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-in-command 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?