Heir to the Jedi (10 page)

“Cargo areas first, agreed?”

“Yeah.”

We approached the portside cargo bay and Nakari sent remote codes to call down the freight elevator. It descended flawlessly and without any bodies on it, which was encouraging. The platform had a rudimentary console connected to the rest of the ship, and Nakari punched in codes to light up the interior. Hydraulics whined as we rose together, though we didn’t see much at first beyond the glow panels and cargo hooks in the ceiling. Might there be a Fexian skullborer perching up there even now, invisible to our eyes?

“Stun sticks ready?” she asked.

“Ready.”

The clanking of our boots on the deck sounded muffled and far away, like someone else was walking elsewhere in the ship.

A pallet of crates shrouded in tarpaulin hunched in one forward corner as the elevator stopped, but farther aft along the right wall a line of specimen crates with thick, clear glass was stacked three high, like one might see in a pet merchant’s stall. I doubted these held any promise of a nurturing relationship.

“Check the crates first, leave nothing behind us,” Nakari said.

The crates underneath the tarp turned out to be bulk food supplies—mostly protein sludge mixtures.

“It’s our diet for the near future,” I said, “nothing more.”

“Okay, let’s head aft.” There was an airtight hatch back there leading to a machine shop, bathrooms, and the galley, and from there to the other cargo bay on the opposite side; or we could go forward through the common area and living quarters to see what waited for us on the bridge. As we drew closer, most of the specimen crates were empty and inactive, save for ten closest to the hatch. We clumped our way forward to get a better look and saw that five of them in the middle row contained Fexian skullborers lying on their sides—unconscious for sure, since we could see them, but more likely dead.

“You know, this makes me wonder,” Nakari said. “How do you keep a Fexian skullborer alive in captivity? Does anybody sell brain chow on the market?”

“I’m sure butchers would be able to supply nerf brains or something like that,” I said.

“Ugh.”

“The skullborers might find them delicious.”

“Uh-oh, Luke. Look at this.”

“What?”

Nakari pointed at the top five containers closest to the aft exit of the cargo bay. The thick polymer glass in these—much like our visors—had been cut through in narrow arcs with uneven edges. The units were still functioning in that the glow panels in the lids, calibrated to mimic the UV light and radiation from
Sha Qarot’s star, remained on and warm. But the containers, clearly occupied at one time, no longer held any residents.

“I bet the glass is all over the floor, but I don’t want to look down or I might join it,” Nakari said. I thought the debris might be more like chunks than shards; the glass was quite thick and might in fact be a clear polycarbonate.

“That means we have five skullborers loose in the ship?”

“Maybe. If we’re lucky, they just snuck out past us real quiet and invisible when we lowered the freight elevator.”

“Not sure if we’re that lucky.”

“Nope. But I wonder why only the top five escaped and not these five below them.”

“Maybe one figured out it could bore through the glass and the others saw what it did and copied it.”

“Okay, that’s plausible. The ones below wouldn’t have seen anything except maybe the glass falling.”

“Or the ones in the bottom cages might have already been dead.”

“True. I actually hope that was the case. Because whether the five on top followed a leader or acted independently, that implies a level of intelligence I’d rather not face. Let’s press on. We need to find the crew—there were six of them. Maybe they’ll respond to a shipwide announcement.” She stepped forward to the aft hatch leading to the rest of the freighter, which we noticed was partially open. It had tried to close automatically and failed, prevented from doing so by the booted right foot of … someone.

“Oh, no,” Nakari said.

“That means they got into the rest of the ship.”

“That it does. But maybe someone’s locked away somewhere.” Using the console pad on the wall by the hatch, she toggled the comm. “
Harvester
, this is a rescue crew sent by Kelen Biolabs. We are in the port cargo bay. If anyone is alive, please respond.”
She lifted her finger away, and we waited for a reply. Nothing. She repeated the message and we waited again in vain. “All right, we press on,” she said to me, pushing the button to open the hatch and then bracing herself against the hatch edge so that she could look down without being pulled off balance. I did the same on the other side of the hatch.

A Cerean lay facedown in a standard Kelen Biolabs uniform—bareheaded, in other words—with two holes in the back of his conical skull, one for each of his two brains.

“They weren’t wearing armor,” I said. “They thought they were safe on the ship with the skullborers locked away.”

“Wonder how long he’s been here,” Nakari said.

“Same as the others,” I replied.

“How do you mean?”

“This ship never took off, but it’s still functional. The skullborers either killed everyone or isolated them from the bridge. Otherwise you can bet it wouldn’t still be sitting here like this.”

Nakari’s lips pressed together into a thin line through her visor. “Okay. We go from room to room together, clearing each and locking it behind us.”

“Can they bore through the hatches?”

“That would be excellent intel to have right now. We’ll see. Let’s check all the way aft first. Maybe someone made it into an escape pod.”

I stepped past her into the next chamber, an all-purpose area that had some scientific equipment set up. It had a bathroom and a galley; both were unoccupied. The armor that the crew should have been wearing was piled in a corner next to the bathroom, and the infrared goggles that would have allowed the crew to see the creatures—and wouldn’t fit our helmets—were stowed in a box underneath a table. In the center of the back wall was a pair of doors that led to the engineering area and the escape pods.

A rudimentary machine shop was incorporated in the engineering
area, and it had been thrashed by someone desperate for any kind of weapon—and that someone was dead, facedown like the Cerean, but with a wrench within centimeters of his right hand. Nakari gasped when she saw the body.

“I know him. Knew him.”

“Was he the pilot?”

“No, a scientist. I was on a collection crew with him once.”

“I don’t see any blood on the wrench,” I said. “Though I don’t know what skullborer blood looks like. Impossible to tell if he scored a hit with it or not.”

“If he wasn’t already holding it and the skullborer landed on his unprotected head, he probably wouldn’t have had time enough, considering how fast they drilled through armor.”

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.