فصل 10

Chapter Ten

Hetzal System. Above The Fruited Moon. 50 minutes to impact.

“We can’t do this. It’s impossible,” said Joss Adren, current commanding officer of the Republic Longbeam designation Aurora III. “Just shooting the blasted thing would have been hard enough.” He stared at his cockpit display, depicting his own ship, the three Jedi Vectors flying escort, the massive hyperspace anomaly whipping through space that somehow contained living beings, and, of course, the densely inhabited moon that said anomaly was going to impact and probably eradicate in, oh, call it twelve minutes. In other words, the problem they were somehow expected to solve.

When they’d volunteered to take out a Longbeam and help where they could, Joss’s primary motivation had just been that he wanted to try out one of the fancy new Republic ships. He’d never flown this model before, and it had supposedly had some nice little tweaks on the last design.

Not that he wasn’t happy to help out, sure—but now he had people’s lives in his hands. Like…a lot of lives, and while people might celebrate him if he succeeded, they would sure as hell blame him if he failed.

Joss cursed. Then he cursed again, then four more times.

“Is that really helpful?” said his copilot, Pikka Adren, second-incommand of the Aurora III and first-in-command of his heart.

“Don’t tell me you can’t relate,” he said.

She looked a little bemused, a little irritated, and very focused. Also very beautiful, with light eyes and dark, curly hair and a pile of dark freckles across slightly lighter skin he loved to see and touch. His wife liked to tell him he was handsome, but he knew the truth: He looked like an engine block with a head stuck on top, with hair he kept cropped tight to his skull so he never had to think about it. Joss Adren assumed he must have some good qualities, otherwise he’d never have landed someone like Pikka…but he knew his looks were not on the list.

“I can relate to your frustration, dear,” his wife said. “I still want to try saving these people.”

“Well, of course I want to try, Pikka,” Joss said. “I just don’t see how.”

The mission had begun as a seek-and-destroy. The target was one of the mysterious projectiles that had appeared in the Hetzal system. It was moving fast, but it was unarmed, and didn’t appear to be able to alter its trajectory. They just had to blow it up before it hit the moon.

Difficult, but not impossible.

But now, thanks to Te’Ami and their other three Jedi colleagues on this mission, they knew that the object was, somehow, inhabited.

There were people aboard it. Living people.

So, while the seek part of the mission was done and dusted, the destroy part was off the table—at least until they’d managed to rescue the people inside. Once that was done—however they might do it, and that was still very unclear—they would still have to blow the thing up, because it was on a collision course with the Fruit Moon, or whatever the people in this system called it.

One tricky mission had become an impossible one, with the original tricky mission still nested inside it.

Joss sighed, then began running through his operational assets.

A Longbeam, with all its capabilities and weapons and tools—a pretty magnificent ship, honestly. You could do a lot with a Longbeam.

Beyond that, they had three Vectors containing four space wizards, and he’d always been a little fuzzy on what they were actually capable of. Jedi could do amazing things, sure, but which amazing things?

He considered that, extremely conscious that every moment he spent trying and failing to find a solution meant this fragment, this ship, whatever it was, got closer to smashing into the moon, obliterating everyone aboard as well as the planetoid itself.

So, what could Jedi do?

They could use those laser swords of theirs pretty well. Always fun to see in action, but he didn’t figure they would do much good just then. Jedi could jump high and run fast—but not as high as space, and not as fast as a ship moving at a pretty good percentage of lightspeed.

They could stand around and look cool. He’d seen them do that plenty of times.

They could…move things around with their minds.

Huh, Joss thought.

He turned to Pikka. “Magclamps?” he said, knowing he didn’t need to explain further. She’d get it right away—one of the reasons they worked well together, on and off duty.

“Maybe,” Pikka said, thinking. “What kind of cabling are they rigged with?”

“Egarian silk,” Joss answered. “They just did a refit on all these Longbeams, swapped it in instead of the duralloy line.”

“That’s good. Egarian’s got a higher tensile strength, and it’s got the variable elasticity. More electricity you run through it, the more rigid it gets. If we could latch on to the object, and start pretty stretchy and ratchet up the tension slowly…”

“Exactly. Do it gradual, so the cables don’t snap.”

Pikka nodded, tapping her finger on the control panel, thinking hard.

“But we’ll never hit it. Those clamps aren’t like blasters. They’re big, clunky. Bad for precision work. They’re designed to tow stationary wrecks back to dock for repairs. The anomaly’s moving too fast.” “Yeah, well,” Joss said, “I had an idea about that, too.”

He activated his comm system.

“Master Te’Ami,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the Duros Jedi actually was a Jedi Master, or a Jedi Knight, or some other rank in the Order, but he called them all Master. Better safe than sorry. Joss didn’t know if the Jedi could even get offended, but why take a chance?

“Yes, Captain Adren?” came the Jedi’s voice, cool and utterly without tension, even though she was facing the same impossible problems he was.

“I might have an idea. But I have a question. You know how you guys can move things around by thinking about it?”

A bit of a pause.

“We use our connection to the Force, but yes, I know what you mean.”

“Can you stop things from moving around?”

Another, longer pause.

“I see where you’re going with this, Captain, but we’re not gods. We can’t just stop that thing cold.”

“Not asking you to,” Joss said, rolling his eyes at Pikka, who grinned at him. “We have something aboard that might be able to slow it down, but it’s not easy to use. We’ll have to try to match velocity with the fragment, and we all know how fast it’s going. It’ll take every bit of engine power we have, and a lot of our fuel, just to accelerate to where we need to be.

“If you can slow it down even a little, even five percent, even one percent, it could make a big difference. At these speeds, even a minor downward shift in velocity would still mean a significant reduction in the resources we’d have to expend.”

“One moment,” Te’Ami said. The line went cold, and Joss figured she was probably talking to the other Jedi, seeing if they thought this would work.

The comm hissed back to life.

“We’ll do what we can,” the Jedi said.

“Excellent,” Joss said. Then a thought, and he leaned forward and spoke into the comm again.

“And, uh, if you could maybe try to hold the fragment together, too, when you slow it down?”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to hit it with these big metal clamp things, and we don’t know how fragile it is. We don’t even know what it is.

Might cause it to just shatter. So if there’s anything you could do to, you know…prevent that…might be good.”

A very long pause.

“This is the best idea you have?”

“Only idea I have, Master Jedi. If we can connect to the thing, we can reverse engines, full power, but gradual, slow it down. We’re not seeing any drive signatures from it—it’s like a projectile from a slugthrower. Like someone whipped a rock real fast. If we could get some opposing force on it, should drain down the velocity pretty quick.

If, uh, it doesn’t break apart. But that’s where you guys come in.” The longest pause yet.

“As I said, Captain…we will do what we can.”

“Great,” Joss said.

He snapped off the comm and turned to Pikka.

“The space wizards don’t seem very excited about this,” she said.

“Eh,” he answered. “They’ll be excited when it works.”

“Is it going to work?” she asked. “Or will the thing break apart, or will the cables snap and whiplash us off into space, or will we just not be able to latch on no matter what we try?”

“Eh,” Joss said again.

He pushed the throttle all the way forward, and the Longbeam leapt into space, the engines roaring, every surface vibrating with power.

“Let’s find out.”