Star Watch Junior Officer Emil Vorgens sat in his tiny compartment aboard the starship and reread his orders for the tenth time. He found it hard to believe that he was finally a full-fledged officer of the Star Watch. School was finished, his commission was safely tucked away in his travel kit, and here—on plastic film—were the orders for his first official mission.
He slid the tiny film into his pocket viewer again and projected the words onto the bare compartment wall:
“You will proceed to Oran VI and assist the Imperial Governor there in dealing with certain dissident elements of the native population.”
Like most Star Watch orders, there was a good deal of meaning in the words that were not there. The Star Watch was the Terran Empire’s interstellar miBtary arm. In fact, the Star Watch pre-dated the Empire, and existed even back in the old days of the Confederation, more than a century ago.
It had been the Star Watch that fought the successful war against the Masters, the war that had made the Terran Confederation—almost against its own will—the new masters of most of the galaxy. The problems of ruling such a vast territory had been solved only by the creation of the Empire. Now the Star Watch served to control the interstellar space routes. A subsidiary branch, the Imperial Marines, handled any planet-home fighting that had to be done.
Vorgens sat back in his webbed chair and studied his orders, a worried frown on his face. It was a youthful ace, with a high forehead. His skin was a golden brown, his closely cropped hair copperish red, his eyes tawny. Although born into the Terran Empire, and fully human, Vorgens was not an Earth-man, but a native of the Pleiades star cluster.