“You sure about this, Captain?” Petty Officer Innamin said, pointing at his screen, which displayed the rough path of one of the hyperspace anomalies as it sped toward the center of the system. “We need to shoot this thing down before it kills someone. Maybe a lot of someones. The problem is that our targeting computers can’t calculate the trajectory. The anomaly’s moving too fast. At best, I’d say we’d have a one-in-three chance of hitting the target.”

Captain Bright shook his head, his tentacles rustling against his shoulders. He knew he should probably reprimand Innamin for questioning his orders. The kid did it all the time—he was young for a human, little more than two decades old, and as a rule thought he knew better. Bright usually let him get away with it. Life was too short, and the ships they flew were, on balance, too small to bring unnecessary tension into the mix. A thoughtful question from time to time wasn’t exactly insubordination.

One in three, he thought. He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected. Just…better than one-in-three odds that they could actually accomplish their mission.

The Longbeam, call sign Aurora IX, was state-of-the-art, a brand-new design from the Republic shipyards on Hosnian Prime. It wasn’t a warship per se, but it was no pushover, either. The vessel had distributed processors that could handle multiple target firing solutions and prepare a spread of blasterfire, missiles, and defensive countermeasures in a single salvo. Not too hard on the eyes, either. Bright thought it looked like one of the hammerfish he used to hunt back home on Glee Anselm—a thick, blunt skull tapering into a single elegant, sinuous tailfin. It was a tough, beautiful beast, no doubt about it. On the other hand, their target, one of the mysterious objects racing through the Hetzal system, was moving at a velocity near lightspeed. It had whipped out of hyperspace like a red-hot pellet fired from a slugthrower. The Aurora IX might be state-of-the-art, but that didn’t mean the ship could work miracles.

Miracles were for the Jedi.

And they were, apparently, otherwise occupied at the moment.

“Fire six missiles,” Bright ordered.

Innamin hesitated.

“That’s our full complement, sir. Are you sure—”

Bright nodded. He gestured at Innamin’s cockpit display. A red threat indicator—the projectile—on a collision path with a larger green disk, representing a solar collection station equidistant from all three of the Hetzal system’s suns. The thing was still some distance away but moving closer with every moment.

“The anomaly is headed straight for that solar array. The data we got from Hetzal Prime says the station has seven crew aboard. We can’t get there in time to evacuate before it gets hit, but our missiles can. If we have a one-in-three chance at shooting the object down, then sending six doubles our chances. Still not perfect odds, but—”