energized security measures meant that he was effectively marooned in Krrassin. It was much too far, and too dangerous, to try to walk to his preferred pickup point far out in the desert park.
    It would be terribly ironic if his false alien identity proved to be his ultimate undoing. Designed and refined by the
Teacher
to such an extent that it was capable of deceiving native AAnn, it could not easily be altered by hand. Unlike with a human disguise, he could not effectively change its appearance by simply adding makeup or long hair. He could doff it entirely, of course, thereby eliminating all trace of the offworld credit thief whose identity he had adopted. Exposing himself as the only human in Krrassin, however, was unlikely to expand his freedom of movement.
    Somehow he had to find a way to make his way back to the vast, unpopulated desert park that lay outside the boundaries of the capital without being arrested or having his true identity discovered. There one of the
Teacher's
shuttles could touch down just long enough to pick him up. But even a perfectly disguised shuttle could hardly set down in the center of the sprawling city. If it could avoid detection and collision, there
was
room for it to do so at one of the four major shuttleports that served the metropolitan center of the Empire. The problem was that each of them lay almost as far outside the city limits as the much more amenable, less closely watched, and unpopulated recreation area.
    As he was trying to decide the best course of action a pair of airborne scrutinizers coasted into view above the line of waiting automated transports. Equipped with paralysis weapons as well as surveillance gear, they could not only identify a wanted individual but knock him down and stand guard over him until organic representatives of the municipalauthorities arrived. Surveying his surroundings, while trying to appear as indifferent to the security machines' arrival as the rest of the increasingly impatient transport customers, he started to retrace his steps. Once he had drifted back to the far end of the queue he veered to his right and allowed himself to be swept up by a