Aliens: Berserker: Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: August 1998
Author: S. D. Perry
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 227
ISBN: 978-0-553-57731-0
Series: Bantam Aliens novels
Setting: Traon Deep 4 and DS 949

Aliens: Berserker is a 1998 novel by S. D. Perry, published by Bantam Spectra in August 1998. It novelized John Wagner and Paul Mendoza's Dark Horse series Aliens: Frenzy. The book follows a Weyland-Yutani hunter-killer crew on the leased ship Nemesis: convict volunteers Martin Jess, Wesley Teape, and Pulaski, Lieutenant Katherine Lara, technician Brian Ellis, and Commander Eric Izzard, called Pop. Their weapon was MAX, a Berserker exo-suit with a living volunteer inside, built to burn out adult Xenomorph infestations after the Alien-Earth War. After they cleared Deep 4 on Traon, Company officer A. Grigson sent them to space station DS 949, one of the largest hives the team had seen.

Plot Summary

A Xenomorph in the DS 949 hive from Aliens: Frenzy

Supervisor Colin Sturges woke to a Code Red in shaft One at Weyland-Yutani Deep 4 on the mining rock Traon. The outpost melted dirt for silurium and held a few hundred machine techs under low-level managers. Head tech Wade McCollough called from the basement after the hoists brought excavators in, and a second caller screamed that the animals had eaten a woman's face. About thirty-one technicians were trapped and out of contact for more than eighty hours. The leased hunter-killer cruiser Nemesis, registration later given as WY-49392, was three days out when the call came.

Deep 4 On Traon

Ground leader Martin Jess was a convict volunteer with eight runs left until parole and a surgical implant that logged him under every doorway. He had been a Colonial Marine years earlier and had been discharged for ignoring procedure and beating an officer. Point man Wesley Acchord Teape heard a voice in his head that wanted him dead or insane, built from memories he thought he had buried. That voice had been with him for about five months. Pulaski, the man Jess called Candyman, wore a white mohawk and an eat-me scrawl on his shoulder guard. Commander Eric Izzard, called Pop, flew the ship. Lieutenant Katherine Lara ran communications and treated the affair with him as a mistake. Technician Brian Ellis was three weeks into his first assignment, hired to watch the MAX after a rumor that a Berserker had wiped a crew.

This was Lara's seventh run on the Nemesis with Pop, and the fifth with this ground team except for Teape's predecessor Mannings, who had burned out four missions earlier. Ellis sat in a closet-sized lab and ran a systems check that showed only the lysine flutter this Max had always carried. Sturges met them on the pad. Pop sold the suit as a Mobile Assault Exo-Warrior, almost ten metric tons of armor with a man locked inside, and he planted a nuclear fail-safe in the mine before the team went down. The ground team rode an APC across the flats to a steel plate set into Traon's surface.

Teape Goes In As Bait

Teape rode the deep hoist alone with a tracker. An adult Xenomorph punched through mesh at him, and he cut the skull apart with short bursts from an M41. A flare showed resin over the beams and more shapes in the dark. He went facedown so the hive would take him as a host. Pop treated the hive as if Xenomorphs valued a live incubator over a corpse if the bait stayed still, so the drones would carry Teape to the Queen. Jess and Pulaski cleared a side spur of four adult Xenomorphs while Ellis cut the sedative on Max.

Max Kills The Queen

Ellis flushed the suit, then hit adrenaline in three steps until Max stepped out of the hoist. Adult Xenomorphs came in to guard the Queen. Max burned a wide arc, put an M5 frag in front of a charging line, and shot a drone off its own head after the animal latched on. A barbed tail never reached the armor. Acid blood smoked where it hit the floor. Max followed Teape's transmitter into the egg chamber, wrecked the egg sac with M108 canisters, and killed the Queen when she tore free of the canal. The team left Deep 4 with the fail-safe disarmed and a week of leave on the books.

Grigson Cuts The Leave

Company officer A. Grigson cut that leave from the Nemesis before the crew had unpacked. The listed quad sat far out, and the first notes pointed at a deep-space station. Jess wanted a psych check for Teape. Teape was not showing the burnout signs that had finished his predecessor Mannings four missions earlier. Ellis reported a lysine dip on Max and compensated by point two five. Lara required any Max change to reach her at once.

DS 949

Terminal 949 held a staff of four hundred and could take as many transfer passengers, with warehousing, medical bays, and berths for four galaxy-class ships. Counting crews, Pop put the head count near a thousand. Last routine contact had been about two weeks earlier. A freighter that docked nine days before had reported a barricaded maintenance door and then gone silent. From the Nemesis they saw acid damage on the lower hull and a live adult Xenomorph in the station biodome, moving through trees under lamps that ran on a separate system. Jess treated the station as too large for one team and wanted Pop to call Grigson for support. Pop sent the ground team in first, without Max, and tried to hand hub communications to Jess. Lara took the hub herself.

Facehuggers In The Elevator

They docked at bay B-3 and walked a backup-lit corridor past a stripped human corpse. Teape's tracker picked up small multiple readings behind a closed elevator. When Lara opened the shaft, dozens of Facehuggers poured out. Pulaski swept them with an M56 smart gun while Jess and Teape cut down the ones that reached the sides. One carrier waited in the doorframe and jumped Lara. She was not wearing a mask. The tail locked around her throat and the ovipositor pushed at her hands until Jess and Teape tore the animal off her helmet and Pulaski shot it. Jess sprayed acid neutralizer across the visor before the blood reached her skin.

They took the stairs instead. Pulaski killed a single adult Xenomorph on the way down, then called the others into the command lounge, where staff had died in an ambush with no barricades and almost no dead drones. A woman had shot one animal through the throat and been cut in half from behind. The communications room held a man who had shot himself at the keyboard, and the station transmitter was wrecked, which explained why no later messages had gone out. The team could not see why the first distress calls were missing. Pulaski found a bottle of champagne in a refrigeration unit. Eight of the nine working monitors showed hive resin or movement. Teape tracked one more Facehugger in an air shaft, and Jess pulled him out before it dropped. On the stairs a drone they had treated as dead closed a claw on Teape's leg, and Lara shot it through the skull. Teape fainted on the way back to the shuttle. The crew treated the station as too large to hold and waited for a nuke from orbit.

The Company Wants The Log

After midnight Lara gave Ellis the records she was allowed to share. Teape was serving twenty years for armed robbery after his partner shot a shop owner who later died. Pulaski had been a bodyguard for Senator Claypool and was convicted in the hit on Linell. Four years earlier Jess had walked in on his girlfriend with another man and killed them both. Ellis went to quarters wondering what the volunteer inside Max had done to end up in the suit.

Pop came into Lara's cabin while she was in a towel, tried to start the affair again, and left with a warning that it was not finished after she refused. She bolted the door and put her father's .38 under the mattress.

In the gym the next morning Pop told the team that no support was coming. No fail-safe was to be used. They were to hold the terminal with Max and take the data log from the ship that had brought the infestation aboard. Grigson promised high recommendations for immediate parole if they pulled it off. Ellis had to follow the ground team through the station and fire Max at the nest himself, because shielding would block a clean signal from the Nemesis.

The Company Trader

The hive on 949 was one of the largest nests the team had seen. Drones hit them in a dark offshoot on level four. A tail opened Pulaski, and Jess dragged him by the splash suit while Teape covered the corridor. When Teape's rifle ran empty he dropped it, pulled his mask up, and went limp. Two adult Xenomorphs lifted him and carried him into a dock so large the ship inside was the nest. The hull was a Weyland-Yutani Trader. Teape took that as proof the Company had known and wanted no record of the Trader. Pop ordered the team to salvage the data log and destroy the evidence. A blow from behind knocked Jess's rifle away. He went limp so the drones would carry him as a host instead of tearing him apart.

Ellis Takes The Suit

Ellis flushed Max and hit the first two adrenaline banks. On the third dose the suit locked, heart rate too high for another shot. Ellis opened the back hatch and lifted out the volunteer, a man in his thirties wasted to forty-eight kilos, green sheath, skull jack, and numbers tattooed on the brow. Blood ran from the eyes, nose, and mouth, and the volunteer was dead. Ellis climbed into the suit without the surgical implant the program used, then cut system drains until the weapons came back. Teape died webbed in front of an egg on the Trader, his face ruined, before Max reached that chamber. A Facehugger had left the egg. Jess transferred the primary log to the Nemesis while drones wandered the halls after the Queen died.

Lara Stops Pop

Pop would not let the team leave after the log was through, and he held the fail-safe over them. He had bargained with Grigson for Lara's life and a payout that would end his work. Lara was on her back under the communications console, cutting amplifier wires with a hand laser to restore the helmet feeds, when a Facehugger ran up her legs. She drove the laser into its back, then jammed the animal in the refrigeration unit after it broke a leg on the door. When Pop reached for that unit, thinking it held Pulaski's champagne, she drove his head into the opening. The Facehugger seated on him. She took his pistol and ran for the shuttle.

Escape In The Shuttle

Ellis cleared fifty meters of corridor on both sides after he disabled part of the suit computer. Lara pulled him and Jess off the station as the nuclear fail-safe triggered the reactor. DS 949 and the Nemesis went up in the blast. The shuttle reached minimum safe distance. Ellis came out of the suit bleeding and unconscious, his pulse holding. Lara set a distress beacon and laid in a course. They had about three days of air.

The Max And The Nemesis

The MAX Berserker armor from Aliens: Berserker

MAX stood about three meters high and nearly a meter across, burnt orange from a million surface repairs, with a wasp-eyed sensor head and no neck. The left arm carried a revolving grenade launcher and pulse rifle. The right arm was a tricapacity M210 flamethrower. Company labs assembled the volunteer in private and held him in a dreamless coma until a flush and synthetic adrenaline brought him to a killing crisis. Ellis's unit had nine missions on the slate and three left before overhaul. Only the worst violent lifers volunteered, on a promise of lighter security if a psych panel later called them fit.

Nemesis was a leased hunter-killer, better than Jess's old poured-plastic Exeter and in the same class as ships named Enmity and Wrath. Convicts walked under implant frames that logged every pass. Lara had seven runs with Pop and five with this threesome. Ellis had a twenty-run synth-tech contract that would dump him into a subcorporate lab if he failed. After the Earth War the mega-corporations leased convict hunter-killer ships for hive cleanup. A regular Marine platoon did not handle hive cleanup.

Key Characters

Martin Jess was the convict ground leader. He survived Deep 4 and DS 949, went limp when the drones took him, and left on the shuttle with Lara and Ellis.
Katherine Lara was Nemesis communications officer. She jammed a Facehugger in a cold unit, used it on Pop, and flew the shuttle clear of the blast.
Brian Ellis was the green synth tech. He ran Max on Traon, pulled the dead volunteer on 949, and took the suit himself.
Wesley Acchord Teape was the point man and live bait. He survived Deep 4 and died webbed on the Company Trader before Max reached him.
Pulaski was the heavy gunner Jess called Candyman. He wanted more drones on Traon than the four in the side spur. He died in the 949 corridor fight.
Eric Izzard, called Pop, commanded Nemesis. He took Grigson's deal, held the fail-safe over the team, and died under the Facehugger Lara put on him.
Max was the unnamed volunteer inside the exo-suit. The third adrenaline dose killed him on 949. Ellis lifted the body out and climbed in.
Colin Sturges ran Deep 4. He called the Company after shaft One went down and watched Teape used as bait.
A. Grigson was the Company officer who canceled leave and sent Nemesis to 949.

Place In The Bantam Line

Berserker was the ninth book in Bantam Spectra's Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, after Earth Hive in October 1992, Aliens: Nightmare Asylum in May 1993, The Female War in August 1993, Aliens: Genocide in January 1994, Aliens: Harvest in September 1995, Aliens: Rogue in December 1995, Aliens: Labyrinth in April 1996, and Aliens: Music of the Spears in October 1996. This was Perry's Bantam Aliens novel of the Wagner and Mendoza comic. It follows Jess, Lara, Ellis, Teape, Pulaski, and Pop from Traon to DS 949.

The source comic was Dark Horse's four-issue Aliens: Frenzy, from January 1995 to April 1995, written by Wagner and Mendoza and inked by Andy Mushynsky. Those floppies used a Berserker cover title. Later collections used the Frenzy title. Titan Books reprinted Perry's novel with Yvonne Navarro's Music of the Spears as The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Four on 27 June 2017. Titan lists that paperback at 592 pages.

Continuity

Deep 4 and DS 949 sit after the Earth War that the earlier Bantam novels place in 2192. The Company sent crews to clear them. That was not a first contact. Aliens vs. Predator: War follows this book. Lara, Jess, and Ellis are the three survivors who reach Bunda with the MAX after the shuttle runs out of options. Machiko Noguchi joins them there after she turns on the hunt.

War never names the Earth War, and Lara treats Earth as home. The years on that later book do not leave room for Earth to fall, recover, and field leased Berserker teams. Perry's Berserker text stays on Deep 4 and DS 949 and does not look ahead to the Yautja hunt.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the American paperback in August 1998 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, under the cover title Aliens: Berserker. The copyright year is 1998. The text runs 227 pages. John Bolton painted the cover. Titan's 2017 omnibus reprints the novel with Music of the Spears, and no film or game adaptation followed.

Behind The Scenes

Perry dedicated the book to Mÿk, on his birthday. The epigraph is Ralph Waldo Emerson on the machine unmaking the man. The title page says the novel is based on the Fox films, the designs of H. R. Giger, and the Dark Horse graphic novel by Wagner, Mendoza, and Mushynsky, under the Berserker name those 1995 issues carried. Bolton painted this Bantam paperback.

Perry followed the comic's main plot: the Nemesis hunter-killer team, MAX, Deep 4, DS 949, Pop's Company deal, Ellis inside the suit, and a shuttle escape. She also expanded histories the issues only sketched:

Teape hears a Voice built from old memories, and the Deep 4 bait run is written in full before they reach DS 949.
Ellis comes in as a first-assignment synth tech after a rumor that a mismanaged Berserker wiped a crew, and he has a twenty-run contract on the line.
Lara has ended the affair with Pop, fights a Facehugger with a hand laser, and uses the refrigeration unit to stop him.
The volunteer inside Max dies on the third adrenaline dose. Ellis lifts the wasted body out before he climbs in.

Conclusion

Aliens: Berserker is S. D. Perry's 1998 Bantam novel of John Wagner and Paul Mendoza's Dark Horse series Aliens: Frenzy. It follows Martin Jess, Katherine Lara, and Brian Ellis through the Deep 4 clear and the burn of DS 949. The book ends with Pop and the MAX volunteer dead, Teape and Pulaski gone, the station and the Nemesis destroyed, and the three survivors in a shuttle with a few days of air.