by Kevin Hearne
I winced. “Good point.”
Moving in tandem, we checked both escape pods and the remainder of the engineering compartment. No more crew. And no dead skullborer bodies.
“Nakari.”
“What?”
“It’s likely there’s one in here, right? The door was closed.”
“Not necessarily. It could have escaped when someone else entered or left. And we can’t assume they’re too dim to figure out the doors. The crew might not have coded them locked and simply allowed them to function with the press of a button. The creatures were smart enough to bore out of their cages in an organized fashion.”
“At least one row of them was.”
“Yeah. Well, nothing’s jumped on us and you have to think anything trapped in here would be hungry, so let’s call this clear and move forward,” Nakari said. “But we’ll do the starboard cargo bay before we head up into the living quarters and the bridge.”
“Okay.” We exited the engineering compartment and Nakari strode to the starboard cargo bay doors, which she tried to open with a single touch. A red light stopped her and a chirp demanded the full code. She carefully punched it in with one hand while bracing two stun sticks in the other. The doors slid aside and I stepped in, arms out for balance as much as readiness.
The bay contained more pallets of equipment and a couple of speeder bikes coated in lavender dust, but no bodies of any kind and no brainsucking predators that we could see. Considering their natural camouflaging abilities, I wondered if we had truly cleared the rooms so far, or merely caught them napping. If a skullborer remained quiet, how would we know it was there?
“You know,” I said, “after we clear the ship this way, I want to go through it again with just one stun stick and a portable scanner to make sure we didn’t miss any that might be hiding.”
“Good call,” Nakari said. “Ready to go forward?”
“Yeah. How many cabins?”
“Eight of them, four on each side of the hallway leading to the bridge. But first there should be a common lounge area.” Her fingers hovered over the datapad next to the door. “All set?”
Raising my arms, I said, “Go,” and she pressed the door release. It wasn’t locked like the cargo bay doors, so it slid aside quickly and gave me my first view of the carnage.
There were three bodies. One of them, a jowly, thick-lipped Sullustan male, was still seated in a lounge chair with a datapad in his lap, the large orbs of his eyes open and filmed over in death; he’d been killed before he could get up. A human female slumped, lifeless, near the hatch leading to the cabins, and nearby a horned Zabrak male lay facedown blocking the door leading to the medical bay, the back of his head an open bloody mess, albeit a dry mess at this point.
“They have to be in here,” I said, moving forward to allow Nakari to follow me inside. “Some of them, anyway.” The helmet wouldn’t allow a decent range of motion, but I saw some scratches and smears of blood high up on the bulkheads. The skullborers couldn’t camouflage their tracks.
The door hissed shut behind us and I paused, expecting an attack at any second, but the time ticked by and none came.
“Let’s secure the medical bay before we go forward,” Nakari said.
Zabrak have some horns on their heads but they are short and stubby and obviously no deterrent to a skullborer, since they don’t grow on the vulnerable pate. The Zabrak’s body was half out of the bay—like the Cerean we had seen earlier, he’d been trying to exit, perhaps seeking help, when the skullborer brought him down. Peering past his body into the bay, I could see an examination table and the metal arms of various scanners and surgical tools; such bays were customized for multi-species crews like this one and packed full of instruments and medicines that a human would never need. I thought that the tangle of apparatus suspended over the examination table would be attractive to creatures that liked to lounge in branches waiting for prey to walk by.
“That door should open up fully without a code,” Nakari said, “since it never closed.”
“Got it.” I thumped the console with my elbow and the door slid wide, allowing me to step past the body of the Zabrak. Three steps in I felt something land on my head. “They’re in here!” I shouted as I whipped the stun sticks at my head from either side. The one on my left hit nothing but helmet, but the right one made contact with something with a bit more give to it, like flesh. No squeal or anything, but the extra weight slid off and plopped onto my shoulder, which startled me. I moved my head too fast to get a look at it as it fell, and the unwieldy helmet pulled me off balance; I managed to stagger backward and get my hands down to control the fall, but the fall was inevitable. And as soon as I hit the ground, two more weights landed on me in quick succession, thunk-thunk, right on my visor, though I saw nothing. A white circle of abraded polymer appeared directly above my left eye and I could hear the material scream as it was torn to shreds by the invisible creature drilling directly toward my head. Its teeth would have no trouble plowing through my eye and then to my brain directly behind. I pounded at the area with each of my stun sticks, but the drilling continued as a body became visible, and I lost a couple of precious seconds realizing what had happened—one skullborer had landed on top of the other, draping over it protectively, and while I had stunned that one to unconsciousness, the first one was still invisible and hungry for my gray matter. I couldn’t get to it with the stun sticks, and meanwhile the drilling continued with palpable progress. Dropping the stun sticks, I grabbed for my blaster and didn’t bother to check its setting. I leveled the barrel on a plane even with the outside of my visor and pulled the trigger, letting rip a bolt of red plasma that momentarily blinded me but halted the shriek of drilling. It also left a scorch mark across my visor.
“Luke! Are you okay?” Nakari asked.
“Yeah. Three down, right?”
“I’ll say. No problem seeing them after you blast them. There’s nasty purple goo all over the bay now.”
“What about the first one I stunned?”
Nakari dropped a stun stick and drew her blaster. She fired at the unconscious form out of my line of sight. “He won’t wake up, either. I don’t have any interest in bringing these things back alive. They’ve killed my friends.”
“Friends?”
She gestured with her blaster. “I knew this Zabrak, too. He knew how to … cook.” Her eyes flashed at me behind her visor. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply criticism of your nerf steaks.”
I hadn’t even thought of that until she said it. Last thing on my mind. I’d been thinking that I knew all about what she was feeling right then. In the shock of seeing someone you know dead, one of the first things you think of is how you will remember them. Things like “he could cook” or “she could sing” or “he was my best friend and I’ll miss him forever.” The crush of grief rolls in behind that, but sometimes you can shove that in a closet for a while until you have time to deal with it; I knew I still had plenty to deal with. I imagined Nakari was walling up her feelings like that now. “Not a problem,” I said. “Sorry about your friend. Give me a hand up?”
“Sure.” She holstered her blaster and strode forward, right hand extended, while her left still held a stun stick. She had to balance herself carefully to lean down, but before I could take her hand, she reared back from me, her left hand bashing the top of her right with the stunner. A skullborer appeared and slid off her hand as she simultaneously dropped the stun stick and screamed. She yanked out her blaster and shot at the back of her left hand, killing another of the creatures—and taking some of her own blood with it.
“Ahh!” Dropping her blaster, she clutched her injured hand to her chest. “Why did they attack my hands?”
I rolled over and levered myself up to a standing position. “They’re smart, just like you thought. Problem solvers. They saw us kill the other three using things in our hands. So they attack the hands to disable you, and then they can get to what they really want.”
�
�Oh. Oh, you’re right! These things are at least semi-sentient. We shouldn’t be messing around with them. Except this last one who’s only stunned. Would you mind?”
I considered simply dropping it outside the ship, but it wouldn’t do to have it lingering around where it could attack us again when we had to return to the Jewel. I shot it, and that made five dead skullborers to match up with five empty cages. “At least you’re already in the medical bay,” I said. “Let’s see if we can patch you up.”
The skullborer had chewed through her glove like tissue and had sawn through the web of tendons in the back of her hand, though it didn’t break any of the bones; Nakari had blasted it to jelly before it could drill so far. It was impossible for her to make a fist now. I slapped a bacta patch on it, gave her something for the pain, and let the automated medical system continue from there. She’d need a true surgeon to repair the damage, but the system could keep her stable and free of infection.
“I’m going to check the rest of the ship, just in case,” I told her. “We should still have one crew member left, right?”
Nakari nodded, biting her lower lip. The pain medication probably hadn’t kicked in yet and her adrenaline was wearing off.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I told her. “I want to see if I can get the ship fired up, too.”
“I don’t know how you can see anything,” she said, breathing quickly. “Between that chewed-up spot in the visor and the burn, it’s a wonder you’re not blind.”
“I’ll be careful. I’m taking two sticks with me just in case.”
Nakari requested that I give her one of hers, and only when she felt sufficiently armed did she lie back on the table to let the medical program run. She quizzed me on the codes for the doors before I exited.
Though my theories would probably be laughable to anyone with a better knowledge of biology, I wondered if the skullborers might get smarter depending on what they ate. Would the prions and neurons of their meals accrete somehow and improve their thinking? If such a thing were possible, maybe eating the double brain of a Cerean would explain how their tactics adapted and improved—because they had been pursuing a tactical strategy by going after Nakari’s hands. And come to think of it, when they attacked my face, the way that one of them landed on top of the other was clever, too—I couldn’t get to the one on the bottom using the stun sticks, and they hadn’t seen the blasters get used yet, so they wouldn’t have been able to account for that. But that possibility raised other questions. The one that landed on the other’s back would have necessarily been punctured by the first one’s spines, so if that had been planned it had been a planned sacrifice. Could they even see each other while camouflaged? Maybe that one–two business had been a complete accident. The two that attacked Nakari had obviously coordinated their attack, though, which made me wonder how they communicated. We had heard no vocalizations from them until we caused them pain.
The simplest explanation—and far more likely than the idea that they could get smarter by eating brains—was that the skullborers were at least semi-sentient, maybe even sentient to begin with. But between them killing the first two collection crews and me and Nakari killing them back, we had never had time to puzzle out their status.
All of my questions were better answered by Kelen Biolabs, and I was more than ready to drop the entire mess into their lap. I tapped the code into the datapad that would unlock the hatch to the living quarters. No bodies awaited me in the hallway, but I had to step over the fallen body of the human female outside the door to enter it. All the quarters were closed, and I punched in the override for each one, finding the first two on either side empty albeit with signs of recent occupation—papers on desks, half-empty cups of caf, tossed linens, and a carelessly discarded pair of underwear in one case. I found the sixth and final member of the Harvester’s crew behind the third hatch on the left. He was a human male, curled up on his bunk, most likely dead, his lips cracked and dry and his skin gone pale. Though his skull was still intact, he hadn’t responded to Nakari’s shipwide calls when he had the requisite equipment to do so—I checked. The console by the door still worked.
Perhaps he had locked himself in here once he realized the skullborers were loose on the ship and knew that he couldn’t venture outside the room without his armor. Several empty water bulbs lay strewn about the floor, but I saw no food packets. Who knew the last time he’d had a drink or something to eat. He’d chosen to die of thirst rather than have his brain sucked up a feeding tube—an understandable decision.
I saw an old-fashioned handwritten diary open on his desk, which would no doubt illuminate his last days. Just to make sure, I knelt beside him and leaned forward until my visor was right next to his open mouth and nose. After a couple of seconds, the glass unmistakably fogged. He still breathed! He had to be near death, though. I had to get him to the medical bay immediately.
Turning off the stun stick in my left hand, I placed it on his desk and then tried to prod him awake with a few finger jabs. He didn’t respond, so I turned off the other stun stick and put it down, threw him awkwardly over my left shoulder, then grabbed a stun stick in my right hand before returning to the medical bay.
“Nakari, I found someone,” I said as I entered. A pair of robot arms suspended from the ceiling was wrapping up her left hand in a thick protective shroud of bandages.
“Still alive?” she asked.
“Yeah, but he’s in bad shape.”
“Well, it’s finished with me anyway,” she said, her words languorous and mellow. The medication must have kicked in. She waved at the medical apparatus hanging above her with her damaged hand. “It can’t do the surgery required for something like this. These things are meant to keep you alive, and mending tendons isn’t on their list of vital services.”
She rose from the examination bed to make room, and I slid the man onto it. “Know him, too?” I asked once she could see his face.
“No.” She shook her head. “But I’m sure my father will be glad to get him back.”
“Mind looking after him?” I said. “I’d like to clear the rest of the ship.”
“Absolutely, you do that,” she replied, and plopped herself into a chair resting against the wall. She didn’t look entirely lucid, so I programmed the autodoc to begin its work on the man before I left him.
The remaining cabins were empty and the bridge was pristine. I wasn’t attacked at any point, so I thumbed the shipwide comm and said, “Nakari, the ship is clear, at least without scanning. I will start up the engines and run preflight, then come back through with a scanner to make doubly sure.” She acknowledged, and then the work began. The Harvester was okay on fuel and all systems were nominal, except for the profound lack of a crew at the moment. I dragged all the victims into the holding area between the galley and the bathroom, where their unused armor was, then returned briefly to the Desert Jewel to fetch a small life-form scanner to scan the Harvester thoroughly. It was truly clear, so I asked Nakari what she’d like to do next. “How are we getting this ship out of here?”
“Link it to the Desert Jewel’s nav, and you fly us all back to Pasher. I’ll stay on board in case this guy wakes up and try to clean up some of this mess.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Yeah. We better get paid really well for this.”
FAYET KELEN WAITED for us on our assigned landing pad when we arrived on Pasher—waited on Nakari and the Harvester, anyway, along with a small throng of his employees. Artoo and I joined them once we’d secured the Desert Jewel.
Nakari had evidently given her father a quick summary of events, because as I stepped up to join them, he boomed, “Pilot! Well met and welcome. I am told you distinguished yourself on Fex.” That might have been stretching the account a bit far since I had accomplished little beyond my own survival, but his eyes dropped to Artoo and he continued before I could reply. “Your droid has erased all the data provided earlier?”
“Artoo, please delete th
e files Mr. Kelen gave us.” The droid beeped an acknowledgment and Kelen chuckled.
“Good, good. But forgive me if I would like some stronger assurance that my interests are protected.” His sausage fingers fished a datachip out of his tunic pocket, and he handed it to me. “I had this prepared for your arrival. It will confirm the erasure of all files I gave you in your droid’s memory and erase any that accidentally remain, nothing more.”
Refusing to run the chip would only invite suspicion when I had already promised to erase everything, so I inserted it and Artoo ran the program, spitting it back out in a few seconds. Nakari winked at me, however, indicating that perhaps she had her own backup of the Fexian coordinates stored somewhere.
“Excellent,” Kelen said. His hand danced about on his personal datapad and he said, “I am depositing a goodly sum into an escrow account, which your droid may access and distribute to you both, and I thank you for returning my ship, my crew both living and deceased, and alien life that will delight my scientists.”
Sensing that he was about to turn his attention elsewhere and dismiss us, Nakari said, “Daddy. Don’t send anyone else there until you read my full report. Those things could be sentient. And even if you ignore that, you have to upgrade the armor’s mobility.”
He placed a hand on her shoulder. “I will digest all you have written before acting further. My primary concern now is that you see a surgeon about that hand. See where my minions come? Go with them.”
“What?” An ambulance coasted to a stop near the ship and two earnest medics hopped out, asking Fayet Kelen who was hurt.
“Take my daughter to the finest surgeon posthaste and bill it to me. Go!”
“Daddy, wait! What about Luke?”
“Fear not, your pilot will be allowed to rest in comfort until you are ready to depart.”
“Don’t leave without me, Luke!” she called over her shoulder as the paramedics led her to the ambulance.