The interior of the station lends whole new levels to the word spartan. Bare, bleak corridors, their walls enlivened only by stretches of exposed pipework... there are roundels, regularly spaced at head height along the walls, that emit a dim light... and there are sliding doors that open onto rooms, most of them stripped bare of furnishings or equipment. It is empty, it is desolate....
It is, at least, no longer cold. I make my way up the access ladders - I have not been able to reactivate the turbolifts - to the control room, where I find Thyvesh much as I left him, hunched over the largest of the remaining consoles, studying a data feed that looks like so much random noise to me.
"I have restarted an auxiliary fusion plant," I say. Thyvesh glances round at me for a second, then turns back to his work. "At least we will not freeze, or starve, or suffocate," I say, "while you do... whatever it is you are doing."
He does not respond at first. I shrug and turn around, planning to go to the replicators and obtain food... when he speaks. "I am trying to open the door."
I turn back to him. "What door?"
"Only one door. The door. Exists in multiple time zones, different time streams... even fragmented ones, like this... but there is always only one door." He points to the data on the display. "See."
I look, and I still see nothing. "I do not understand this."
He gives an odd little wheezing laugh. "I was hoping.... You should, really." He slaps the side of the console. "You built this."
"I - what?"
"Before. The last time you were here. Which never happened, now. Was hoping you still might see... the processes, the logic behind it. But no."
The gravity plating is stable, I made sure of that... so the giddy sensation I feel must only be my head spinning. "I built this? When we - did whatever we did, that did not happen?"
"Reads and interpolates chroniton superpositioning signatures." Now he slaps the side of his head. "Like my brain, but mechanical. Objective. Reliable."
I frown. As he says... if I made this, I should understand the methods I used. Except that was not me, that was some past, alternate version of me.... Perhaps it is best not to try to think about these things. "How? I mean -" I think furiously. "You would need to base it around a very precise timing mechanism, so that the temporal fluxes would be detectable."
He nods in approval. "Atomic clock at the heart of it. Yes."
"And then the temporal discontinuities would show... how, exactly?" I am asking myself this question, more than him. There is an inspection panel in the side of the console. I pull it open, and start tracing the intricate web of circuitry. Some things are becoming clearer....
"What is the door?" I ask, as I trace the links between components with the tip of my finger.
"It is a door," says Thyvesh. "Just a door. The hinges, now, they are a little... special. They swing in directions no one else can see. But the door is only a door."
"There must be more to it than that," I comment, though my mind is not entirely on the conversation. "There must be entropy gradients involved...."
"Discharge of energy when moving between different time periods," says Thyvesh, "yes."
The atomic clock is there, and it is positioned under a group of things I recognize - highly sophisticated phase discriminator devices, the sort of thing used for quality control in singularity core production. The arrangement... the arrangement is unusual. But I should expect the unusual. "So," I think aloud, "this door should be detectable, whenever it changes its space-time orientation. Whenever it... swings. On those hinges."
"Yes."
"Who made the door? And why?"
"The Suliban. And security. Needed a place to store... things. A place that was not a place. A place with only one entrance, that we could control. That I could control. So we built a door, and opened it onto the void... and we built a safe place, inside the void."
"A void. Like this? Another unreal timeline?"
"Not exactly. This place might have been. We opened a door to somewhere that never was." He laughs again. "It was very quiet. Peaceful."
And they stored things there. And I can guess what sort of things. The Suliban made a creditable attempt to destroy the Federation before it could even begin - with temporal manipulation, and genetic augmentation. They had help from - somewhere, or someone. But they were an advanced culture to begin with, and they were ingenious and determined.
They must have made weapons that I can only imagine. Or, perhaps, that I should not imagine.
I close the panel and stand up. Now, when I look at the data stream, some parts of it begin to make sense. "Since each movement of the door is non-temporal," I say, "from our position in the timestream, we should see all of them at once. We should be unable to discern... Oh."
Thyvesh positively grins at me. "You see why this place, now? We are outside the normal timestream. We have... perspective."
Someone in Temporal Investigations let slip a remark about "temporal observatories", once. This must be something like one of those - a vantage point from which the flow of time can be seen.
"Do we not need temporal shielding of our own?" I ask, as I try to make sense of the readout. "So that... if there is a new opening of the door... we know it is new?"
"Would help. But not essential. I remember." He taps the side of his head again. "You will just have to trust me." He turns to look directly at me, and his face is sad and serious. "I know that must be hard."
"You have always... helped me. And I have never really known why." I swallow a sudden lump in my throat. "I trust you, Thyvesh."
"Thank you." He reaches out to take my hand for a moment, cold, dry, scaly fingers wrapping around mine. He lets go almost at once. "So. Any of this becoming clearer?"
"I think -" I take a deep breath. "Singularity cores were never my specialty - I know more about the warp fields they generate - but this display is showing spikes in zero-point energy, I think." I indicate a part of the data stream. "And from that, we can extrapolate a function of the chroniton displacement -"
Things are falling into place. Am I understanding this, or simply remembering it? Thyvesh can remember things that never happened - is my brain, too, becoming sensitive to chroniton imbalances? Is that possible, in the abnormal space-time of this aborted timeline? Too many questions.
"Can you open this door?" I ask.
"Always. Isn't wise, but... the door opens from my side. Wherever I am, I am on my side. Trouble is, whoever I am, I am on my side." He touches the console. "This is always on its own side of the door, too. Or should be."
"How do you open it? Do you... summon it, somehow?"
"I need to be in the right frame of mind. Easy enough to achieve. But just because I can do something... does not make it a good idea."
So, this console will be an access point to the Suliban secret cache - one which does not depend on Thyvesh, one which we can use to sneak around behind the back of his alternate self. I can see how that will be useful.... Has it already been useful, once before? In a time which never happened?
Something flickers and changes in the data stream. My eyes narrow. "What was that?"
"Temporal surge. Something shifted in the timestream... but not the door. Nothing to do with me."
"But if it registered on these instruments -" I look around, cross the floor to another console. The design is strange, but the functionality is clear enough. "It must have been close at hand." I touch the controls, tune in the viewscreen -
In this non-space, the viewers have only shown blank blackness - until now. Now, a monstrous scarlet bat-winged shape cruises slowly across the screen. "Na'kuhl battlecruiser. Acheros class."
"Here?" Thyvesh sounds agitated. "Now?"
"Here and now." The Denobulan characters are strange to me, but the scan data is clear enough. "It is closing on the station. It must mean to dock."
"No," says Thyvesh, "no. They must not find us. The station is big, big enough to hide -"
"Not if they make a determined search."
"They do not know we are here -"
"But they will, when they find the gig in the shuttle bay. They will search, and they will take us." I take a deep breath. "We need a bolt hole. And we only have one. You will tell me it is unwise, and I am sure you are right, but we have no other option. Open the door."
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