She Always Does This

An Apex Short Story

- by Ninmast Nunyabiz -

Chief Homkish finished getting directions from the nurse and politely extricated himself from the Sikch woman's attempts to extend the conversation. The highly social and empathetic endocytes had big hearts, every last one of them - the nurse's was bigger than his fist; he may have been a happily married man, but it was hard to miss with the way she kept shoving it up into her chest - but they had little more than slime between their ears.

Besides, even if he were available and interested, there was no way he could think about flirting when he was there because one of his best officers was laid up.

Hell, she wasn't just one of his best officers. He practically felt paternal of her. Not that he'd known her particularly long; as officers went, she was still pretty much the FNG. Still, he couldn't know her backstory and not feel bad for her. Dragged off of a post-calamity planet with promises of a better life, then thrown to the wolves the moment they found out she was one of them. No family to fall back on, no friends, and in a completely alien environment.

She didn't look anything like a predator, either. Smooth, pale skin, round, wide-set eyes, soft, floaty head hair ... The kid had no claws, no fangs, no poison, no natural armor. Well, not that could be seen at a glance, anyway. She did have fangs, it turned out. Small, almost cute ones that looked more vestigial than functional. Not to mention she had to have the tiniest frame of anything he'd ever been told was a greater primate. When they'd dumped her on him and told him she was a predator, he almost punched the spindly little bureaucrats for being so stupid and traumatizing some poor alien girl.

... Of course, that poor alien girl had proven to be nothing if not full of surprises, and today had been no different.

When he first heard she had jumped in the way of a Jolosian acid spray to protect another officer, he thought he'd be confirming the remains at the morgue. The best case scenario was that he'd have to brace himself to see her covered in third degree acid burns and tranqed into a medical coma on top of a blood-soaked sheet.

But no. She had her eyes closed, so she'd been fine. Because that was apparently how that worked now. According to the other Defenders present, they'd been concerned about ingestion when she sputtered and spat, but she had compared it to a fruit juice from her home planet. Jolosian acid. Reduced to the intimidation of a beverage. Like the other Defenders, he made a note never to eat one of these lemons if he ever found himself in that system. She'd nonchalantly hosed herself and her gear off after the brief ensuing scuffle and the team continued their mission.

He started to grow worried again when the report mentioned a trapper. The preds had holed up with the hostages deep in an old tram line, and the low, near nonexistent light levels would elevate a pred type that was usually little more than an annoyance to a deadly danger. Then he remembered the sprout could pick out a lit match a parthon away in total darkness, and wasn't surprised when it turned out she'd spotted the reflected light off of trip wires and the lumpy shadows of raised terrain.

What did surprise him was that she'd cheated on most of them. After the first few traps, she'd sent for a pole no less than half a dozen spogans in length, and then, with an ordinance shield on her other arm like some sort of ancient phalanx warrior, she proceeded to wallop a path ahead of the team of defenders and around any corner before allowing anyone to round it. She called the process bushwacking.

He wasn't sure what kind of bushes were on her planet that led to such an approach, and he didn't think he wanted to find out. Probably the same ones that produced lemons. He'd suppressed a shiver at the idea of massive piles of leaves that blended in with the surrounding foliage and defended themselves with exploding acid bomb fruit. Surely, that was just his imagination getting away from him.

Broken limbs, snapped ribs and a crushed pelvis, with accompanying damage to internal organs, was the next mental image of the girl to haunt his mind when he learned that she'd faced off against a Forthian wrestler alone to allow the team to pass through to the hostages. The Forthians were massive ursine predators that had the genetic good fortune to pair the brute force of size and strength with dermal bone plates across most of their bodies, and their wrestling consisted largely of crushing their opponents by essentially belly-flopping on top of them. A single male could weigh as much as a small vehicle, and the kid was about a thousand horts too light to have even considered it.

A brave and noble sacrifice for the greater good of rescuing the hostages, perhaps.

Except her species actually did have natural armor, just very well hidden, like most of their more absurd abilities. They actually evolved to integrate it into their internal skeleton, rendering it as strong as steel at a tiny two percent of the weight. The kid's bones were practically indestructible aside from a smattering of very specific exploitations. Not that it made a difference against the Forthian, but they were also effectively immune to immolation, acidic corrosion and electrocution.

... He would only admit in the privacy of his own mind that he didn't want to imagine what other horrors were native to a planet where a species had to evolve to survive lava, lightning and liquefaction as regular occurrences. But then, he was already imagining exploding acid bombs as produce, so maybe it wasn't that much of a leap.

Of course, being unable to be simply crushed wouldn't do much good if you were still sandwiched underneath an immovable object, and it would only be a matter of continuing to be bludgeoned until even her ridiculous body broke or, more humiliatingly, being sat on until she suffocated. But that body had another secret, equally hidden and equally absurd.

Endurance was normally the name of the game her species played, and in that vein, the efficiency of her muscles was extraordinary. They could maintain strenuous activity for hours at a time, even under harsh conditions. With a bottle or two of water and maybe a meal bar, both she could carry on her person and consume without stopping, she could keep moving from dawn to dusk, and probably on through the night, too.

But this wasn't a secret. In fact, it was one of her most obvious traits, discernible by anyone spending any meaningful time around her. She could keep going longer and harder than any other Defender, even in blistering heat and high nerves, that was all there was to it. When they still thought she was a herd species, the labcoats had assumed it was for fleeing predators. It was hard to argue against the merit of being able to run away for longer than your pursuer can give chase.

... And then they found out, no, that was completely backwards. Being inexhaustibly tenacious was how her species hunted. Because that didn't sound like it came right out of a horror holo.

But then came the secret. This endurance was a sort of ... low-power mode. In times of duress, their bodies could flip a switch and achieve feats of explosive strength on par with what other greater primates twice their size were capable of. For brief periods of time, they could even exert force fifty times greater than their own body weight. Enough that the kid could have even juggled him, if she had ever taken the notion.

Suddenly, a match against a Forthian started to sound a lot more even than their sizes implied, and sure enough, she had dispatched the pred wrestler in short order. By repeatedly twisting his phalanges until he surrendered, apparently.

And, of course, she'd overloaded her rig. Again. The device was supposed to be an equalizer, allowing all to operate at the same physical standards regardless of innate strength or the gravity they evolved in. It also assisted in load-bearing and impact resistance, allowing most operating forces on the body, sudden or sustained, to feel like a tenth of their actual weight or force.

Rigs were, of course, tuned to the species of the wearer. Which meant the kid's was tuned specifically to her, though the metrics were close enough to those of the Undpani, the closest Union member species in similarity, that it largely meant grabbing one of theirs and making some minor adjustments. And she did need it, her normal muscular output was only a little above average. Every time the rig tried to augment those explosive peaks the same way it would her normal, every day motions, however, it, quite understandably, ripped itself apart. He often wondered how they didn't do the same to her.

This all just served to raise the question even higher. If the rescue mission had been a success, and every challenge the preds raised was dispatched with such ease, how in all the stars in the sky did she end up in the hospital?

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He stopped outside of her room and took a moment to square his shoulders and focus himself on the proper demeanor. It had never had much effect on her, but it wouldn't do to look anything less than the part of the hardass chief, pissed that one of his own had the gall to get injured and pull him away from an afternoon of brooding and frowning severely at paperwork, or something. He had a reputation to protect, a reputation that solved many problems between defenders just by entering the room. It wouldn't do to have rumors flying about that he was soft, worrying over individual officers like an old den mother.

He was confident that every officer under him knew that he would fight for them at the drop of a hat, would stand by their side and support them against any political nonsense or overblown accusation. They also knew that he'd come down on them like a ton and a half of bricks if their egos got too big, and three tons if they went crooked. What he hoped they never found out was how often he worried about them like they were his own brats every time they went out on a call like this one, how he'd deal with the guilt if they didn't make it back, how he dreaded telling their loved ones that they were never coming back and it was his fault.

The kid didn't have any of those, of course. No kids of her own, no parents, no siblings, no cousins. No one to hand her off at a wedding, no one to bury her at a funeral. The closest she had to someone waiting for her to come home was a holographic keeper. To so many others, even a surprising number of her fellow defenders, she was still the predator living among them. Events like today, despite how she risked herself for their sakes, only added to her reputation as the Defenders' pet monster. Somehow, knowing that there was no one to tell, no one who would miss her, no one who would cry at the thought of never seeing her again, it only made the heavy weight in his chest worse every time she went into danger.

In a galactic civilization of trillions upon trillions of people, she was alone. No one should have been so alone. Even preds had families. And yet she came in to work every morning with a smile on her face as if she had it all. She smiled, not for herself, but for them. Maybe that was why he worried so much about her.

Such deep thoughts were ruining his game face, and he shook his head to clear it before centering himself again.

Like any other public service or space, all of the doors in the facility conformed precisely to Galactic Union building code standards. In plain speak, that meant that some bureaucratic pencil pusher somewhere at some point generations ago, who had never once in all of his life lifted a hammer and wouldn't know which end of it to hold if he had, once looked at a chart with the absolute average dimensions of a hypothetical average Union citizen, and ran that through an equation someone else had given him to determine the "ideal" doorframe. He then went off to his next self-important dictatorial task without ever giving a single thought to the extremes of that average.

This left Chief Homkish wider and taller than every single door in any building built to the unquestionable doctrine of the holy code. He felt for those at the opposite end of that fictional average, he really did. Sure, he had to both duck and turn to pass through any door outside of his own home he ever encountered, as he did once more here, but at least he could reach the handle without having to ask for assistance.

"Chief!"

There, occupying the one bed in the room, and turning toward him to act as if she hadn't heard him outside the door, was Defender Ashley Jones, the only human in all of Union space. The sole representative of the only known predator from a world so deadly that they developed a herd mentality. Quite possibly the single most dangerous sapient species in the galaxy. Or at the very least, the most ludicrously difficult to kill. Looking for all the world like a child whose parent just showed up at school while they were in the office.

A glance over her form told its own tale of the day. Her skin was redder than normal from her acid bath, and shiny in the room's illumination from the ointment the nurses had applied. Some abrasions on one cheek, around her shoulders and down her right arm in particular were covered in squares of taped gauze, light wounds from some of the more explosive traps. He could just make out the edges of a compression wrap under her hospital gown, no doubt for the rib cage that found itself under the weight of a small vehicle.

All injuries he knew full well she would have refused to acknowledge in her report, walked home with and self-treated with an ice pack, a lumbar pillow and a beer. If the hospital hadn't gotten to her first this time. The primary suspect of that feat was the one injury that didn't correspond to any of the initial reports he'd received. Her ankle was elevated by a sling, wrapped in a compression sock and fully encircled by chemical cold packs.

"Apex," he responded to her with her callsign in his best Violently Displeased voice. He motioned to the room around them, rather than to her injuries, as if he didn't consider them worthy of notice. "Care to tell me what this is all about?"

She had the common decency to look bashful, at least. Though her blush was hard to notice against the already reddened skin, the way she suddenly was looking for anywhere else to look was expression enough. "Ah, well, it's stupid ..."

"I'm sure," he replied, making sure he put a sarcastic tone in there. "I still need to know so I can fill out all of the extra paperwork you've made for me today."

She looked down at the sling and rubbed at the back of her head. "Well, there was a kid with the hostages. He was scared, and I figured some levity would lift his mood, and everyone else's with him. So I gave him a ride on my back. It was a big success until we were nearly out. We could even see the ambulances waiting to give them the once-over."

Apex flumped back on the pillow on the angled bed that held her in a reclined sitting position. "And then I ... I stepped in a pothole. I lost my balance and all I could think about was making sure the kid didn't fall, so I turned around to catch him and gave my ankle a good ol' twist when it didn't turn with me."

A pothole. How painfully mundane, he thought. No wonder she had hesitated to share it. And all because the hyper-predator that had just made a mockery of deadly threats decided to be a silly big sister. Homkish couldn't decide if it was wholesome or ludicrously insane. "Broken?" he asked.

But at that, she shook her head and scoffed. "Just a sprain. They're overreacting. I told them, get me an ice pack and a pair of crutches, and I could see myself out. Instead, would you believe I've been offered nerve dampeners three times just since I got here? Three times!"

Ah, yes. Pain tolerance. Another human quirk. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and rattle her back and forth. Of course they offered you nerve dampeners, you sprained your fucking ankle! She'd literally damaged the very things fastening her body parts together, and it was just a sprain. Any other Union species would have been begging for those dampeners, and she probably hadn't taken a damned one. An injury like that meant an officer would be posted up for a month, too.

... Which probably meant the doctor would have a fight on his hands if she wasn't out of here and cleared for active duty in a week.

Instead of pointing any of that out, he motioned to the rest of her injuries. "And let me guess, all of this is just decoration."

You ever see a dominant predator pout? It's a damn sight. She crossed her arms and huffed and everything. "If I didn't know any better, I'd swear they just took the opportunity of having me here at all to make up for lost time. I'm going to need a shower to get all this ointment off, but oh no, I have to stay off my foot." She motioned toward the bathroom. "I told them that's literally what a shower seat was for, but the hot water could set off the inflammation they're putting enough ice on to keep a turkey frozen."

"And I'm sure the ointment, itself, is there for a reason," he sarcastically offered the ranting defender. He was not going to ask what a turkey was. Something in his mind told him that was a hole he didn't want to go down.

The redirection worked, and she rolled her eyes. "It's just a little irritation! I might've been a bit tender tomorrow, maybe a little peeling in a day or two."

He slapped a massive hand over his face and pulled it down its length with a weighty groan. "Do yourself a favor and don't tell the hospital staff that. Most people don't make light of their flesh literally peeling off of them. They'd probably throw you into an intensive care ward."

She looked at him funny at that, which was a sure sign she was about to say something simultaneously mind blowing and stupid. "What do you do for sunburns?"

He blinked. "Sun burns? Apex, your biology is the work of an eldritch madman, but even you couldn't survive outside of the atmosphere without a space suit."

She scratched at her cheek and looked toward a corner of the room. Oh, fuck no. "Well, I could, actually. If only for a couple minutes. But I meant planetside. In atmosphere." Her gaze came back to him. "Are you really saying nobody in Union space gets sunburns?"

This time, Chief Homkish took a long moment to consider his response, paced by a deep breath and exhale. "... When you say your sun ... burns you, what about it does so?"

She thought for a moment, too, gathering her words and how to say it. "It's the ultraviolet spectrum of the sunlight that causes sunburns, when it gets past a certain intensity or you're exposed for too long."

"... The part that's supposed to be blocked by the atmosphere?"

But Apex shook her head. "That's just the shortest frequencies. Longer frequencies pass through and reach the ground."

The chief sighed again and shook his head. "I'm no astronomer, kid, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work. You make it sound like your star is unstable and pissed off. You're basically saying you evolved in an irradiated wasteland."

Her dismissive shrug wasn't exactly reassuring. "I was trying to avoid saying radiation."

He should have listened to his instincts back at the turkey. He shouldn't have gone this deep. If he went any further, she was probably going to start telling him, actually, fission bombs aren't that bad, the radiation necessary to kill all life in a city within a generation was totally survivable, her people made nature parks out of them. Stupid radioactive, acid bomb fruited, lava-filled, lightning-riddled death world. And to think, none of those were even the calamity that finally took it out. But then, it, and its humans, had survived that, too.

Instead, he turned for the door. "I'll do what I can to make them get you those crutches," he growled as if she was putting him out. "But don't expect to get out of at least an overnight. After that, desk duty until a doctor says otherwise."

She gave him a grateful and relieved smile that illuminated her entire face. "Thanks, Chief, you're the best."

He grumbled something that was supposed to sound like a threat and closed the door behind him. What kind of apex predator from the bitchiest planet in the galaxy evolved to smile so damn sweetly? She had fangs, for crying out loud.