The Training Sim

An Apex Short Story

- by Ninmast Nunyabiz -

Fiffsy yanked the helmet off with a howl of frustration the moment feeling returned to her limbs.

“It’s impossible,” she raged as she threw herself upright from the deep chair. “It’s completely ridiculous!”

The female Chisay took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her rusty brown hair feathers, and when she spoke again, it was at least several decibels lower, if no less furious as she pointed an accusing finger at the foxlike Halreian.

“This isn’t a training exercise, Foris! It’s a damned farce!”

He held his hands up in an attempt to appease the bird lady. “You’re just frustrated. I told you it would be difficult!”

“Difficult? Difficult?!” she repeated as her volume crept back up. “Difficult is raiding a fortified pred den without power armor!” She hefted the helmet in hand and waved it like she was about to beat him over the head with it. “This is your sadistic attempt to make something that doesn’t even make sense just so you can brag about it being unbeatable!” And Fiffsy threw the helmet over the side of the chair. “Well, congratulations, Foris, it’s unbeatable! Because it’s broken!”

“Hey, hey, that’s expensive department hardware you’re tossing around there!”

“What’s going on in here?”

All three heads – Fiffsy, Foris, and the Halreian’s usually innocent and timid assistant, Atoi, of the diminutive Passeian rabbit people – turned toward the new voice, and Foris’ face split into a grin, though he hadn’t found his words yet.

The sole Earthling in the Union Defenders looked over the trio for a long, silent moment, then pointed directly at the Passeian. “Atoi. Explain. Now.”

The girl, her long, drooping ears hanging down over her shoulders reminiscent of pigtails, flinched at being called upon, but obeyed. “Ah, Agent Apex, Doctor Tlthortza was testing a new training simulation he programmed.”

“Not just any simulation.” The fox – though despite the visual similarities, his species ate only fruits, berries, and some vegetables and legumes – had found his words, and with them, his grin had widened even further. “The most challenging combat simulation perhaps ever devised! Tell me, what would you do if faced with a full-on infestation of Deathworld tier predators?!”

Apex arched a single eyebrow at the doctor in charge of many of the technical aspects of their branch. “Start shooting humans, I guess.”

Doctor Tlthortza seemed then to realize to whom he was speaking and raised his hands in supplication much in the same way he had done to the Chisay. “Ah, I did not mean to imply anything untoward concerning any present company. I assure you, beyond traditional bipedal structure, the predators within the simulation bear no similarity to your species at all.”

And then his grin returned, and Apex couldn’t help but wonder if he thought any of them believed the idea was only just occurring to him. “In fact, I could very much use the data of an actual Deathworlder. Besides sating the immense curiosity of whether or not my simulation is too much even for the, ah, real deal, as it were.”

He even ended the proposition with a bit of a manic giggle.

Fiffsy was already shrugging on her own blue Defender uniform jacket. She stood several inches taller than the Earthling and had an even broader build. If she were a human, she’d have the weight advantage over Apex by fifty pounds easily. Of course, she wasn’t, and most of that size was plumage and semi-hollow bones. The alien woman could kick like a talon-hooved horse, though. That’s why her callsign translated to Mule.

“Don’t bother, Ash,” she told the human, giving Foris another round of stink eye. “He cheats. Hostiles jump out from nowhere, sometimes even places you already looked. Never from the same place if you run it again, either. It’s completely random.”

Apex turned her gaze back to the doctor, a slightly bemused smirk on her lips. “Is that true, Doctor?”

“Only semi-random,” he attempted to assure her. “And they don’t appear from nowhere! I assure you, all preds within the simulation are clearly defined and behave only according to those parameters.”

She stared at him a bit longer.

Doctor Tlthortza took a step toward her as he clasped his palms to keep from rubbing them together. “Ah, I just realized that I forgot to tell you, Agent. Participants get a bonus from my research grants on their next paycheck.”

She glanced back to Mule.

The Chisay gave a reluctant nod. “That part’s true.”

Ash considered the offer for a moment longer, then shrugged as she began peeling her jacket off. “Eh, what the heck, why not? My cat needs more irradiated sand.”

And no, she did not explain herself to the three questioning stares that comment earned her.

* * *

Ash’s eyes snapped open, her cheek against the concrete equivalent.

It was dark, something that rarely happened in the megacity. It meant she was either underground or the sector’s power grid wasn’t operating properly. When she pushed herself up, she could see it was the latter. Not all of the lights were out, but they were sparse.

There had been some sort of blast or accident. The surrounding structures were damaged. The nearest source of light was a flickering street lamp that was bent over a hovercar.

She checked herself out quickly. No armor, no rig, no gear, just her Defender jacket over civilian clothes, what she might wear walking around town. So she wasn’t supposed to be on beat. She also didn’t seem to be meaningfully harmed. A little roughed up, but any injuries were strictly superficial, even for most Union races. They barely registered to her at all.

The first thing to do normally, then, would be to call it in and let responders know she was on the scene. Normally, they would be able to tell her where she was needed and her additional information would improve their awareness of the situation.

She wasn’t really surprised when she lifted her arm to check her slate and saw comms were unresponsive.

Alright, then. The area behind her was blocked off by the rest of the accident. It looked like some sort of pile-up, but from the blackened hulls and the cooling flames, odds were good that it had been a while ago. That left the only open path down the narrow road ahead of her.

As she slowly started walking forward, she moved close to one shattered wall, and with a forceful twist, pulled a length of pipe out of the remains.

* * *

“Oh, that’s clever,” Fiffsy noted as the trio watched the events unfold on a holo-screen. “Wish I’d thought of that.”

But Atoi just watched with bewilderment. “What does she want the pipe for?”

“A simple club,” Doctor Tlthortza surmised. “It’s not much, but it’s a force multiplier. She is that much better armed than she was on waking.” He glanced over to the bird woman. “Though for the record, I suspect it wouldn’t do you as much good, Agent.”

Fiffsy tilted her head in what would be, for a human, a raised eyebrow. “Chisay have excellent upper body strength for our mass, Foris. We’re not primates, but you know full well that a million years flapping wings have given us very good chest and shoulder muscles.”

“Ah, yes,” he agreed, “but even most primate species don’t have what Humans call a trebuchet assembly. An overhead strike from Agent Apex would be equivalent to a blow from someone perhaps twice her size. It’s the same reason they’re such good throwers.”

The Chisa woman crossed her arms as her feathers rustled. “Still better than nothing.”

“Yes, yes, I suspect that was her thought, as well. Now, be quiet, she’s coming up—” The fox cut himself off with a swear as he stared at the monitor.

“What?” Atoi begged, standing on her toes to try to see the screen better. “What happened?!”

“How in the stars did she …”

* * *

Ash had come to a complete stop as she stared down an adjoining alley. It wasn’t a long one and ended in a separation grate, so it wasn’t a means of moving through to another street. But that wasn’t what had caught her attention, anyway.

There wasn’t anything in the alley, just a dumpster and a bunch of bags of trash. It wouldn’t have been a bit out of place down on the docks, where city services were less common. But this wasn’t the docks, and that was a very large pile of trash.

And it smelled like blood.

Mule had described ambush predators, and Foris had said the preds were hominids. She eyed the pile, considering the size of a standard human.

She stood there a moment longer, adjusting her grip on the pipe, testing its heft against her other hand …

And then she started walking again.

When the attack came, it was lightning-fast.

* * *

Doctor Tlthortza was gobsmacked as he stared at the display, but Fiffsy had thrown her head back in laughter.

“Would you look at that! You weren’t kidding, were you, doc?! She took the head of your death world pred clean off!”

“Why?” he bemoaned. “Why?! I thought she saw it, but then she walked on by! How did she react so quickly?!”

“Perhaps she did see it,” the rabbit girl suggested timidly. “Maybe walking away was a trick.”

“A trick,” he repeated. “Yes … Bait for a trap, perhaps. We’ll see, we’ll see. There are still three more preds in that alleyway. She can’t get through them all so easily.”

* * *

She did get through them. And then three more that spotted and charged her when she broke through to an open street. She used the abandoned vehicles to control their approach so that she was never faced with more than one of them at a time.

Ash continued to follow the path available to her until a collapsed upper bridge blocked further progress. A quick look around, and one of the double doors to an aquarium was just a little ajar, so she headed inside next.

She couldn’t say she was particularly impressed with the design of the preds. They were basically just scorpion people. Standard hominids in basic clothing with a thin outer shell, insectile eyes, fangs, and a stinger tail. Honestly, if she saw one on a Union street just going about their day, she probably wouldn’t think anything of it.

She restrained the last one in the alley, locking its neck with her pipe and stepping on its tail just behind the stinger. No matter how she tried to communicate, it just hissed and thrashed, though, so she snapped its neck and moved along.

Either they weren’t supposed to be intelligent enough to care, or they just weren’t programmed to respond to negotiation. Probably the latter, she guessed.

Her footsteps brought her into a large foyer with scaffolding off to one side where they’d been doing renovations. After snagging one of the brochures near the front and stuffing it in a pocket, she moved toward the large aquarium wall to check if it was see-through – any transparency could vastly influence how she moved through such a maze.

* * *

“Aha,” the fox celebrated as the agent in the sim wheeled around to see four more of the preds closing in on her at once. He was rubbing his palms together again – an instinctual behavior originally for cleaning them off and ensuring nothing compromised their grip. “I knew it, not even a deathworlder can survive this sim! I’ve got her now! She’s got nowhere left to run, she’s completely pinned in!”

But Fiffsy just looked at him in confusion. “What are you talking about, Foris? She’s not cut off at all.”

The confusion spread to his expression, making it half glee, half lost. “Eh? What are YOU talking about?”

The bird lady grinned as the human broke for the scaffolding and practically ran vertically up it like a four-legged spider. “You said it, yourself, Doctor. She’s a primate. You practically gave her a staircase.”

“How did YOU see it?” Atoi asked, her tone radiating amazement.

“Avians and primates both have something in common,” she proudly provided. “To both of us, Up can be a viable direction.”

Doctor Tlthortza’s expression was far more annoyed than that of his assistant as he was powerless to do anything but watch the preds clumsily try to pursue her along the same route. Especially when the first one to try slipped and fell onto his back.

* * *

First, it was a mark against the enemies for their uninspired design, Ash reflected as she stared down at the last one to crash back down and fall still. Now, it was the far more serious mark of brainlessness.

They had doggedly tried to chase her up, continuing up the same path over and over again even as she stood at the top and swatted them with overhead strikes each time they nearly made it. Making them play Ring Around the Rosie out in the street had been one thing, there was at least always the plausible threat of them successfully flanking her.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

But this? This had just been stupid.

Oh, she could absolutely see how they’d given Fiffsy so much trouble. They were ambush predators with a natural talent for hiding, and when they struck, they did it fast. They had a good amount of physical strength, too, and their natural armor meant most unarmed blows would just rain off of them. She had no doubt that their stinger was loaded with some sort of neurotoxin, too, which was why she’d made it a point not to let it touch her at any cost.

No, she suspected this was a shortcoming of their programmer, not one of their own. Foris didn’t know how to act like a predator, so he could only pass on the most basic impersonations of one to his creations. He should have spent some of those grant funds on getting some dockside consultants.

With a moment of peace and quiet, she set her pipe aside and pulled out that pamphlet from the entryway.

Ah, jackpot! She had hoped for a map of the aquarium, but this actually had a map to show where the place was located in the city. She traced the street she came in from to get her bearings, and sure enough, there were exits from a store area on the opposite side of the building. They came out on a completely different road that she was willing to bet would be her way forward.

More importantly, she recognized a nearby intersection. If she could get out of the aquarium, she’d be only a few blocks from a Defender waystation. Even if her own comms were out, the ones there would be hardlines specifically so they’d still be operational in a situation like this. She’d place money that was the ultimate objective of the simulation, to get to the waystation and radio the situation to headquarters to get reinforcements and evac.

A low growl drew her attention and she slowly rose back to her feet at the sight of a massive scorpion man with a second pair of arms.

“Hey, boss fight time already, is it?” she asked no one in particular as she reached for her pipe once more.

The growl transitioned into a roar just before the monster charged.

Ash tried to keep her distance, but unlike on the floor below, this engagement was limited by the causeways and paths that laced above. She’d duck a massive haymaker, only to have to avoid a backhand and deflect the stinger.

She needed firepower. What she had was a pipe that was rapidly misshapen, and any attempts to get within striking range put her dangerously within his.

When he had her bent backwards over the balcony and she looked to what waited below, she reconsidered. He clearly didn’t expect her to take that bent pipe and drag them both over the edge.

Their bodies made twin cannonballs into the water, just past a sign that read, “Alternate Tour Path – Aquatic Species Only.”

She turned in the water to orient herself to gravity and grinned as his heavy form flailed in slow motion until it rested at the bottom of the pool.

Then she turned and darted through the underwater tunnel.

* * *

“She can SWIM?!”

Atoi’s tone was much calmer than the near-stroke of the doctor’s. “Her planet is three-quarters water, sir. It would be more surprising if she couldn’t.”

“And you’d know she could if you paid closer attention to her training assessments,” Agent Mule added, with no small degree of smugness over the shorter fox.

Foris turned on her, wild-eyed as if the preds were coming after him. “How long? How long can she swim without coming up for air? That tunnel is meant for piscenes and aquatic reptiles! There’s no way a surface mammal can stay underwater long enough to make it through! She’s killed herself!”

But Fiffsy was unswayed. “You’d be surprised, Foris. She can go longer on one breath underwater than she can in open air.”

He spun away from her. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he shouted scoldingly.

“Some sort of diving reflex,” the bird replied. “Constricting nonessential blood vessels the moment their bodies detect the pressure change or something. I’m sure you’d understand the biology better than me.” Then a twist of the lower jaw that amounted to a half grin. “She once mentioned that the record for a member of her species was nearly a third of a deci.”

Doctor Tlthortza turned slowly back to her as if she’d run him through from behind. “… A third?”

“That’s right. Is that long enough to get through that tunnel?”

He faced the monitor once more, where the human woman was being tracked. “Well, the thing about records, Agent, is that they’re outliers. But if she can manage even half that, she could make it through most of the tunnel without ever coming up for air. And she wouldn’t have to. There’s viewing bubbles along the way, and the current’s to her back.”

He placed his hands on the edges of the console and slowly shook his head. “How badly … have I underestimated what it means to be a deathworlder?”

* * *

Two more scorpionoids made their way down the walkway, oblivious to her existence as she watched them from just below the water of the aquatic path. It seemed Foris didn’t think they’d be capable of cooperating in large groups, so it was rare to see them more than two or three at a time.

There had been eight of them in the wide-open plaza ahead of her, but this flaw had made them easy to isolate and pick off. These were the last two, and they didn’t even know it.

Worse for them, she knew another of their weaknesses, and like any proper hyper-predator, she would exploit it until they ceased to exist.

As they passed by her hiding location, she erupted from the water like a crocodilian, grabbing them both and then falling back into the water to drag them in with her weight and momentum.

These smaller ones were lighter and didn’t sink as neatly as the big alphas, but a few good rolls had them so disoriented they couldn’t tell up from left. Their tails struck out, but they were terribly slowed under the water, and she shoved the both of them toward the bottom.

They panicked, they flailed, they swam in random directions, but if they tried to swim back up, she gave them another roll and shoved them back down again.

The preds choked out their last breath before she was even straining to hold hers, and she breached the water’s surface once more to pull herself up onto the walkway in their stead.

She had lost her pipe in the scuffle with the alpha, and as the water ran off of her body and she took a moment to empty her boots, Ash considered the best means of replacement.

Then her eyes lit on an algae restaurant built into a U-hook of the tour path, and she grinned.

* * *

“Oh, she’s moving again,” Atoi announced.

But Doctor Tlthortza wasn’t anywhere near the display. He’d been hanging his head at his desk in a fit of self-pity for the last half hour. “Really?” he asked with bitter sarcasm. “Why bother when she can just drown them all?”

“Probably because the waterway doesn’t leave the aquarium,” she answered the question as if it were serious. She tapped on a holographic pad to check the building Agent Apex was heading toward. “She’s moving to a restaurant.”

Foris raised his head at that. “A restaurant? Why? Does mass murder make her hungry?”

“Yes, actually.”

Fiffsy came back into the lab at just that time, carrying a tray of hot, caffeinated beverages she passed around. Foris gave it a sip and wrinkled his snout at it, but didn’t turn the black drink away. Atoi’s had enough cream and sugar in it to give diabetes, so whatever bothered the doctor didn’t enter her long, satisfied pull.

The bird woman continued her explanation. “Apparently, combat burns a lot more calories than normal operation for her people. A lot of other resources, too, mostly sugars and proteins from what I’ve seen. They aren’t supposed to stay in high gear for long periods or they’ll start getting the shakes and burnout from their stimulants, too.”

Now, Foris was clear out of his seat, pulled back toward the display and the conversation. “She’s not supposed to be taking stimulants that strong on the job. The simulation wouldn’t include that.”

“She doesn’t take them, she makes them,” the bird corrected before sipping at her own drink. “Military-grade chemical combat enhancers, and she’s got a gland whose whole job is to just dump them into her system wholesale the moment there’s even a chance things go bad.”

She shook her head, though. “Still, I’ve seen her come out of a scrap bruised, bleeding, and broken, barely able to stand and looking like she needs a gurney more than anything, and all she’ll say is, I’m fucking starving.”

An unladylike snort escaped Atoi’s nose at that, and she quickly covered her mouth and gave a little cough. “Unfortunately, even if the simulation supported that, I doubt she’d find much of what she needs from an algae restaurant.”

Agent Mule stepped closer to the display and looked it over. “Where’s the pipe?”

“Lost it.”

The bird nodded as if that answered the situation. “She’s not going for a snack, she’s re-equipping herself.”

“It’s a restaurant, not a weapons depot,” Foris scowled.

“At the very least,” the bird woman countered, “she can expect to find quality knives and basic first aid supplies. It’s better than nothing.”

As they settled in, Foris sidled up to her. “Say, Agent, the way you described her resource burn, and the negative reactions to the stimulants, are you saying she normally couldn’t keep this up for so long?”

But Fiffsy just smirked at the desperate fox. “Sorry, Doc. All indicators say she could keep it up for days. It’d probably be miserable, but her tolerance for physical misery is disgusting.”

* * *

The aquarium restaurant looked like some sort of vegan Hawaiian barbecue crossed with a Mongolian grill. Fire pits decorated select stone tables while charcoal grills were set up to prepare plates of fruits and vegetables wrapped and flame-broiled in kelp analogues. Tropical miniature trees lined the outer boundary of the eating area, looking a bit like a hybrid of bamboo and yucca.

On any other day, this place would be a bougie, overpriced trap for those without the endurance to keep walking. Today, Ash looked at it and saw an armory.

Of course, the very first thing she grabbed was a nice, big straight knife, probably normally for chopping vegetables. Then she meticulously made certain the entire restaurant was clear and barricaded the entrances. She got all of that done without having to sully her new knife. Apparently, being obligate carnivores, the preds didn’t see much value in a vegan eatery.

Then she turned her attention to the contents of the kitchen, itself. While Union drinking alcohol was typically extremely weak by Earth metrics, the alcohol used for cooking was much stronger. Not only did it tend to cook out of dishes, making diluting it unnecessary, but some recipes required it for the sake of ignition. The flash fire produced was equal parts spectacle and essential finishing touch to the cooking process.

It was this second quality she was most interested in. The fact that it already came in small bottles for safety reasons was icing on the cake.

Once she’d found the stash and lined up all of the bottles she found on the kitchen island, she headed back out to the dining area and checked the trees until she found one just the right height, a little shorter than her. It took some muscle, but she managed to pry it free, then propped it on a table while she cleaned it off with a smaller knife. When it was nice and straight, she carved a shelf into one end the width of the larger knife’s handle and headed back into the kitchen.

There, she pulled her jacket off and spread it out on an open part of the island. It was still a little wet, but that wouldn’t matter. Still, she hesitated for a moment as she reminded herself it was a virtual construct and not her actual jacket. Then she started cutting it into strips.

The longest one, a spiral cut of one sleeve, she laid out as straight as she could and weighted it with some spice jars, then left it while she started up one of the open-fire grills. While that warmed up, she sized out the remaining strips, cut them into lengths no more than six inches, and then pulled a metal first aid box off of the wall.

She upended the entire thing in the corner. After all, it was only the box she was after.

As she started laying half the strips into the metal box, she considered how much better terry towels would have been for this, but Union kitchens used non-contact sanitation methods. There wasn’t a towel in the entire kitchen. The jacket was made of a cotton fiber analogue with a light weatherproofing outer layer she’d peeled off while she made the shorter strips, though, so it would do.

Once she had a roaring fire going, she tossed the sealed metal box into the flames and turned her attention back to the island. One glass of cooking liquor, about the size of a tallboy can, was placed atop a strip of cloth that still had the weatherproofing so she could start getting the sizes for tying up slings.

By the time she pulled the box out of the fire with a pair of tongs, however, the long strip still wasn’t dry, and that was one she really didn’t want stretching out on her, so she went looking for some paraffin or wax for her fuses to keep any fluids from ruining them.

And as she was digging around the dry goods, that was when she saw the thickener. She couldn’t believe her eyes. An entire bulk can of 100% food-grade potassium nitrate.

For a pregnant moment, she just stared at it like she was waiting to wake up, and then she launched into a flurry of activity. There was something else she’d seen, something perfect. And in moments, she victoriously held her prize in her hands.

A restaurant-sized pack of powdered sugar.

It was a good thing she hadn’t waxed her fuses yet. She’d need to tie some more slings, too. And there was something else she wanted to make. Now all she needed was a thick pipe and some ball bearings …

* * *

“What in the stars is she wearing?”

“That’s a bandoleer,” Agent Mule answered the doctor. “Looks like she’s got it loaded with glass bottles and aluminum cans. And a starter torch? Not sure what’s with the chunk of water pipe, though.”

“Oh,” Atoi noticed excitedly. “Instead of just taking a knife, she made a spear with it!”

“Well, whatever she’s spent all this time cooking up,” the bird concluded, “she seems to think she’s ready now.”

“I almost thought it was a snack when she pulled out the confectionary sweetener, but then she mixed it with the thickener.” Atoi turned to her boss. “Is that supposed to do something?”

Foris leaned closer to the screen in consideration. “Not that I’m immediately aware of. Some sort of adhesive trap, perhaps? Yes, she’s certainly very clever. It takes a flexible mind to walk into a building and see components of something larger in otherwise normal features. She even used the charcoal to create an artificial camouflage pattern on the skin bared by the loss of the jacket.”

“Tool builders on top of everything else they have,” Fiffsy agreed. “Humans are something crazy.”

Despite this, Doctor Tlthortza was rubbing his hands again. “If she’s heading back out into the open, I can’t help but wonder if it will be enough. So many advantages she had indoors will be gone again.”

It was just over five minutes later when the sudden roar of an explosion came rolling out of the speakers, driving them all to their feet in reflex.

“What was that?!” Foris demanded.

Atoi checked with a tablet linked to the simulation. “That … that was one of the adhesive traps Agent Apex constructed! She used the torch to light a braid of cotton stuck in the top and hurled it over the vehicles. Four and a half seconds after ignition, the device exploded! Four preds dead, estimated fatality radius … three meters!”

“Nonsense!” the doctor immediately bit back. “An explosion of that size alone couldn’t possibly have killed them!”

“It … it didn’t!” The bunny girl buried her face behind the tablet. “According to the data, the explosive powder inside the can was stuffed with glass shards. The blast wasn’t the attack, it was the propellant!”

Mule marveled at the holo-screen with a slow grin. “You sly, sly girl, letting us think you’d made something as boring as adhesive. Those aren’t traps, they’re fragmentation grenades! Haha! I’m going to have to remember that recipe!”

* * *

Ash catapulted over the wreck she’d taken shelter behind and hopped across several others before driving her spear through the chest of one of the couple survivors. The other came at her and she bashed its jaw with the opposite end before spinning it around to slice its neck through.

Only then did she take the opportunity to examine the outcome of her candy grenade. The results were reassuring. It wasn’t as good as a formal grenade, and unless her count was off, the fuse didn’t last quite as long as its length should have. But then, that’s why you always treat a five-second fuse like a three-second one.

… Considering this was being recorded, it probably just got a lot harder for her to legally buy sugar. Damn. Ah well.

As the last scorpionoid bled out behind her, she gave the spear a spin to flick the blood off of the blade before tucking the haft under her arm again.

One block down, six more to go.

…

It took her nearly an hour to reach the Defender waystation. Most of that had been from caution, as the preds were crawling practically all over at this point, giving up ambush strategies in the presence of sheer numbers.

They still didn’t hardly communicate with each other, though. At one point, she even tricked a bunch of them into a dead-end alley, where she introduced them to a couple of her Molotovs. She was kind of glad that they hissed instead of screamed.

If nothing else, she’d left substantially less of them still scurrying about in her wake. Her bandoleers were empty, but her spear had put in plenty of work and she still had her trump card.

The lights of the waystation came on automatically in response to her presence, illuminating the short entrance hall, the lobby, and, as the doors slammed shut behind her, the waystation’s one other occupant, its massive form hunched over the consoles for city security feeds.

There was that deep growl again as it pushed itself to its feet, but it wasn’t a threatening one, emphasized as it deepened when it stretched its back out. And then the alpha scorpionoid turned to face her, and there was intelligence in this one’s eyes.

“Prey,” it greeted her deeply, though the word didn’t match the movement of its pincer mouth. “Is your translator my words understand?”

“Mostly,” Ash replied as she continued to approach as if this were all perfectly normal. “It’s not perfect, but I can make sense of it.”

The problem perhaps went both ways, because it seemed to take a moment before it gave a bob her translator told her was a nod. “Good. You here die now. Grasp you this.”

“Eh, I give myself good odds,” she disagreed conversationally. “You’re not the first four-armed variant I’ve encountered, and I’ve learned since then.” She tapped the spear haft against the floor. “Got myself more reach.”

Its mandibles twisted. It was a grin. “You interesting prey are. No fear. Prey not behavior.”

“Ah, that’d be because I’m a predator.”

“Hmph.” It stood up fully straight and unfolded its arms fully. It might have been half again as large as the one in the aquarium. But then, she’d never seen that one stand up straight at all. “I predator death world am. Still you do think reach enough?”

Ash did give it the benefit of a surprised eyebrow but then grinned back. “Let’s find out.” And she brought the weapon up into a ready position. “One deathworld predator against another.”

It gave a whistling hiss that translated as laughter, then came at her like a raging, poisonous wrestler.

Her new reach was not enough, at least not as much as she would have wanted. The scorpionoid chief’s blows came fast and hard. One miss even put a hole in a wall she could have slipped through. In a proper arena, she could have kept dancing around the demi-giant and bled it to death with a thousand cuts, but waystations were built to be sturdy, not big.

Then it sent its tail shooting after her when she rolled to one side and she buried her spear into it just below the stinger, pinning the limb to the wall and causing the pred to cry out in pain as she jumped away from it.

In a rage, it reached down and ripped the spear out, itself, then snapped it in two and threw the pieces to either end of the room. But when it wheeled on her again, it paused as it tried to make sense of the short length of pipe she held in one hand, bracing herself down on one knee while her other hand held the lit torch near the pipe’s back end.

Then the torch touched the back of the pipe, and an explosion filled the room as a ball bearing passed through the chief’s skull at nearly the speed of sound.

Ash dropped the pipe and shook her hand out after the brute’s body crashed to the ground. She even gave her palm a few useless puffs of air as she made her way over to the consoles. That smarted right up into her forearm.

But with a few quick pokes and a bio-signature verification, she found the communications channel.

* * *

Agent Apex pulled the helmet off of her head and her body immediately took a deep breath she hadn’t realized it needed. She looked at the three faces that were still there almost where she had left them, and focused on the fox in particular.

“Well, Doc, I’d call that a passable amateur horror game. Points for environmental interaction, though.”

He in particular was staring at her like he’d completely forgotten who she was, and she’d sprouted fangs in the meantime. “G-game?! You call that a game?!”

“A basic one, sure,” she confirmed, and Fiffsy grinning beside her put a grin on her lips, as well. “It’s a pretty popular genre back home. Oh, and you need to work on your AI, your basic enemies in particular could be really stupid.”

He swallowed at that and looked down his nose. Rather than snobbishness, for his kind, it was an expression of annoyance. “Yes, I’m fairly certain I know the encounter to which you are referring.”

“Great!” Ash hopped up from the bed and shoved the helmet into the doctor’s hands. “So who wants to go get something to eat? I’m starving.”