The overstressed box of metal, plastoid, and wiring did not want to continue to exist in its current form. It had been through too much, and knew it. It wanted to disintegrate, escape from the weight and heat and become a swarm of much tinier bits, all free to head off on their own trajectories.

If not for the Jedi, it would have done exactly that. They used the Force to keep the container in one piece, the loops of resistance they had used to slow it now used to maintain its integrity.

It didn’t seem like it would work. It was too much all at once—on top of everything else, the exhausted Jedi had to keep their Vectors flying at top speed, close enough to the passenger compartment that they could maintain their links.

And in the back of their minds, distraction, as some new crisis burgeoned elsewhere in the system. An increasing sense of alarm swelling along Avar Kriss’s network—but they had no time for that. They had their own crisis right here.

The wreckage ahead of them shifted, like a pile of stones about to tumble after one is removed, and Te’Ami opened her mouth and groaned, a sound of intense strain, as physical as internal. She could still feel the compartment pulling on her, and now she knew that if she let go, if she released her hold even a little, her Vector could be torn apart around her. Now it wasn’t just the lives of the people aboard the compartment, or even on the moon, now so close she could see its disk looming in space, growing larger every second.

Te’Ami stopped thinking about any of those things. She closed her eyes and let the Force guide her. For long seconds, nothing but chaos, strain, stress. And then…a lessening. The slightest release in tension—but it made everything simpler. As Captain Adren had said, even a one percent reduction was meaningful.

Then one became two, and more, and the objects working against one another became a single system.

The compartment slowed. More, and more, until it came to a slow stop, the Longbeam reeling it in on its cables.

“Whoa,” came Captain Adren’s voice over the comm. “I really didn’t think that would work.”

“You certainly waited long enough to tell us,” came Mikkel’s reply. Even through his translator, he sounded utterly exhausted.

“Almost out of fuel,” said Joss, ignoring the remark, “couple more seconds and we’d have had to shut off our thrusters. We couldn’t have done that alone. Thank you, Jedi.”

“We couldn’t have done it by ourselves, either,” Te’Ami said. “And the idea was yours. Whether you thought it would work or not, it did.”