“How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know. A little tired I guess.”

  “Okay?” he didn’t know how to respond. “So, is this where they’ve been keeping you?”

  “They’ve not been keeping me anywhere,” he seemed to resent the question. “I’ve got my own cabin. I can come and go as I please.”

  “Really? So why didn’t you come and find me, earlier?”

  Dalbiri squinted at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “I’ve been trying to work out what our next move might be.”

  The odd way that he was studying the other ships suggested that his intentions weren’t entirely friendly.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Bumped into Maria. Though she was kind of busy. Couldn’t stick around for long.”

  A tremor prickled up and down Webster’s spine.

  “Maria?” Webster said. “As in Tuscany Maria?”

  Dalbiri looked at him with disdain. “You knew she was here, right?”

  “No,” it was now his turn to look confused. “No, I didn’t. But you were able to see her though?”

  Dalbiri gave him a huge smile. “Yeah. Though not for long – she’s got some stuff to deal with.”

  Webster nodded while privately he was unnerved by this new development. Either Dalbiri was hallucinating or he was having some kind of major schizophrenic episode. Neither possibility boded well for them getting off the ship. He decided to try and probe further.

  “Does she come here or is there somewhere else you can go to?”

  Dalbiri laughed, clearly enjoying the subterfuge of it all. “She comes here mostly.”

  “Okay. Well, hopefully, I’ll be able to see her later. Maybe you can introduce us?”

  Dalbiri nodded but there was nothing in his expression to suggest that he fully understood the bizarre nature of what was happening here. And whatever it was that he was dealing with was clearly having a detrimental effect on him. Webster was going to have to find some way of confronting him long term about what was going on but, for now, he was just glad to see his friend up and moving around.

  If he wanted answers, he decided, he was going to have to look elsewhere.

  So, he wandered off, examining the books on display, trying to identify whether there was some kind of indication there as to what might be going on. On a number of occasions, he was so struck by how artificial this whole façade was and he found himself scrutinising the walls and shelving in detail looking for false walls and hidden compartments. The sense that he was being watched had never left him and he was desperate to uncover a secret room which would eventually reveal the real reason why they were being kept here.

  In fact, he was so focussed on looking for clues that at first, he didn’t register that there was someone else in the room with him. He’d assumed that it was Dalbiri who was following him, so it didn’t seem like anything was wrong until he turned to confront his stalker.

  The man was tall and slim, wearing a classically tailored tweed suit. He appeared to be in his late sixties but had lost none of his sparkle. A tiny pair of wire framed spectacles sat perched on his nose.

  “Good day,” he said, indicating the shelves. “Anything I can help you with?”

  Webster looked at him, somewhat taken aback by this approach.

  The man’s overly confident tone prompted Webster to respond warily. “I’m sorry but who are you?”

  The man indicated his attire as though this were answer enough but then said, “You may call me The Librarian. I’m one of the sub-minds dedicated to managing the records here.”

  “ One of the sub-minds?” Webster said.

  The man went over and selected one of the books from the shelves. Only, while he gave the impression that he was holding it in his hands, the real book remained in situ. This didn’t stop him from opening his electronic copy and starting to read.

  “That’s right. There are six sub-minds, all told. Part of our mission brief is information gathering so, as you can see, I’ve been quite busy.”

  “So, where are these other sub-minds? Why haven’t we seen any of them?”

  “Normally, there’s no need to assume a physical form but, in this instance,” he said smoothly. “It was thought to be less disconcerting for you to have a physical presence with which to interact.”

  “Okay.”

  Webster stared at the man for rather longer than was necessary but the man seemed resigned to this level of scrutiny and favored him with an indulgent smile. It was only when The Librarian moved quickly that Webster became aware of a slight translucent quality and realised that he could see part of the library shelves through him. Only when he stopped moving, the sense of substance was virtually impossible to fault.

  “Can you tell me what happened to my friend?”

  The Librarian, who was in the process of returning his book to the shelf, froze at this.

  “Nothing has happened to your friend. Why do you ask?”

  “He seems odd. He’s clearly not himself.”

  The Librarian slid the book back into place and patted it home.

  “He seems happy enough.”

  Webster was getting tired of all this subterfuge.

  “Then, perhaps you could tell me about this woman he’s been seeing. This Maria.”

  “Delightful young woman. Italian, I believe. They seem very taken with one another.”

  Webster glared at him. “Yes, but she isn’t real, is she? I mean, she’s not a real person.”

  And then the sub-mind said something which made his skin crawl.

  “I think your friend would very much disagree.”

  With that, the man turned and started striding towards a door set back in the shelves. A door which, Webster was quite certain, hadn’t been there a couple of minutes earlier. Webster moved to intercept him.

  “So, who’s in charge here,” he said, playing for time. “Do you have a ship’s captain, for example?”

  The Librarian turned to confront him and, when he next spoke, there was a new firmness in his voice.

  “The sub-minds interact on a cooperative basis, though we all have our different roles to play,

  “And who is it that you represent? Who are your people?”

  The man’s face wrinkled with distaste.

  “Our ‘people’, the Drasin, were forced to give up their physical form many millennia ago. It was either that or face total annihilation.”

  “And yet, you seem to have persevered.”

  “But at great personal cost,” he quickly moved on. “When it became clear that our enemy could not be stopped, we built ourselves a fleet of ships. But no matter the size of these ships, we couldn’t begin to accommodate the vast numbers of people we needed to save. So we were forced to compromise. In order to ensure that the knowledge which we had accrued was not lost, this ship and others like it were tasked with leaving our system in an attempt to keep them safe.”

  “And did that work?”

  He indicated the walls of books which surrounded them. “What you see here is but a tiny percentage of what we managed to save.”

  Webster nodded but then a thought occurred to him as he remembered the star chart Dalbiri had been so fascinated with. And he considered those strange areas of space which he hadn’t even begun to recognise.

  So that was where the Drasin had come from. The unexplored depths of space.

  “You said that there were other ships like this one. What happened to them? Are you still in contact?”

  “Currently, our communication systems have been compromised so we are unable to contact the others in our fleet.”

  “If they still exist,” Webster said.

  “Oh, they do exist. Our weapons research people were sending us constant updates even as we remained in stasis. And, as you have witnessed, our weapons systems are second to none.”

  After the way in which the Da’al ship had been dispatched, there was no arguing with that.

  “But you have yet to receive a direct communication from any of your people,” Webster said pointedly.

  “Not yet, but it will come. The Drasin are nothing if not resourceful.”

  “And what will happen in the meantime?”

  The Librarian tilted his head to one side, like an uncle indulging an inquisitive nephew.

  “We will continue with our on-going mission.”

  “And that is?”

  “To continue to gather knowledge.”

  Webster smiled sourly. He wasn’t buying any of it.

  If this ghost ship had last been active twenty thousand years ago what would be the point of continuing their mission now. At the most rudimentary level, their mission parameters would have had to have changed.

  No, there was something else going on here. Something that The Librarian didn’t want him to know about.

  He was about to leave when something occurred to him. “Earlier, when you fired on that Da’al ship, you didn’t let up. You didn’t stop until she’d been completely destroyed. Why was that?”

  “We were defending ourselves,” he said tersely. “We had been fired upon. Not to have destroyed the Da’al would have been to jeopardise our own safety.”

  Webster’s gut turned cold at that. “So, you’re familiar with the Da’al then?”

  “Why, of course. We were once their masters.”

  *

  Webster had been provided with a cabin just along the corridor from Dalbiri. Their original intention had been to meet for dinner in the canteen but Webster had been so exhausted that he’d lain on his bed and immediately slipped into a deep sleep.

  He didn’t remember anything until the next morning when he was woken by the sound of Dalbiri banging at his door. He was seriously disorientated by this stage, but he was also terribly hungry so he went with his friend along to the canteen.

  The lay-out was not dissimilar to canteens he’d seen on merchant vessels although with no human staff to see to their needs it was left to one of the servitors to attend to them.

  The first order of business was to get as much food inside him as possible so conversation was kept to a minimum. The food itself was filling if rather bland, though Webster was too hungry to care. He didn’t even respond when Dalbiri intimated that he’d be seeing Maria later that day. It was too early in the morning to get dragged into that now.

  It was only later, while Webster was finishing off his second cup of coffee that he thought to question his friend about their ongoing situation.

  Dalbiri told him that he’d spent a good deal of time the previous day programming the servitor which served their food and seemed to think that it had been time well spent. He was less inclined to talk when Webster tried to cross examine him about why they were being kept there and whether Dalbiri had asked about the likelihood of them being released.

  “Where would we go, anyway?” Dalbiri asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose we’d have to ask them to transfer us over to one of the other ships and then take it from there.”

  “Which other ships?”

  Webster scowled at him. “The ones you were looking at yesterday. The Montezuma and Peter the Great. Those ships.”

  Dalbiri shook his head. “We left those behind hours ago. Didn’t the Librarian tell you?”

  A sense of panic flared in Webster’s stomach. “No, he didn’t. What do you mean: left them? Where are we supposed to be going?”

  “It’s alright,” Dalbiri slapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. We’re heading back in-system. Something or other about a Confederation ship.”

  Webster got to his feet, enraged by Dalbiri’s overly relaxed attitude. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “I thought you’d be more interested in getting something to eat.”

  “Yes, I was. But now I’ve had my food so which ship are we talking about? Did they mention any names?”

  “Yeah. Seemed kind of a strange name to me. The Naked something.”

  “The Naked Spur! That’s Ed Hoyt’s old ship. How do I get to the bridge?”

  *

  It was a lot more straightforward than he’d imagined. All he had to do was follow the pulsing blue lights set in the floor and fifteen minutes later he was there.

  It was the same bridge he’d sheltered inside when he was trying to hide from Nash but it looked very different. There was absolutely no sign of the supplies they’d left there - everything had been tidied away – and the place was as neat and antiseptic looking as the bridge of any starship. The screen they’d seen briefly on their last visit had been re-instated and everything looked bright and functional.

  But he didn’t walk straight in. Some part of his training made him hesitate at the threshold because there was already someone in there, crouched over consulting one of the consoles which ran along the far wall. Although the man, dressed in crisp naval whites, had his back to him there was something about him which Webster found familiar.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Permission to come on to the bridge?”

  The man turned, regarding Webster as if he’d been expecting him and beckoned him forward.

  But still Webster hesitated. For something told him that this wasn’t The Librarian. The physical similarities were but he had a marked sense that he was looking at someone else. He was broader across the chest and shoulders and had styled his hair neatly, in a style that wouldn’t have looked out of place inside the Confederation. There was a strange quality to his eyes also. These were dark and intense whereas The Librarian’s, he recalled, were bright blue.

  Webster stepped inside. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  “Not directly. But I believe you had the dubious pleasure of speaking with The Librarian yesterday.”

  “Yes, I did. But if he’s The Librarian, what does that make you?”

  “You may refer to me as The Pilot.”

  The Pilot spent the next ten minutes showing him around the bridge. Unlike his compatriot, he seemed quite relaxed answering Webster’s questions. He’d laid in a course which would see them meet up with The Naked Spur in the next eighteen hours. He even showed him a schematic of the deployment of the ship and the various freighters which had accompanied it. They all appeared to be arranged around another ship which, by the very nature of its organic design, was clearly a Da’al vessel.

  But then, when he pushed the Pilot for further details of what had happened the man merely shrugged.

  “That’s what we’re about to find out.”

  Webster found the whole process of being shown around both invigorating and slightly frustrating. For all that this was a new propulsion system, all he seemed to be able to work out was that it wasn’t designed to make use of gates of any kind. Just the mention of the concept appeared to confuse the other man.

  After a while, Webster got the impression that he was nearing the end of his allotted time so decided to press him on something The Librarian had mentioned previously.

  “The Librarian told me something interesting. He said that you used to be the Da’al’s masters?”

  The Pilot viewed him with a renewed intensity.

  “That is correct. We are an uncommon people. Unique in many ways.”

  “I’m sure that lots of civilisations like to think that of themselves in that way.”

  “Only with the Drasin, it’s true. Our ability to extend our life-span indefinitely is testament to that.”

  Webster gave him a quizzical look. “And yet I’m stood here talking to a hologram. When do I get to meet you in person?”

  “Long before the Da’al became a threat, we were putting great efforts into extending our life spans. We are inspired by the quest for knowledge and so sought to solve the problem of our own mutability, our alarming tendency to grow old and die. But in order to do that, we needed to make breakthroughs in technology and biological sciences. This in turn led us in a constant quest for resources.”

  “I can see where this is going. You needed resources. Resources which weren’t available to you on your own planet.”

  “We followed an expansionist policy, yes.”

  “Some people might call that empire building.”

  The Pilot raised an eyebrow.

  “Whatever you want to call it, that’s fine. As we sought to find solutions to our problems it became inevitable that we should branch out into other star systems. Our progress was not without its challenges - we made mistakes, true. But all the while we fiercely defended our racial essence, ensuring that whoever we conquered was never allowed to take a place with us at the high table.”

  He paused for a moment to input a new set of coordinates.

  After the Librarian’s rather idealised re-telling it was refreshing to hear such a frank assessment of the Drasin’s achievements.

  The Pilot went on, “We utilised everything these other planets had to offer while ensuring that they were never under any illusion as to who was in charge. I’m aware that this doesn’t portray us in a particularly flattering light but then we were the ones who ended up paying for our arrogance.”

  “But that’s part of why empires are all doomed to fail,” Webster said. “It’s built into the fabric of their DNA. After their initial success the empire starts to proliferate and expand. Then, at some predetermined point the whole thing becomes unsustainable. Becomes so big that it can’t support itself. Is that what happened to you?”

  “Not quite. Our mistake came when we discovered the Da’al. They proved to be both our greatest salvation and our greatest curse.”

  Webster nodded as everything started to slide into place.

  “What happened?”

  “When we first encountered them, the Da’al had very little to recommend them. They were a largely aquatic species. They tended to work in large family groups controlled by a dominant male. These males expected total obedience from their progeny and if they didn’t receive it they were quick to make their disappointment known. This worked well in terms of helping the various leaders develop their own individual fiefdoms but it limited them in genetic terms as innovation and external influences were ruthlessly suppressed.”