Aliens: Genocide: Plot, Characters & Lore

Aliens: Genocide is a 1994 novel by David Bischoff, published by Bantam Spectra in January 1994. It novelized Mike Richardson and John Arcudi's Dark Horse comic of the same name. Neo-Pharm's drug Xeno-Zip, sold as Fire, was mixed from royal jelly, and the rare queen-mother grade was running out. Daniel Grant and Colonel Alexandra Lee Kozlowski took the Colonial Marine ship U.S.S. Razzia to G-435 (previously known as the Xenomorph homeworld). They found red and black hives at war and went after that jelly.

Plot Summary

In the eighteenth year after the Alien-Earth War, leftover nests on Earth were being cleared for carcasses, eggs, photographs, and royal jelly. Private companies paid for those raids once the government ran short of money. Ordinary queen jelly had uses, but the rare queen-mother grade was the prize, and none of those mothers remained on Earth after the Pacific Northwest blast.

Kozlowski Hits The Hollywood Hive

Captain Alexandra Kozlowski took the 69th Platoon, Alien Occupation Eradication, against hive 009 in Los Angeles sector B forty-seven, the old Bank of America building at Hollywood and Vine. A Mark 23 Access Tank rolled with them. Five adult Xenomorphs rushed the street in daylight, which her people were not used to, and the squad cut them down. In the vault basement they found fifteen Creative Talent Agency hosts too far gone to save, killed those implants with poison darts, and burned the bodies.

A second fight in the tunnel left five more warriors dead. The first jelly bulb was empty of a queen. Lieutenant Peter Michaels, Kozlowski's lover, tapped that decoy against her order. A hidden warrior cracked his helmet with its inner jaw, and a torso shot from Daniels dumped acid blood into the helmet. The acid ate Michaels's face, eyes, skull, and brain, then burned through the floor. Kozlowski finished the real chamber, took only a small jelly haul, and later transferred to the Colonial Marines. She won the Congressional Medal of Honor for the North American cleanup and was stationed at Camp Kennedy.

Fire Kills Jack Oriander

Three years later, Jack Oriander, a twenty-year-old Iowa runner, stood in the tunnel at Field Humanitas in Baghdad for the Goodwill Games, the replacement for the destroyed Olympics. His father had been a captain killed in the Earth war. Oriander swallowed two fresh green capsules of Fire, Neo-Pharm's legal pick-me-up built from royal jelly. He broke the hundred-yard record by about four seconds, kept running, smashed through a plastic wall, and died on the steel girder beyond. A medic took the bottle from his belt.

Marshall Tests A Supersoldier

At Quantico, Colonel Leon Marshall showed General Delmore Burroughs that Fire's active mix was regular jelly plus a drop of queen-mother extra. Neo-Pharm was synthesizing the regular jelly and running out of the mother stock. Marshall wanted cheap supersoldiers after the postwar budget cuts. Private Willie Pinnock, chosen because he was slow and easy to push around, swallowed three tablets of the synthesized mix. He wrecked the bait squad, tore Big Pecs's neck, smashed Corporal Glen's face with a walkie-talkie, and shot the two armed backups after losing part of an arm. Marshall's mini-bazooka destroyed him. Burroughs wanted the drug investigated after that.

Grant Needs Queen-Mother Jelly

In rebuilt New York, Daniel Grant ran Grant Industries from Grant Tower. Neo-Pharm was the only part of that empire that made real money. The rest, hotels, shuttles, casinos, and a Brooklyn store, bled cash, and a collapse of Fire would expose debts to criminals. Dr. Patrick Wyckoff told him commercial Fire was fine and that the bad bottles were being called counterfeit. The real problem was synthesized regular jelly plus a queen-mother precipitant, which hurt a share of users.

Dr. Amos Begalli, hired away from MedTech to hurt CEO Lardner Foxnall, showed Grant a recessive gene in alien DNA and tied the berserker batches to extra mother jelly in the synthetic mix. He wanted a hiveworld source of both jellies and a chance to study that gene. General Burroughs then called Grant.

Kozlowski Takes The Mission

Kozlowski, a colonel and on Fire, was flown to a closed meeting with Admiral Niles, Burroughs, and Grant. Hiveworld was the source of the aliens in this quadrant and of the queen mother brought to Earth. Grant offered a joint run: Neo-Pharm scientists, a military hull, and troops. Regular jelly would go to the company. Queen-mother jelly would go toward a controlled supersoldier drug, and Grant wanted legal cover against civil suits. He would not board the ship, and Kozlowski took the command anyway. She pocketed his cigar for after a safe debrief.

Fisk Kills Mabel Planer

Grant took temp Mabel Planer to Flickers and showed her a cube of the parked Razzia. Foxnall, who owned the club, knew about the voyage. Underground financier Morton Fisk was months overdue on Grant's buyout loans. Fisk's men machine-gunned the booth and killed Mabel, and Grant ran for the launch base with no bags. Admiral-level orders put him on the ship.

The Crew Wakes Over Hiveworld

After about six weeks of hypersleep, Kozlowski woke Grant with a Black Fang training hologram. Impulse cruise put them four days from orbit. On the shuttle up he had met Corporal Lars Henrikson, a Europe special-services veteran, plus Jastrow, who carried a baritone sax, Ellis, and Private First Class Edie Mahone, a tactical weapons specialist. Kozlowski commanded only the military side. Neo-Pharm owned decks on the hull. She was down to a quarter capsule of Fire a day.

Captain Phillip Hastings flew the Razzia, refused the troop briefing, and planned to retire to a chicken ranch on the Ulna colony. Kozlowski had studied the earlier Hiveworld reports from Wilks and Billie. At the briefing Grant asked them to trap a queen mother if they could. Dr. Zato issued the Z-110 Acid-Neutralizing Combat Wardrobe, a light silver-blue suit whose membrane swallowed acid and re-bonded in seconds. True acid-proof armor was too heavy for this world's gravity. The suits had to be maintained after contact, and no one was to wade in blood.

Friel's Clone Lab Is Wrecked

Grant traded Kozlowski a tour of Neo-Pharm decks E and F for drinks, grabbed her, and she knocked him down. He later admitted the Fisk debt, the MedTech fight, and that the mission was also an escape from Earth. Her full name was Alexandra Lee Kozlowski, named for Grant and Lee. On Deck E, Dr. Murray Friel was growing a donor clone torso from his own wrist cells, with an egg sack and a discarded Facehugger shell. The plan was to birth a Chestburster, hold it dormant, then queen it with hiveworld jelly so Neo-Pharm could work a DNA-changed queen unlike Earth stock. Grant cited Ripley's earlier embryo as proof the tech could work. Fail-safes included cages, alarms, and an automatic laser and particle-beam lattice. Kozlowski walked out and called the lab a threat.

Someone entered Cargo Bay Nine, killed the status alarms, and wrecked the rheostats. The dormant embryo burst Friel's torso. The particle beams destroyed it. Begalli said the safeguards had been tampered with. Grant blamed Fisk or MedTech. Kozlowski threw him her Fire bottle and quit the drug. The Razzia then parked over Hiveworld, G-435, fourth of ten planets around the G0 star Achilles Two. Sensors found the old hive.

They Land In A Hive War

The Mark Nine lander U.S.S. Anteater went down with Begalli in Friel's place, pilots Lieutenants Lenny Fitzwilliam and Tank Tanarez, Sergeant Argento on the guns, and Corporal Seamus O'Connor on the field gear. The air was violent, the ground volcanic and bare. About a hundred miles from the original mound stood a second hive of a different shape. Surface swarms of red and black warriors were killing one another, which matched Begalli's recessive-gene split.

Kozlowski ordered a thruster landing instead of force impellers so the rockets would cook the field. Fitzwilliam shifted twenty-five meters off an outcrop. Four Perimeter Extension Harpoons, seven meters tall, raised a remote force-field fence that sheared aliens in the grid. About twenty-five warriors were inside that grid. Plasma and a robo-wagon cleared them. The Z-110 held when Kozlowski took splash under the lander. A warrior reached a pilot blister, she netted it, and Henrikson burned it.

The Force Field Collapses

Argento's shells opened a path toward the hive mouth, and a new harpoon was meant to push the field about seventy more yards. That post landed on intact warriors. Acid ate the base, and the southern field failed. Rodriguez was torn apart on point. A warrior from the hull drove secondary jaws through Argento's neck. Jastrow stayed outside the old line after his radio failed and was buried under warriors while calling for Ellis. Begalli stopped O'Connor from slamming the field back up, because guns plus a full fence could wreck the lander. Mahone climbed the gun array, blasted Argento's killer without bleeding on the weapons, and drove the swarm out. The field came back up. The memorial named Argento, Jastrow, Rodriguez, McCoy, Lantern, and Chang.

Hastings Nukes The Red Hive

Begalli wanted the war tilted to the blacks, because the mission needed black jelly, not the mutant red strain. Hastings offered a limited-radius tactical nuke on the red hive. The plan was to kill the red queen mother, break her hold, send the reds fleeing, and pull the blacks after them, leaving the black mound empty except for larger queen's guards. Grant volunteered for the entry, and Kozlowski accepted. In the locker room a timer-clamp egg launched a Facehugger from a spare-suit cabinet. Kozlowski kicked it and burned it. Grant wanted Begalli arrested as a MedTech plant. She refused, because they needed his pheromone detector inside the hive, and anyone could have planted the egg.

The nuke hit the red hive dead-on. Reds spasmed, then fled, and blacks chased them. Ellis stayed on the lander guns. O'Connor and Ellis planted a force-field tunnel to the mouth, and a cargo drone followed for jelly. The tunnels were larger than Earth hives and unusually empty. Begalli's detector chose the left branch of a three-way split.

The Queen Mother Kills Begalli

Queen's guards bigger and faster than the briefing came on. The first guard died. The second tore the point man's chest, and another soldier was torn apart before the rest of that group went down. Four aliens and two humans were dead there. Begalli took a skin sample. Rear guard at the last bend was Privates Dicer and Clapton and Mahone, with a one-hour abort order. Kozlowski, Henrikson, Grant, Begalli, and the drone went on.

The queen's chamber held four huge pods around a larger central pod, with the black queen mother on top, running the red rout by a psychic link. Jelly oozed on the center. Begalli admitted a side project for papers and a book on the new strain, not MedTech sabotage. The queen jumped, even with an attached ovipositor. Secondary jaws went through the back of his head and pushed his eyes out. Kozlowski and Henrikson shot the thorax, then the head. Acid finished Begalli's face. The jelly was not spoiled. They vacuum-tapped the drone full and left more behind.

Henrikson Turns On Them

Henrikson ordered weapons down. He was a MedTech mercenary, not a synthetic. A leader-type pheromone had made Grant and Kozlowski trust him, which the other grunts never did. He had raided nests for money. The plan was to kill them, blame dead Begalli, siphon jelly and DNA on the way home, and announce Grant and Kozlowski killed in action so Neo-Pharm talent would scatter to MedTech. He had sabotaged the clone birth and planted the locker egg.

Kozlowski dived for her rifle. Henrikson hit her left thigh and hip. Grant beat him down. Underplating stopped a kill, but the hip was likely broken. They disarmed him to use him against MedTech on Earth and took helmets off to cut weight. Blacks came back through another tunnel after sensing the queen's death. Henrikson tackled Grant. Grant's Fire bottle spilled, and Grant stuffed a handful of pills into Henrikson's mouth, left him a rifle, and ran him as bait. Fire-mad Henrikson stood and fired until the gun stopped.

They Leave With The Jelly

Mahone held Dicer and Clapton on the one-hour order, even firing a warning shot. The drone reached the Anteater. Ellis's guns hit the emerging horde. A warrior caught the rising ramp, and Kozlowski forbade a shot because acid would ruin the hatch. Ellis threw Jastrow's saxophone, hit the head, and knocked the creature off. The hatch sealed, and the lander lifted.

In sickbay Kozlowski's fractured thigh was set for hypersleep healing, and she was off Fire. The tank held twenty-five hundred gallons of top-quality black strain, with no red contamination. Friel's team started work at once, plus red-alien DNA, and thought they might create their own queen mother. As a parting shot they nuked the black hive. Friel's group called the red strain a fluke. Both queen mothers, lesser queens, and eggs at those sites were treated as destroyed. Leftover warriors on the planet would take a long time to regroup. Grant offered her head of security at Grant Industries. She refused and stayed a Marine. She agreed to beer and pretzels, not champagne, and lit the cigar from the Washington meeting.

Fire And Neo-Pharm

Xeno-Zip was sold over the counter as Fire, green capsules with silver sparkles, labeled all natural and free of steroids. A normal dose sharpened alertness and coordination. Extra queen-mother jelly in a synthesized batch, or a double handful of pills, produced record athletics and then psychosis or berserker strength. Neo-Pharm had worked from about two hundred gallons of the Earth queen mother's jelly for two decades. Marshall treated that mix as a cheap way to build a better soldier after the public turned against a large peacetime army.

Grant's Earth lab sat under Grant Tower, with pickled aliens and controlled acid pits. Freelance crews were paid to pull jelly before hives were burned. On the Razzia, decks E and F held the clone host, egg pens, fail-safe beams, and storage tanks rated well over two thousand gallons. They filled those tanks. S. D. Perry's later Aliens: Criminal Enterprise sent a Neo-Pharm team under Shaw Puente after an illegal plant.

The Razzia And The Z-110

The U.S.S. Razzia was a deep-space tactical hull with gravitonic engines, impulse cruise, hypersleep, and corporate decks Grant owned outright. Kozlowski staged a fake fire-alarm drill on the pad to show him the ship was hers in a fight. Hastings never went down to the planet. He fired both nukes from orbit. The Anteater was the class 9 lander that carried the troops, the gun array, the cargo drone, and the PEH posts.

The Z-110 was not acid-proof plate. A gelatinous membrane swallowed the blood and brought the surface back toward a water pH in seconds, then the plastic closed. Interiors matched standard Marine articulation and servos, which let the wearer handle heavier guns. The suit had no built-in weapons. After contact it had to be serviced, and standing in a spray was a bad idea. Grant wore neutralizing boots in camp. Exoskeleton chemistry could not be used as armor because it was toxic and a bad match for human kit.

G-435 And The Hive War

Marines called the planet Hiveworld. Navigators used the tag G-435. It was the fourth of ten worlds around Achilles Two, a G0 star, class M, seismic, flat, and mostly barren, with huge cloud banks. Gravity sat at about 0.9 Earth. Radio failed inside hive shell. The original mound from the earlier landings remained, and a second hive stood about a hundred miles away.

After the first queen mother was stolen, genetic drift produced rival queens. The dominant survivor was a traditional black queen mother, close enough to be called a twin of the mother later killed in the Pacific Northwest. Recessive red changelings, normally destroyed in the hive, escaped under a red queen mother, founded a second nest, and bred on local animal herds. To the blacks they were wrong by touch, smell, and other hive cues, even if a casual observer saw the same shape. Each side treated the other hive as the enemy and bred for numbers. Grant's people could land at all because those swarms were busy killing one another.

The Queen Mothers

Earth had ordinary Queens and no living queen mother. All commercial mother jelly in Fire came from the one killed on Earth. G-435 grew a replacement black mother and a red one. The black mother sat on a central pod ringed by four satellite pods and four oversized guards, used a psychic hold on her army, and could detach and leap. Hastings's nuke killed the red mother and emptied her mound. Kozlowski and Henrikson shot the black mother in her chamber, then the Razzia nuked that hive on the way out.

Friel's people treated the red strain as a one-off once both mothers and their eggs were gone. They also thought the captured jelly plus red DNA might let them grow a queen mother of their own. Leftover black warriors were expected to remain. The large escorts were queen's guards, the same royal-guard role as a Praetorian, larger and faster than the briefed warriors.

Key Characters

• Alexandra Lee Kozlowski was an Army captain on the Hollywood raid, then a Marine colonel with the Congressional Medal of Honor. She quit Fire on the cruise, took a broken thigh in the black hive, refused Grant's security job, and stayed in the Corps.
• Daniel Grant ran Grant Industries and Neo-Pharm. Fisk's hit put him on the Razzia. He filled the jelly tanks, force-fed Henrikson Fire, and offered Kozlowski a civilian post she refused.
• Lars Henrikson was a MedTech mercenary posing as a Marine corporal. He sabotaged Friel's clone, planted the locker egg, and died in the black hive after Grant stuffed him with Fire and left him as bait.
• Amos Begalli was the ex-MedTech xenobiologist who read the recessive gene and picked the tunnel. The black queen mother killed him. He wanted to publish on the new strain, not work for Foxnall, and he was not the saboteur.
• Peter Michaels was Kozlowski's lieutenant and lover. Acid through a cracked helmet killed him in the Hollywood decoy bulb.
• Jack Oriander was the Iowa sprinter whose two Fire capsules took him through the Baghdad finish wall and into a steel girder.
• Willie Pinnock was Marshall's Quantico demo. Three synthesized Fire tablets turned him on the bait squad, and Marshall's bazooka destroyed him.
• Mabel Planer was Grant's date at Flickers. Fisk's machine guns killed her.
• Edie Mahone cleared Argento's killer off the gun array, held the rear on the one-hour order, and lived.
• Ellis ran the Anteater guns after Jastrow died, then threw the saxophone that knocked a warrior off the hatch.
• Jastrow, Argento, Rodriguez, McCoy, Lantern, and Chang died when the extended field collapsed.
• Phillip Hastings captained the Razzia, fired both nukes, and never landed.
• Murray Friel lost his clone torso to Henrikson's sabotage, then called the 2,500-gallon haul a chance to grow a queen mother.
• Morton Fisk and Lardner Foxnall stayed on Earth. Fisk wanted unpaid loans. Foxnall paid Henrikson.
• The black queen mother and the red queen mother both died, one by gunfire and one in Hastings's nuke, and both of their mounds were then destroyed from orbit.

Place In The Bantam Line

Genocide was the fourth book in Bantam Spectra's Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, after Earth Hive in October 1992, Aliens: Nightmare Asylum in May 1993, and The Female War in August 1993. Steve Perry wrote the first two alone, then wrote the third with his daughter S. D. Perry. Bischoff's book was the first Bantam Aliens novel without a Perry name on the cover. Those first three books are the Wilks, Billie, and Bueller trilogy. This one follows Grant and Kozlowski. Wilks and Billie appear only in Kozlowski's Hiveworld briefings.

The comic was a four-issue Dark Horse series from November 1991 to February 1992, written by Richardson and Arcudi, drawn by Damon Willis and Karl Story, with painted issue covers by Arthur Suydam. The novel uses Wilks and Billie, not Hicks and Newt. Titan Books reprinted Genocide with Robert Sheckley's Alien Harvest as The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Two on 28 June 2016. Titan lists that paperback at 624 pages. Sandy Schofield's Aliens: Rogue followed Harvest in December 1995.

Continuity

The Hollywood raid happened in the eighteenth year after the Alien-Earth War. Three years later, Oriander ran at the Goodwill Games and Grant boarded the Razzia. The grown aliens match the usual lifecycle, with acid blood, eggs, Facehuggers, and Chestbursters.

Years earlier, a nuclear blast in the Pacific Northwest had killed Earth's queen mother and wrecked most of the Earth hive. After that, Earth had leftover ordinary queens and no mother jelly except the stored stock Neo-Pharm was burning through. Taking the original mother off G-435 is why recessive reds survived and split the planet. In the novel, both replacement mothers died and both mounds were nuked.

The comic commander is Major Alexandra Lee. Bischoff's novel promotes her to colonel and adds the surname Kozlowski. Jastrow and Ellis thought Henrikson was a synthetic because he ate in his room and skipped showers. He was human. Grant mentioned Ripley's earlier embryo as proof a queen could be grown on the ship. Fisk and Foxnall were still free when the Razzia turned for home.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the American paperback in January 1994 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line. The copyright year is 1993, and some catalogs date the book to 1 December 1993. The text runs 281 pages. Dave Dorman, also credited as David Dorman, painted the cover, with Kozlowski and Grant standing over a dead Xenomorph. Millennium published a British paperback in August 1994 at 281 pages. Titan's 2016 omnibus reprints the novel with Alien Harvest, and no film or game adaptation of this text followed.

Behind The Scenes

Bischoff dedicated the book to the Haldemans, Jay and Vol, Joe and Gay. The novel has no epigraph. The story is a novelization of Richardson and Arcudi's comic, with Willis and Story on the interior art. Suydam painted the four issue covers. Dorman painted the 1992 comic collection cover and this Bantam paperback.

The novel keeps the same spine as Richardson and Arcudi's comic: Daniel Grant, the Razzia, Fire, the red and black war, the red-hive nuke, and a traitor in the landing party. The comic commander is Major Alexandra Lee. Bischoff promotes her to colonel and adds the surname Kozlowski. The novel spells the traitor Henrikson. The issues often use Hendrickson.

Conclusion

Aliens: Genocide is David Bischoff's 1994 Bantam novel of Mike Richardson and John Arcudi's Dark Horse comic. It follows Daniel Grant and Colonel Kozlowski from a rebuilt Earth to G-435 after Fire's queen-mother stock ran out. The book ends with 2,500 gallons of black-hive jelly on the Razzia, Henrikson dead, both hives nuked, and Kozlowski staying a Marine.

External Sources

• The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Two at Titan Books
• Genocide at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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