Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne

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 “hewas 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 tojelly 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