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.”