Four Tomorrows: A Space Opera Box Set

by James Palmer

“And I had Hudson do some course extrapolation,” said Hamilton. “They’re heading for the heart of League space, probably Draconi space too.”

  “They’ll decimate our forces,” said Drizda. “All life in the galaxy is in danger.”

  “Did you find that piece of the Progenitor puzzle you were looking for?” asked Hamilton.

  “I have the necessary data,” said Drizda. “But I still need to go through it.”

  Kuttner nods. “Get to it then. Let us know as soon as you find something. Hamilton, you and I need to find someone at the Admiralty who will listen to reason.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They didn’t send a frigate after us because I’m late for my retirement party,” says Kuttner. I think we’re a fly in someone’s ointment.”

  Hamilton thought for a long moment. “Who did you tell about Drizda’s presence on board?”

  “Just Admiral Sheldon,” said Kuttner. His eyes grew wide. “I called her while you were down on Verdant. She’s been getting de Gray treatments.”

  Hamilton arched his left eyebrow. “Pretty expensive, even for a Fleet Admiral. You think someone’s paid her off?”

  Kuttner nodded.

  “What else?”

  Kuttner rubbed his stubbled chin. “I expected her to tear me a new one. She just shrugged it off, told me to go on to Zephyr as if nothing happened.”

  “That is odd,” mused Hamilton.

  “You think the higher ups in Fleet have been compromised?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Hamilton said. “What if they’ve known about these things all along? And what if they want to make sure no one else does?”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  Hamilton shrugs. “What could technology like that be used for?”

  Hamilton’s blue eyes grew wide. “It would be the perfect weapon. Especially against the Draconi.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know how that would be,” he says. “Boy, Special Operations would love to get their hands on something like that. I’ll bet their funding really took a nose dive after the treaty with the Dragons was signed.”

  Hamilton snapped his fingers. “That’s it. It’s got to be.”

  “What?”

  “I need to make a call.”

  Hamilton nodded once. “All right. You can use the ready room. I’ll give you some privacy so you can call your old girlfriend.”

  15 Old Wounds

  The chime of her tightbeam receiver woke Leda Niles from a troubled sleep. She got up as quickly as she could and padded across the room to answer it. She rubbed sleep from her eyes while the viewer warmed up, and stared at the security glyphs floating in the sea of decaying tachyons. Whomever this was from, it was important.

  She sat down at the desk and opened the channel. “Yes?” she said sleepily.

  A three-dimensional face coalesced from the quantum chaos. She wasn’t surprised to see that it belonged to Lt. Commander Noah Hamilton.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you, but this is important.”

  Leda nodded, rubbing her left eye. “I’ve been reading of your exploits. You’re becoming quite adept at disobeying orders.”

  “We have good reason,” said Hamilton.

  His face looked cold, fearful. All thoughts of sleep left Leda’s mind.

  “What the hell is going on, Noah?”

  “I wish I knew, Leda. We answered a distress call, and now suddenly we’re in the middle of an interstellar incident. Listen, I’m going to send you something, and then I’m going to ask you a question about it. I want your honest answer. And I don’t want to hear about security clearance or protocols.”

  Leda nodded, and Hamilton punched a series of keys on his end. His image was replaced by a snippet from the Onslaught’s visual log. It showed a Navy vessel in orbit around a blue-green planet. Suddenly a swarm of small, strange craft descended upon the ship, like ants on a bit of food dropped at a picnic. Her mouth opened wide as the craft seemed to devour the ship right before her eyes.

  The image froze, and Hamilton’s face reappeared.

  “You got away from those things?” she asked.

  “Barely,” he said. “We think they’re some kind of ancient, extraterrestrial von Neumann machines. Have you ever seen anything like them?”

  Leda chewed her bottom lip. “I’ve heard rumors,” she said. “Unconfirmed reports from Oort cloud miners and vessels probing the fringes of explored space. But it’s nothing more than hearsay.”

  “Let me guess,” said Hamilton. “Ships and mining colonies going missing. Not destroyed, just gone without a trace.”

  “Something like that, yes,” said Leda. There was also the thing in Silo Six, she thought but didn’t say. She wasn’t sure if Hamilton knew about it from his time in Special Ops. She didn’t know much about it herself.

  “Are you recording this?” asked Hamilton.

  She gave a small grin. “What do you think?”

  Hamilton smiled back. “Good. Download the video I gave you and put it someplace safe. I have a feeling it must might get us out of hot water with the Admiralty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hamilton rubbed his face. He looked tired. “I don’t know. I think someone high up is intentionally trying to sweep knowledge of these things under the rug.”

  “That’s insane. Why?”

  “So they can blame the missing colonies and ships on the Draconi and restart the war.”

  “Why would anyone want another war with the Draconi?” she said. “Noah, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Hamilton.

  “We’re talking about a conspiracy within the Solar Navy,” she said. Leda had served proudly since her eighteenth year, as had her father before her. The thought that a portion of this proud organization could be corrupt was inconceivable.

  “Yes,” said Hamilton. “The same Solar Navy who blackballed me and kicked me out of Special Ops when I started asking legitimate questions, exiling me to this used up rust bucket.”

  He looked down at something, apparently self-conscious about what he’d just said.

  Leda felt a frisson of guilt. If she had spoken up, helped him, or had just gone to bat for him with the Admiralty. But she had her own career to think of.

  “I’m sorry, Noah. I—”

  Hamilton held up a hand. “It’s all right, Leda. I was angry at first, but I know why you did what you did, and if I were in your shoes I probably would have done the same. This isn’t about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about us. This is about the future of life in this quadrant. Leda, while we and the Dragons are blaming each other for the destruction of our colonies, those things are out there eating every form of life they encounter.”

  Leda steadied herself. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I need you to find out everything you can about who’s involved in this. Off the record.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Hamilton looked away for a moment, as if lost in thought. “I’m not sure yet. We’re looking for a way to stop these things. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

  Before Leda could say another word, Hamilton cut the connection, leaving her alone in the dark, her mind racing with unsettling thoughts.

  16 Drizda

  Drizda had been studying her slate for several hours, and the lines were beginning to run together. She blinked her nictitating membranes a few times, then squeezed her eyes shut. There was a rap on the door, startling her.

  She sat there silently, unsure of the protocol. Her kind simply entered a room when they wanted to come in.

  “Enter,” she said finally.

  The hatch opened and Commander Hamilton stepped through the portal, a smile on his face. Drizda stared up at him. She was amazed at the sheer range of facial features of which humans were capable. She still couldn’t read them, even while she re
cognized their import.

  “Hello, Commander,” she said.

  “I thought you could use a break,” said Hamilton. He tossed a metal tube onto the desk in front of her.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s what passes for food aboard Navy ships,” he said. “It’s kind of like meat. It doesn’t taste that great, but you can live on it.”

  Drizda picked up the tube and opened it, sniffing it carefully before putting it to her mouth and squeezing its contents onto her tongue.

  It wasn’t the freeze-dried insects served aboard Draconi vessels, but it was passable.

  “Thank you, Commander,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Any luck?”

  Hamilton gestured to her slate, and she took it up again, holding it so Hamilton could see.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “These are Progenitor glyphs,” Drizda said. “Before I could begin searching the Epics for references to these swarm machines I had to reintroduce myself to their written language, which as you can see is very complex.”

  Hamilton nodded. “I’ll take your word for it. Any luck?”

  “Yes. I’ve been able to reacquaint myself with it quite easily. Now I’m going through the Epics to find that familiar snippet that I believe refers to these von Neumann machines.”

  “The Epics are huge,” said Hamilton. “Without having a particular word or phrase to search for—”

  “I have to go through it line by line, yes.”

  Drizda stared at the lines. The Progenitors had apparently communicated physically using musical tones, described by one of her teachers as an eerie piping over a wide range. At some point they developed a written language, a complex method of sharing not just individual words but thoughts, ideas, and feelings.

  Hamilton sipped his coffee. “An instructor told me once that the Progenitor Epics have more in common with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony than Homer’s Iliad.”

  Drizda nodded her head once, trying to mimic the action she’d seen the humans perform. “I’m not familiar with those works, but if a symphony is akin to one of our war hymns, I’d say your analogy is correct.”

  “So what have you found out?”

  “Not much so far,” said Drizda. “I’m isolating bits of the Epics that speak of various events in their history and tagging them so I can tell them apart. The Epics are more like one long piece of literature, or a song that gets passed down from one generation to another, each generation adding lyrics to it as they go.”

  “Wow,” said Hamilton. “No wonder they’re so large.”

  “I’m moving through it more quickly now. I’m up to what the Progenitors referred to as the Crystalline Age. I just wish I knew a time frame for their encounter with the swarm. Looking for the reference I need is like pinpointing a particular nucleotide sequence in a strand of DNA.”

  Hamilton finished off his coffee. “Lt. Brackett thinks we should capture one so we can reverse engineer it. Maybe figure out a way to override its programming or communicate with it.”

  “An excellent idea,” said Drizda. “I’ll continue my researches, let you know when I find something.”

  “Why don’t you take a break?” said Hamilton. “You look exhausted. Hell, we all are.”

  Hamilton cocked his head to one side. “Yes?”

  Drizda started to ask what he meant, then she remembered the humans had implants in their inner ears that allowed instantaneous communications with other members of the crew. He was communicating with one of them now.

  “Roger that. I’m on my way.”

  Hamilton got up to leave. “That was Hudson. He’s located the swarm’s next likely target. Some kind of Draconi installation.”

  “Where?” said Drizda.

  “The Devlin system?” said Hamilton. “Pretty remote, even for you guys.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” said Drizda. “It’s the location of one of our subspace hatcheries.”

  “What?”

  “Thousands of Draconi eggs are stored there, waiting to hatch,” said Drizda. “We have to stop the swarm from destroying them.”

  Hamilton nodded. “I’ll tell Kuttner. Maybe now we can somebody at Fleet to listen to us and stop blaming this on the Draconi.”

  He left the room quickly, slamming the hatch closed behind him.

  Drizda returned her attention to the slate, all thoughts of how tired she was pushed from her mind. She had to find a way to stop the Swarm now. It was just such slow going. If she’d been back aboard the Talon, she would’ve had access to a full range of scientific equipment with a faster computer. But here… She marveled at how dilapidated the Onslaught was. It was a wonder the humans had almost won the war. But she couldn’t focus on that now. Her eyes fell on a line of text and suddenly something clicked into place in her mind. She remembered. The glyph for eating paired with the glyph for space.

  “Space Eaters,” she said aloud, testing out the phrase. Knowing the Progenitors, there was probably a whole range of nuance that she was missing, but that was the gist. The Progenitor’s Space Eaters had to be the von Neumann probes. She typed on the slate, telling it to search for those two glyphs only when used in combination in that particular order. She sat it down and let it do its work. Then she tapped a button the desk.

  “Hamilton,” said the Commander’s voice through a speaker hidden somewhere in the small room.

  “It’s Drizda,” she said. “I’ve found it.”

  “Good. I’ll tell the Captain.”

  She sat there and waited for the slate to compile her search. She clicked her teeth together excitedly, and knew that if her mouth had the ability to smile, she would be grinning from ear to ear, as the humans liked to say.

  17 Secret Meeting

  After their talk the day before, Leda hoped that Straker would let her in on his little secret. Instead he kept her busy shuffling papers and tending to completely innocuous matters. And all the while she could feel his eyes on her, even when he wasn’t around.

  She couldn’t get her conversation with Hamilton out of her head. What if everything he said was true? What if there were machines out there that could eat everything they encountered and make copies of themselves? And what if the Admiralty was covering it up? It made no sense. Why would they do such a thing? But she had never known Noah Hamilton to lie. He was many things, but liar was not among them. She owed it to him to take his word, at least for now.

  Leda kept her eyes on Straker too, which wasn’t that difficult. She kept his appointments, knew his movements. He was a very disciplined man, structured and routine. So far he had done nothing that struck Leda as out of the ordinary. On the surface, everything seemed above board, but that was what bothered her about it.

  Every day at 0300 hours he had nothing on his schedule for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of dead time, in the middle of the afternoon. At first it didn’t concern her, but now, after their bizarre meeting, after what Noah had told her, Leda decided she wanted to know what her boss was up to.

  For the past several weeks at that time she had seen him go into an empty conference room and lock the door for that twenty minutes. It was a strange place to take a break. Most people preferred to walk the gleaming promenade outside, enjoying the fresh air. Whatever Straker was up to in there, it was off the books, and something he didn’t want his assistant knowing about.

  At five minutes before the appointed time, Leda entered the empty conference room. It was dark, save for a few spot lights at the front of the room. There was a lectern facing rows of long tables equipped with holo emitters, as most of the meetings that occurred here weren’t physical, but conducted via tightbeam across light years of empty space.

  Leda chewed her bottom lip, pondering her next move. She settled on simply crawling under one of the tables. There was a risk she would get caught, but she could always tell Straker that she simply wanted to be more involved in whatever he was working on. It was risky, but it was a chance she was willing to
take. She was an officer of the Fleet, sworn to uphold and protect the League of Worlds.

  She scrunched herself under the middle row of tables as comfortably as she could manage, and started to take shallow breaths as the door opened and Straker entered. She could smell his cigar smoke as he crossed over to the lectern. He tapped some control studs atop the lectern, and the spotlights went out, the holo emitters on the tables flickering to life. Leda heard the room’s tightbeam chime as a connection to somewhere was made. She peaked out between two chairs, focusing on the back of the room where four ghostly forms had appeared, their faces purposefully obscured in shadow.

  “Good afternoon,” said Straker warmly. “What is the news from the front?”

  “Things are coming to a head,” said one of the phantoms. His voice was distorted digitally. “We’re moving our warships near the border of Draconi space. Those damned lizards won’t know what hit ‘em.”

  “Good,” said Straker.

  “The Draconi will figure out something’s up before we’re ready to strike,” said another ghost, his voice similarly distorted. “And those infernal machines are eating our forces too.”

  “Please tell me you have a handle on them,” said the third figure.

  “Well,” said Straker. “It will take time. But we’re making huge progress with—”

  “We have another wrinkle as well,” said the fourth figure. The voice was altered, but Leda could tell she was female. A nimbus of grayish hair shown around the edges of the shadow obscuring her face.

  “Yes?” said the apparition next to her.

  “The Onslaught,” she said. “Captain Kuttner may have accidentally stumbled into our ruse. He was ordered to back off, but he disobeyed.”

  “Kuttner and his ship will not be a problem,” said Straker. “The Swarm will see to that.”

  “He’s done a bang-up job at evading them so far,” said the woman coldly. “We need assurances.”

  “I assure you all will go according to plan,” said Straker a bit testily. “By the time we declare war on the Draconi, no one will care how it started. And the Swarm will be ours to command. As I started to say earlier, the thing in Silo Six is teaching us much about the Swarm’s technology, its capabilities. By the time the Chaos Wave reaches League space, we’ll be able to stop it.”