Kaleps-Sis was a Hish-qu-Ten warrior who served as the most fawning lieutenant of Shesh-Kuk during the hunt on Midnight in Predator: Forever Midnight. She began the campaign as a He-State under-warrior, oversaw the mental domination of the human trooper Roy Mannen, and slid into the She State in the middle of the Expedition. Distrusted by her own leader as a possible spy for the Hierarchs, she was killed when the humans seized the Hish lander.
Biography
The Flattering Under-Warrior
Kaleps-Sis served aboard the lander of Shesh-Kuk when the Kuk Clan Expedition came to Safari Planet 3998. She reported to her leader that the mobile cerebral implanters were ready for launch, and walked with him to the launch room where his enslaved Amengi engineers sent the swarm toward the colony. Her speech was thick with ancient honorifics and pledges of terrified obedience, and she pressed to know when the forest hunt would begin.
Shesh-Kuk found the worship excessive. He judged that such ingratiation usually hid either a poisonous barb or a wish to mate, and he ranked her flattery alongside that of his slaves. Later, on the bridge, she offered to throw herself alone against ten humans in a kill-rage, an offer her leader coolly filed away while he took a call from Hierarch Bel-Cann.
Handler Of Roy Mannen
Shesh-Kuk gave Kaleps-Sis charge of the mental domination of Roy Mannen, the captured trooper imprinted through the mind-probe helmet. She reported the work complete, describing a human who now thought of himself as a low under-warrior and shambled about imitating Hish posture and speech. She was present when her leader decided to keep Mannen as a test subject before feeding him to the spawnlings, and she noted the strange phrase from his own world that he kept repeating.
Mannen came to see her as his immediate superior. After later operations he was expected to report to her, and when he was chained by the neck in the parentship's surveillance chamber she asked Shesh-Kuk outright what was to be done with him. Her role made her one of the few Hish who dealt with the experiment day to day, much like the human servants described among the humans who joined Predators.
Shift Into The She State
The Hish were not born into a fixed sex, and a warrior could slide by hormone from the Generative He State into the Receptive She State. Kaleps-Sis made this change during the Midnight campaign. Shesh-Kuk recognized it from a looser stance, a sullen manner, a slight rounding of the lower torso, purple mottling around the jaws, and flesh-braid ornaments switched to bright colors. From that point the Hish spoke of her as a she.
Under-warriors were under orders to watch their own hormones and stay home with the clan until spawning was done. Shesh-Kuk weighed sending her to the neurological-crucifier for the breach, but a warrior early in female modality was unpredictable, and an inflamed kill-gland could have left him with more dead crew. He let it pass, and was repelled when she seemed to flirt with him, clacking her mandibles invitingly.
The Karna Hunt
Kaleps-Sis joined Shesh-Kuk and Mannen on a hunt against a family of the lizard-like Karna in the jungle. While the father was brought down by plasma fire and Mannen's pike, Kaleps-Sis sliced the head from the Karna mother. The child escaped into the deep brush, and the hunt became one of the moments that bound Mannen more tightly to his captors.
Bearer Of Bad News
Aboard the orbiting parentship, Kaleps-Sis reported that 2 more warriors had been eaten by the local fauna while hunting. Shesh-Kuk ignored her at first, then scorned the bungling subclans and admitted that his force was running short of warriors. She asked about the spawnlings' training, learned that they would receive full remote control of the implanted colonists at the seventh cycle, and launched into another honorific until he told her to stop talking and leave.
The Ravine Ambush
Kaleps-Sis led the Hish team that ambushed Commander Randall Ness and his party in a ravine. The trooper Summers and the Atavite girl Ann Louise were killed, and Kaleps-Sis carried Ann Louise's head tied to her belt as a trophy. Ness and Georgie escaped through a narrow cleft in the cliff face that led into a dry underground riverbed, too tight for the Hish to follow.
The Final Test
Her warriors dragged Mannen from the brush where he had been hiding, and Kaleps-Sis handed him a long-range plasma projector with 8 shots. She ordered him into the tunnel to kill the escaped humans, his own commanding officer and sergeant among them. The weapon was locked by a remote device under the barrel, so when Mannen chose not to turn it on his captors, she took that as proof that a human could be mentally enslaved.
The warrior Akh-Rendin mocked her nerve and asked whether her kill-gland needed draining. When he praised Shesh-Kuk, she accused him of wanting to spawn with the leader, and he told her to control her hormonal outbursts. She activated the weapon and its locator, then reported to Shesh-Kuk, who was furious that the humans had escaped, that the ambush site had not been surveyed, and that she had sent Mannen out of sight instead of watching from a flyer. He ordered every human killed, the test subject included, and promised an investigation into treachery.
Death In The Lander Hijack
The test failed. Mannen rejoined Ness and Georgie, and the projector Kaleps-Sis had given him became the weapon they used to storm the Hish lander-camp while the Karna Rattle decoyed the guards. Ness burned down the warriors in the lander's corridors, took the forward guns, and killed Shesh-Terk outside the ramp with the Small Sterilizer.
The guard Ke-Meckna, who had watched Kaleps-Sis leave early with the ambush team, later told Shesh-Kuk that the human commander at the Small Sterilizer had killed at least 5 Hish, the high warrioress Kaleps-Sis among them. Shesh-Kuk remarked only that her death spared him the trouble of throwing her out of the airlock. The exact moment of her death was never witnessed by the Hish who reported it.
Suspected Hierarch Spy
When Bel-Cann rebuked Shesh-Kuk for letting Mannen roam the planet after seeing so much of the ship, he refused to say who had told him. Shesh-Kuk concluded that a spy for the Hierarchs was reporting on him from inside his own crew, and Kaleps-Sis was his first suspect. He resolved to confirm it and throw the informer out of the parentship's airlock at the first chance.
Whether she truly spied for the Hierarchy was never settled. Her endless flattery, her closeness to the Mannen experiment, and her role in the failed test all fed her leader's distrust, and his calm response to her death showed how little loyalty ran in either direction within the Kuk Clan.
Personality And Traits
Kaleps-Sis was ambitious, obsequious, and quick to shift blame. She praised her leader in extravagant terms, offered to die for him, and blamed Akh-Rendin for the unsurveyed ambush site the moment Shesh-Kuk demanded answers. Her change into the She State made her more volatile, prone to jealousy and quick to bristle at a fellow warrior's tone.
She was also a capable field commander by Hish standards, trusted with the Mannen experiment, a hunting party, and a heavy plasma projector rarely used on a hunt because it gave little sport. Her end fit the wider pattern of dishonorable Predators on Midnight, whose cruelty and carelessness let their prey turn Hish weapons against them.
Behind The Scenes
Kaleps-Sis appears in John Shirley's novel Predator: Forever Midnight, published by DH Press in 2006. The book introduces her with male pronouns and switches to female pronouns once Shesh-Kuk notices her shift, which makes her one of the few Predator characters whose sex changes within a single story. The novel never shows her death on the page, and it slips once by referring to her with a male pronoun after the change. Because the book has no interior illustrations, this page uses the novel's cover art.
Conclusion
Kaleps-Sis was a flatterer, a handler, and finally a liability to the Hish-qu-Ten hunt on Midnight. Her shift into the She State, her suspected spying for the Hierarchs, and her trust in a conditioned human set her apart from the other warriors under Shesh-Kuk. The projector she placed in Mannen's hands helped the humans take the lander, and she died in the same reversal that doomed the whole Expedition.
Appearances
- Predator: Forever Midnight (2006)
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Novels | Predator Deaths | Predator Lore
