• Prologue: Separation
• Chapter 1: Broken Pieces

Prologue: Separation

Eliza strode into the room, waving a digital tablet in the air in front of her. "I have it!" The staff stared at her, partially in disbelief, and mostly because she looked like she hadn't slept in a week. Hair in disarray and dark circles under her eyes there were, but her grin and energy belied those facts.

"Only two days late!" Tony, her husband, shot back in jest. She supposed it was true. She had told them that she'd have it done before she went to sleep. They'd probably assumed she slept normally, even if this wasn't the first time she'd pulled a stunt like this. Wouldn't be the last, either, she reckoned.

"You didn't figure caffeine into your timetables, did you?" she returned, setting the tablet down on the desk. "We'll be able to transmit with these calculations."

"I certainly hope so. I really don't like repairing the lab," John said, moving over toward the desk to glance at the screen. "Last time it took almost a week to get the power fluctuations under control."

"Oh John, that's what you're here for. If we did everything right the first time, you'd be out a job." John snapped his fingers mockingly and shook his head, taking a closer look, his mind already working on unraveling her formulas.

"Dear, go get some sleep. We need to go over these numbers and recalibrate the computer. We'll wake you up if we need anything."

"No need, I've already reprogrammed the system. What do you think I've been doing all this time, playing games? We should be ready to go, as long as the capacitor banks are charged."

"Finished last night, actually," Megan chimed in. "They're floating at 95% capacity right now."

"See? All done. We can fire within the hour. Hop to." She turned to one of the many control panels inside the room, toggling a dozen switches to initiate the individual beams' power-up sequences. Then, sitting down at the navigational computer, she brought up the main procedure she'd spent the past two days writing, placing it into a ready mode.

"'liza, I still want to go over the numbers. It isn't safe to just be firing particle beams into space randomly. Last time was bad enough, and we didn't even get the beam out."

"Exactly! How do you know it's bad? I've fixed the power compensation modules, too, so we won't overload any of the particle lasers. It's not like we're pointing this at Earth. The radiation won't touch anything for over a hundred light years, and by then the signal should be no more harmful than the cell phone John keeps attached to his ear." She typed a few more sequences, bringing up the main command console, and she activated the sequence. A dull thud, felt through the floor more than heard, signaled the generator powering up. "You have an hour before the system is ready. Do your math. If it's bad, we abort, no harm done."

Tony sighed, looking at Megan and John, and picked up her tablet, walking off to the adjoining conference room where a number of whiteboards were scattered around, most filled with assorted scribbles. All of them followed, except for Eliza who shrugged and went back to work, running calibration on each of the lasers again. She looked through the huge glass window in front of her, down into the testing area. Nine lasers, all moving slowly right now as the calibration sequence ran, were barely visible. Each one of them was larger than her. Their target, a vast collection ring, stood clamped in front of the bay doors, nearly seven stories tall. She stared at it for a few minutes, wondering how she'd ever been so lucky to get assigned to this project.

* * *

The countdown sequence had fallen below ten minutes before Tony and the rest of the crew walked back into the room. John handed her tablet back to her, holding on to it as she went to take it. His stare bored holes into her eyes. "The numbers check out, near as we can tell. Are you sure you want to do this now?"

She yanked on the tablet, pulling it from his grasp. "If I wasn't sure, I wouldn't have started the program. Best take a seat, guys. I want all eyes on the monitors. There isn't anyone saving us if we take out the station. We're at five minutes and counting."

When the lasers fired, everyone in the room could feel it. The energy in the air crackled, causing their hair to stand slightly on end even from a hundred feet away. As the ring began to absorb the particles, it started to glow. The bay doors, now open to the blackness of space, gave an almost beautiful contrast to the reddish hue.

"Temperature rising, though still on target," Megan chimed in off to her left.

"I'm seeing small power spikes on lasers three and eight. Nothing to worry about, though," John this time, watching a terminal directly beside her.

"I'll compensate for it anyway. I don't want the ring's pulse to be uneven." She typed a few keystrokes, bringing up each laser's output, and cycled the two errant lasers down slightly. Then she looked back up, and gazed in awe at the sight. In the center of the ring a ball of energy was forming. The last test had been shutdown before this stage.

A red light in her periphery brought her out of the trance. Cursing, she punched in another command. "Son of a..." She jumped from her chair and sprinted to the space suits, tugging one off of the rack and working to don it quickly. "Watch that power! Those spikes are resonating through the ring now!" Megan moved to where she had been, bringing up several diagnostic windows. John was also busy.

Tony moved over to her, grabbing her shoulders as she was trying to shrug the suit into place. "We need to shut it down, now. You're not going out there."

"We can't shut it down now. What do you think is going to happen to that—" she pointed out the glass at the ball of energy that was still growing—"if we interrupt the sequence? There won't be a base left to fix. Now help me into this so I can go out there!"

Tony looked at her hard for a few seconds before sighing and pulling the suit up over her shoulders. He then pulled the helmet off the shelf and slipped it over her head, locking the rings in place at the neck. "It should be me going out there," he muttered.

"You don't know how to fix it. You're better off in here helping John. Just make sure it doesn't overload. The ring needs enough power to shoot the beam." She turned and opened the airlock door, grabbed her tablet, and walked into the pressure chamber. Tony closed the airlock behind her and cycled the air. The outer airlock opened automatically a few seconds later.

The second she walked out into the hold, she winced as all her hair stood on end. "Oh gods, this is gonna screw me up." She grimaced and trudged into the hold farther, heading for the first of the malfunctioning lasers. Her boots clanked every time she set them to the deck, the magnetic soles keeping her from drifting right out the open bay doors. She looked at her tablet to make sure it was still working and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it was. She pulled up the laser's output diagnostics, and saw that it was still pulsing regularly.

"John says that you'd better hurry up. The energy sphere is growing unstable," Tony's voice came to her over the suit's comm unit.

"Thanks for the advice," she responded sarcastically as she reached the laser's controller module. Popping off the cover, she plugged her tablet into the diagnostic port. One look told her that the data inside the control room was all wrong. "John, the system's reporting huge deviations. I'm correcting it here." She modified the laser pulse to match what it should be, watching as the control room's output went into the red.

"Gods, 'liza, you trying to get us killed?" John's voice sounded very worried, even over the radio.

"Just ignore it. I trust the internal sensors a lot more than I trust the control room, right now."

"No, I'm more worried about the other laser. There's a huge imbalance, now."

"What do you expect? Increase the power on it, and ignore the warnings. I need to get over there." She eyed the other laser, on the opposite end of the bay.

"I've set it as high as the system will allow. I can't override the safety mechanism from here."

Eliza grunted into the comm, disconnecting her tablet from the laser and replacing the panel quickly. Looking at the laser again, she knew she'd never reach it by walking around the bay. She grabbed onto the deck railing with one hand and switched off the magnetic boots. She thanked herself for taking the time to train in zero-g for so long as she twisted herself up to rest her feet on the wall, and then she pushed off from it as hard as she could, letting go of the handrail as she did. She propelled directly in front of the ring, seeing the huge ball of energy pass by only thirty feet or so from her. She fired the suit's small maneuvering thrusters to slow her down as she reached the other side of the bay, and she managed to grab onto the outer handrail to turn herself around. Her timing was a little off, though, and she wrenched her arm as she slammed into the deck. She stifled the scream before it left her lips, screwing her eyes shut in pain. Slowly she used her other arm to re-activate the magnetic boots, and she stood up. Her right arm hurt to move it at all; she guessed that she dislocated her shoulder.

"Don't ever do that again!" Tony's exasperated voice cut across the comm. "You could've gotten yourself killed!"

"I'll take that into consideration when I'm not trying to save everyone's lives!" she yelled back, trying to ignore the pain on her right side. She groaned and moved over to the laser's panel, working to remove the panel and keep her tablet from floating off with only one hand.

"Two minutes until stage three, Eliza, and you're not going to want to be in there when it happens."

"Thank you, Megan. Just be ready to launch it when the time comes." She got the panel off and managed to plug her tablet into it. She saw instantly that this side had been much farther off. Even with John setting the output to the maximum limits, it was still only about three quarters of what it should been. She started increasing the power to where it should be, trying to puzzle out how such a large discrepancy could occur.

"Eliza, it's working. The sphere is balanc—the system is overloading! Get out of there, NOW!" Eliza looked up at the control room, saw John and Tony's faces, recognized the expressions of sheer terror on them, and then saw a brilliant flash of light that encompassed her vision and blinded her. Then, blackness.

* * *

From the control room, Tony still stared out, into the darkness beyond where the bay doors used to be, two hours later. He didn't know how the beam could have fired with almost a minute left on the clock. When the smoke had cleared, though, Eliza was gone. He didn't know how that could have happened, either. There was no damage where she had been standing, no remains of her anywhere. The power of the beam had been more than anyone had thought possible, though. All of the internal bay sensors had been destroyed, and many of the external sensors closest to the bay were still malfunctioning. The long range sensors still detected the energy signature of the pulse, though. It had worked. He just didn't know if he could live with the sacrifice that made it successful. He sat down on the chair and placed his head in his hands, mourning.