Alien: The Cold Forge: Novel Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: April 24, 2018
Author: Alex White
Publisher: Titan Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-1-78565-194-6
Series: Titan Alien novels
Setting: RB-232 / Cold Forge, 2179

Alien: The Cold Forge is a 2018 novel by Alex White, published by Titan Books on 24 April 2018. It followed the 2014 Titan novels Out of the Shadows, Sea of Sorrows, and River of Pain. Alien: Into Charybdis continued the story later. It was set in 2179, the same year as Aliens, on remote station RB-232, called the Cold Forge, in orbit around the dwarf star Kaufmann. Geneticist Blue Grace Marsalis and company auditor Dorian Sudler were there when a saboteur opened the Weyland-Yutani kennels and loosed live Xenomorphs.

Novel Overview

The Cold Forge was a barbell-shaped station about ten parsecs from Earth, with crew quarters at one end and a locked science wing, the SCIF, at the other. Kaufmann's radiation hid the work and doubled as an incinerator when heat shields opened. Three classified projects shared the deck: Glitter Edifice, Blue's live-specimen genetics, Silversmile, a neural-network virus built by Lucy Biltmore, and Rose Eagle, a reactor meant to break entangled comms. The station was built to grow. In use it ran a thin crew of about 22 people and those three jobs.

Dorian arrived to fire scientists and seize assets. Seegson already had a mole on board and a listening post watching the station under the name Indigo Flag. Blue was trying to pull a medical use from a military contract before Bishara's Syndrome killed her. The kennels failed after someone opened the cages by hand and someone else put Silversmile on the station computers.

Plot Summary

Dorian's last stop before the Cold Forge was a shipyard. Blue's next chimpanzee test then went wrong. From 27 July 2179 the station lost gravity, pods, and most of its crew in a matter of hours.

Line Items And The Athenian

On a shipyard assignment, Dorian found that branch manager Alphonse Kanner had killed himself after a firing. Kanner still held a two-million-dollar company life policy from age eighteen. Suicide voided the payout, and Dorian logged that as a win. Shipyard doctor Jana mistook his interest for a last-night pass. He refused her, then added a termination that blocked unemployment under threat of a harassment charge. His next classified stop was RB-232, listed as poor performance on an asset worth billions.

He worked classified HR under the title Special Resources, painted and smoked between jobs, and treated the Cold Forge as his twentieth cryo voyage. He arrived on the company yacht Athenian with pilot Ken Riley, copilot Susan Spiteri, and navigator Montrell Lupia. Commander Daniel Cardozo and chief of security Anne Wexler met him at the dock. Dorian already knew the Governance Board had not trusted junior executive Carter Burke to finish a parallel special project, and he treated the Cold Forge as the backup.

Blue, Marcus, And Glitter Edifice

Blue ran Glitter Edifice from a hospital bed through a brain-direct interface in the synthetic body Marcus, a 2169-copyright male synth with blond hair, green eyes, and a cheap gut that could not digest food. She had been a Johns Hopkins fellow and a leading geneticist before Bishara's Syndrome took her motor control, optic nerve, and the last unassisted steps she had taken six years earlier. She kept his pain receptors on. Twelve other diagnosed cases existed worldwide, all children of lifelong colonists or spacers, and none of those patients lived past 30. Lab assistant Kambili Okoro helped her time a chimpanzee against an egg, sample 63. They missed the open. A Facehugger took the animal, Blue's wireless link dropped, and she seized hard enough to tear her colostomy pouch loose. The official job was military control of the species. Her private goal was to isolate the Facehugger payload, Plagiarus praepotens, as a medical rewriter that might undo Bishara's Syndrome.

Vice president Elise Coto had recruited her from Johns Hopkins after the diagnosis, then covered thin progress from Earth. Blue had already spent about 80 percent of the chimps and eggs and half the funding without starting the official control-loop task. Eggs were tracked like gold at about $150,000 each. She opened hidden wireless ports in Marcus so she could keep working when the official link failed, and those same ports later let someone off-station move the body. The Company never delivered the anti-bedsore bed it had promised, and Intellijectors in her real body refused an overdose. A secret picture channel then told her Elise could no longer protect the work, and that someone was arriving.

Silversmile And Kaufmann

Technician Javier Paz flashed wrecked Silversmile drives and let the virus jump the air gap into Juno, the SCIF computer. The code went after kennel heat shields. Kennel designer Dick Mackie sent Blue outside in the mirrored Turtle EVA kit, a suit that could face Kaufmann for about two minutes before a synth body started to melt. She locked some shields. Silversmile opened more. At least one adult died in the star, then a cascade cooked most of the 63 caged adults. Twenty eggs remained in storage.

The Audit Squeeze

Dorian slept with Anne, then used her. She had once been Blue's lover and had ended it because Blue was too close to death. Anne pointed him at Blue's unauthorized kennel server. He blackmailed Rose Eagle lead Josep Janos, then planned to seize Glitter Edifice, put Blue in cold storage, and cycle every name on the roster, Anne included. A rushed chimp surgery then tore off half of Kambili's face. Dick shot the animal. Cardozo locked Blue out of the SCIF.

Blue hacked Dorian's terminal and found a personnel file that listed everyone for termination. She answered a new cutout message and agreed to an off-station extraction if she could deliver a sample. That night Dorian used Override Epsilon on Marcus, locked Blue out of the body, and pulled her clearance. Techs started cracking her quantum-locked research through Rose Eagle. Dorian watched old birth tapes and fell asleep among feeding adults in the kennels.

Cells Open

Two acts hit at once. Someone opened kennel cells by hand, and someone installed Silversmile on Titus, the station computer, from outside the SCIF. Javier later found a three-year-old shared commissioning ID used on Titus. Dorian read that as Lucy. Lucy had written her mother about the experiments. The leak got her blackmailed by handlers who named themselves COMSEC's Bill Prater and USCM Counterintelligence Colonel Weber. She was Seegson's mole. She had not expected a massacre.

Juno called a kennel evacuation. Dorian shoved an unnamed video tech into a Xenomorph and ran. He found the server camp slaughtered and recognized Josep Janos's severed head. Armory guns were placebos, kept so lab techs would enter the wing. Cardozo's caseless armor-piercing pulse rifle was the real weapon. A Xenomorph impaled Dick through the ribs while he crawled away from an egg crate, then fed on his skull. Titus lost scrubbers, nav, access control, quarantine, and the killbox. Blue rebooted Marcus from cold storage and tried to drop the kennel module into Kaufmann. She primed one of three bolt lines before comms died.

The Athenian Undock

Three Xenomorphs boarded the Athenian, killed Susan on a tail spike, and put Ken on his own stick after his pistol flattened on a rib plate, sending the ship into a full-burn spiral. The docking clamp tore a bay wall open. Explosive decompression stripped most of the escape-pod rack. Kambili, already half-faced and drugged, shoved Blue's wheelchair under a sealing bulkhead. The door sheared off both of his arms. A Xenomorph finished him. Cardozo was last seen hanging near the breach as the suction fell. He never returned.

Anne and Dorian reeled survivors in on a fire hose. Unpiloted Marcus hauled people through the gale. About 12 humans spent five hours in an airlock on hyperbaric treatment. The crash split the station into a crew-quarters half and a SCIF half, linked by maintenance tubes. Blue was left on the far side of the vacuum docking bay with Kambili's hands.

Anne, Javier, And The Sample

Dorian forced Javier to bootstrap Titus, then hid and left him for the hive. Blue later found Javier cocooned, hands chewed off, an egg crate still locked at his feet. He asked her to end it. She crushed his throat with Marcus's hands. Marcus called her a murderer after that and would not kill Dorian, but he still tried to keep her alive. Blue then milked a Facehugger with the synth body, pinned it, bit the pharynx, and sucked praepotens into Marcus's plastic stomach.

Off-station traffic answered NO SAMPLE NO HELP. The station was in a 60 km/h off-axis spin and falling toward Kaufmann. Dorian isolated Anne in a break room with no ration bars, only creamer packets, and asked her to EVA to the last pod and abandon the rest for Gateway Station. She refused, so he beat her with a chair and left her in a hall as bait until a Xenomorph took her. Blue later watched the Juno recording.

Power Loader And The Last Pod

Dorian smashed Marcus's skull with a fire extinguisher, shut crew-quarters air and heat, and painted a nav-light trail from the kennels to Blue's room. Blue jammed an oxygen valve, hid in a vent, and lit his last match. The blast and an alcohol-cabinet fire killed one adult and melted her bed through the deck. He then herded the last Rose Eagle techs with doors. He bit out C. Hogan's throat on Juno's cage and threw the body down to the hive. In the impregnation lab he lied to Lucy and Nick Harmon that he was Seegson extraction, beat Nick, flash-froze him in the surgical nitrogen booth, and kicked the frozen face in.

Blue piloted Caterpillar P-5000 CP5000-03 through her brain-direct interface, with shoulder lamps and a weld torch on firmware Marcus had flashed. A resin nest already held crew in place with open, disarmed egg crates at their feet. Rose Eagle tech Charles begged her to kill him. She could not, and she left him for the Chestburster. The loader crushed several adults before acid wrecked an arm and a hip. Dorian and Lucy crossed the hull in Kaufmann's ten-second shadow window. He unsealed her helmet and kicked her into the star. In med bay Blue jammed an opiate injector into his neck. The chip refused the dose. A Xenomorph pulled him off her, the loader folded that adult in half, and the machine stuffed Blue into an empty egg crate as a coffin.

Seegson Takes Blue

Dorian woke glued in resin with a spent Facehugger beside him. The hive let the host walk. He went to his observation-deck quarters and painted until the Chestburster came through his ribs and finished the canvas, then fed back into him as the station fell toward Kaufmann. Marcus, feet beaten to stumps, lifted Blue from the crate into a cryo berth. He was not glad she lived. He blamed her for Javier and for forcing him to keep existing.

Blue next woke in a Seegson facility under synth Rook. Seegson had destroyed Marcus. Helen and Dan from their HR office treated the raid as a way to hit Weyland-Yutani's books hard enough for a 5 percent share and a board seat by fiscal year-end. They wanted a portfolio of uses from praepotens, not only a cure, and they would keep Blue alive to finish the work. She took the deal, asked for a male remote body again, and planned to design a cure and outplay them the same way she had outlasted Dorian.

Plagiarus Praepotens And The Kennels

Company files shipped with the eggs called the adults Xxenomorphs. Crew called them snatchers. Blue named the Facehugger Manumala noxhydria and the payload Plagiarus praepotens, a bacterial-scale agent that rewrites DNA far faster than a physical embryo. Fear in the host concentrated the dose. Sedated chimps gave worse results, so she kept the animals awake. The same DNA reflex that maps host shape produced chimp-proportion adults that preferred all fours, unlike the human-proportion drawings packed with the samples.

There was no Queen on RB-232. Every egg was imported and inventoried. Adults still built resin nests in hours, cocooned live hosts, and understood armed egg crates well enough not to force a live failsafe. Exterior decks used a super-hydrophobic coating so acid blood was less likely to hole the hull. Dick's later cell failsafes added shock, lye flood, and a space purge after the heat shields failed.

Confirmed Xenomorph Kills

Dick counted 63 caged adults before Silversmile opened the heat shields. Kaufmann's light then killed most of them. Several dozen still moved through the station afterward.

Daniel Cardozo killed at least one with the pulse rifle, and the acid then cut through two decks. Blue killed one in her own room with the oxygen-and-alcohol fire. In the P-5000 she smashed two into walls, cut one in half with a steel conduit, and batted two with a hydrophobic egg crate. The loader later folded one more in the med-bay hall.

Key Characters

Blue Grace Marsalis - Johns Hopkins geneticist and Glitter Edifice lead, dying of Bishara's Syndrome, the only human who left RB-232, taken by Seegson with a praepotens sample.
Dorian Sudler - Weyland-Yutani Special Resources auditor on his twentieth cryo voyage, who came to fire the station, herded the crew to the hive, and died as a Facehugger host in his quarters.
Marcus - 2169 male synthetic body Blue piloted by brain-direct interface, pain receptors left on, destroyed by Seegson after he put her in cryo.
Anne Wexler - Chief of security and Blue's former lover, used by Dorian, then beaten and left as bait for a Xenomorph.
Lucy Biltmore - Silversmile lead and Seegson mole, blackmailed into the leak, killed when Dorian opened her helmet over Kaufmann.
Kambili Okoro - Blue's lab assistant, half his face torn by a chimp, killed after he shoved her wheelchair under a bulkhead that sheared off his arms.
Daniel Cardozo - Station commander with the only real pulse rifle, last seen hanging at the Athenian breach.
Dick Mackie - Kennel designer who sent Blue out in the Turtle suit, killed beside an egg crate during the first breakout.
Javier Paz - Technician who let Silversmile into Juno, later mercy-killed by Blue after the hive cocooned him.
Josep Janos - Rose Eagle lead, blackmailed by Dorian, found dead in the first kennel slaughter.

Place In The Titan Line

Titan's first official Alien novel wave was the 2014 trio by Tim Lebbon, James A. Moore, and Christopher Golden. The Cold Forge followed on 24 April 2018. White's next book, Alien: Into Charybdis in 2021, picked up Blue after Seegson took her. Titan later bundled The Cold Forge with Alien: Prototype and Into Charybdis as The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death on 28 November 2023.

The Cold Forge was set on RB-232 in 2179, Prototype followed Zula Hendricks on Jericho 3, and Into Charybdis continued Blue's research.

Continuity With Isolation And Aliens

The rival company is Seegson, the same company that owned Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation. Isolation's outbreak is 2137. The Cold Forge was forty-two years later. Seegson still used listening posts, blackmail, and a stock-price hit rather than a fight in open space.

The date was 2179, and Carter Burke ran a parallel special project that year. Gateway Station was the civilian destination if a pod could be flown.

Editions And Adaptations

The mass-market US paperback was published on 24 April 2018 at 320 pages. Blackstone Audio released an unabridged reading by Michael Braun on 17 July 2018, running 11 hours 51 minutes. The 2023 Symphony of Death omnibus reprints the text with Prototype and Into Charybdis.

Behind The Scenes

Agent Connor Goldsmith asked Alex White for favorite science-fiction properties, and Alien was first on the list. Titan editor Steve Saffel took the Cold Forge pitch over a military-academy outbreak he thought was too close to young-adult fiction. White prepared an Alien version and an Aliens version of each pitch. Saffel would not pick a favorite film, so White kept Marines out.

The remote-body idea started at a UX conference when a Double Robotics telepresence unit, an iPad on a Segway, rolled onstage. A friend's father had died of ALS around the same time. The auditor came from a Silicon Valley ride with a venture capitalist who talked profit and IPO, not ethics. White was living in Huntsville, Alabama, and working as an experience designer, with earlier military-defense lab work behind the classified-program details.

The acknowledgements thank science readers Dr. Stephenson, Lali DeRosier, Sola, and Dr. Granade for genetics and physics help, plus Fox's Carol Roeder, Nicole Spiegel, and Steve Tzirlin.

Conclusion

Station RB-232 fell in 2179. Blue Marsalis left in cryo with a praepotens sample after Dorian died as a host and the rest of the crew died in the kennels, the Athenian breach, or the hive he herded them into. She woke under Seegson, still trying to turn the payload into a cure. The Cold Forge is often considered among the best Alien books, and it is praised for strong, deep characters.