The final member of his crew, Ensign Peeples, buzzed his proboscis as if he was about to speak, but Bright waved him off, continuing without stopping.

“Yes, Peeples, I know that math is off. I’m mostly worried about a different equation: If we fire six missiles, we might save seven people. Let’s see what we can do.”

The Aurora IX’s targeting systems chugged along, not seeming quite so state-of-the-art now as the deadly red dot crept closer to people trapped on a solar farm with no way to escape. The Longbeam zoomed toward the array at its own top speed, narrowing the distance its weapons had to travel, sort of an interesting problem of trajectory and acceleration and physics, something that awakened Bright’s own three-dimensional instincts built on much of a life lived underwater. He shook his head again, rustling the cloud of thick green tentacles that emerged from the back of his skull, angry at himself for getting distracted when people out there were praying for their lives.

The missiles fired, six quick whmphs transmitted through the ship’s hull, and the Aurora IX was down to lasers only. The weapons shot away, leaving thin trails of smoke behind to mark their path. They were out of visual range in an instant, accelerating to their max velocity in seconds.

“Missiles away,” Innamin said.

Now it was up to that fancy distributed processor, and whether it had successfully transmitted effective firing solutions to the missiles. Maybe all six would hit. It wasn’t impossible.

The deck crew looked as one at the display screen tracking the six missiles, the fast-moving anomaly, their own ship, and the solar array that was rapidly becoming the collision point for all nine objects.

The first of the missiles blinked out on the screen. Nothing else changed.

“Missile one is a miss,” Innamin said, unnecessarily.

Two more missiles vanished. Bright held up a hand before Innamin could speak again.

“We can all see, Petty Officer,” he said.

Two more misses. Leaving one. All else remained unchanged.

The last missile vanished from the display, nowhere near the incoming anomaly. A communal sigh of despair washed across the bridge.

“Blasters?” Bright asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ensign Peeples said, his voice a high-pitched, reedy whine. “Even the best gunner in the universe couldn’t make that shot, and I would guess I’m barely in the top ten.”

Bright sighed. Peeples’s species had a radically unique understanding of humor—not the jokes themselves, which were often decent enough, but the appropriate moment to deploy them.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Bright said.