The Mission

[Liliana Hamilton 0]

Crewman Liliana Hamilton sat at the computer terminal and checked her mail. It contained an assortment of departmental meeting announcements, unsolicited sales pitches, and random forwarded material from friends and relatives. It also contained a secure transmission from command on Earth. Before opening it, she knew its contents. After listening to the message, and prompty rescrambling and deleting it, she went on to her next message. It was a reminder to commemorate the "birthday of nuclear war." She turned the terminal off and headed to her quarters.

 

***

Lily was dressed in civilian attire. She looked back at the hallways of the construction platform as she carried a duffel bag onto ECS Bonaventure, a warp-3 capable cargo ship. It had just finished unloading its supplies to the Challenger construction crew. Her ordinary duties would involve sorting through the supplies for those relevant to the armory, and helping to direct them to the proper sector of her department. Instead, her destination was the Rigel system, a sprawling trading post less than a week away.

 

The mission had been assigned months ago, but the blockade had prevented it from getting off the ground (or, out of Mars orbit, as the case may be). The Klingon terrorist attack, the blockade by the Andorrians, and rumors circulating about a mysterious "Romulan" menace made the mission as relevant as ever. As of now, she was a crewmember-in-training on the cargo ship. When she arrived, aside from performing the menial duties that would be assigned to her by her new "commanders," she would roam the trading posts of Rigel, and she would listen. It was a conceptually simple and yet practically difficult task. She was to find out what the galactic "general public," the merchants, smugglers and cargo runners of their corner of the Milky Way, knew about and thought of Earth. Effectively, she was to become a lightning rod for the rumors of the myriad traders. Doubtless, most of the talk would be impossible to substantiate, and would likely be false. But, some and hearsay have a basis in fact. The analysis would be left to others.

 

She was unsure why she had been selected for this mission. She was not an intelligence agent. Her minimal field training had been in paper-pushing and basic infantry combat. Her linguistic abilities were average for a native-born Earther, meaning almost nonexistent on an interplanetary scale. But, she vowed to do her best; a heavy duty had been assigned to her; it was possible that the future of her planet dependend on her.

 

The airlock door closed behind Lily. She walked the cramped and narrow corridors of the cargo vessel and dropped her duffel on the third-level of the left set of bunkbeds in the womens' quarters. The mission had begun.