Aliens: Labyrinth: Plot, Characters & Lore

Aliens: Labyrinth is a 1996 novel by S. D. Perry, published by Bantam Spectra in April 1996. It novelized Jim Woodring and Kilian Plunkett's Dark Horse comic of the same name. Colonel Doctor Anthony Crespi reached the research station Innominata in 2467 to work with Paul Church. Church ran live adult Xenomorph tests in a maze, shocked the captives to keep them useful, and hid a second lab for the human bodies that work produced. He wanted to join the species instead of destroying it.

Plot Summary

The transport Arkham woke its crew after nearly a year of cold sleep and closed on the Innominata. Admiral D. U. Pickman of ETops had given Crespi written authority to take the station by force if he found cause. Pickman had ordered the covert wipe on Myna 8 that killed civilians and Marines, and he spent his career hunting drone nests. Crespi was forty-one and a theoretical analyst, sent both to assist Church and to report what the station was hiding. The Arkham crew had heard the same stories he had, expendable techs, secret tests, and a general named Spears who wanted a drone army.

Crespi Reaches The Innominata

Lieutenant Colonel Heller brought the Arkham in at 0900. On the bridge, Heller, Shannon, and Blake watched the station through a pair of fuzzy dice hung over the console. The Innominata was a 700-series military research hull that could hold two hundred people. Official reports put fewer than a hundred aboard. Heller asked Crespi to settle the rumors about the station. Crespi refused and left for the landing.

Admiral Thaves met him on the deck, short, soft, and smelling of cigars and hair oil. He talked around every question, pointed Crespi at quarters A89, and offered the lounge and a warm body as a cure for cold sleep. Then he said Church no longer wanted a second in command. Crespi threatened a board of review. Thaves went to Church, and Church let the new man through. The crew believed Thaves answered to Church and pretended he did not.

McGuinness Volunteers

Lieutenant Sharon McGuinness had volunteered for the tour. In the Arkham mess she asked Crespi if she would work under him on the Innominata and got no useful answer. She called the station too hush-hush for her taste, then refused to say why she had signed on. She was a class-three systems tech with a forensics background, good enough to write programs for a hundred and fifty credits an hour, and she had come for Church, not for a routine posting.

Church Shows G Lab

Church received Crespi in a bare office. He was thin, with long dirty white hair, smudged glasses, and a baggy sweatshirt under his lab coat. He treated the new posting as a waste and called the work dull virus typing. David Lennox, he claimed, would have been transferred if he had not died, and there was nothing here for a replacement. Crespi answered that one of those viruses had pushed Lennox's brain out of the back of his head. Church walked him to G Lab past armored guards O'Hara and Lawless, kept him off the bioscan, and asked if Earth still sold good chocolate.

The pit was seven meters of acid-neutralizing alloy, with a force field and motion-triggered electrodes in the walls. A live adult Xenomorph crouched at the bottom. Church shocked the captive to keep it from going dormant, then added that he had four more adult Xenomorphs in semi-cryogenic kennels. Isolated from a clan, they did not live long, and he intended to study them before they died.

The Fight Near Solano's Moon

Years earlier, Sergeant Crespi had ridden an armored transport into a cave near Solano's moon under Captain Wilcox. Most of the twelve were bioanalysts sent for firsthand drone work, not a combat company. Corporal Cady Trask had spent the night before with him. She was working toward biotech engineering, and he had meant to find her next posting after the job. Sweepers Rupp and Hollister went in first in silver freeze-unit armor with particle-plasma projectors and cut down the first three adult Xenomorphs they saw. Wilcox treated the cave as a routine collection until a much larger brood came out of the dark.

Acid wrecked the transport's wheels and filled the sweeper suits, killing Rupp and Hollister. The rest of the Marines fought from the roof until the fumes and blood overcame them. Chan fell into the acid, Tom Olsen was opened from gut to ribs, and an adult Xenomorph clawed through Akely. Trask lost an arm to the blood before a drone pulled her into the nest. The ledge failed and the vehicle dropped into a lower cave.

Only Crespi and Sergeant Karl Gibbs walked away from that wreck. Gibbs took Wilcox's gun off the captain's body, threw a thermal grenade into a crack of daylight, and hauled Crespi up the slope. A Queen came out of a second hole, caught Crespi in two pairs of arms, and started him toward her jaws. Gibbs shot her off him and stripped the melting chest plate before the blood could finish the job. They reached the hovering ship's drop lock. An adult Xenomorph that had ridden Gibbs punched through his skull with its inner jaw and took him back down into the nest. Crespi was the only survivor who reached the ship.

Maze Tests

Church sent the starving drone from the pit into a maze and asked Crespi what the animal would choose. A live pig slept on a bolted table. An armored volunteer waited a few meters away. The creature ignored the pig and went for the armed man until electrodes dropped it. Church treated that as proof that the species would starve before it left an enemy standing, and that a drone did not fight as one animal but as the hive. When the next choice was food or an empty escape tunnel, it tore the pig apart and fed. Church watched the feeding with a smile, then shocked the drone again before a full meal could kill it.

Later tests used two unarmed men. The drone always went for the man it read as a threat. On one run Wagner stood in front, cold sober and terrified, while Copper behind him was full of the telepathine FITR and stared the captive down. The electrodes failed at first. Copper held the attack by will, and the drone paused before the shock finally hit. Church treated that pause as proof that Xenomorphs spoke to each other by thought, that they could see human minds without understanding them, and that a weakened captive could be turned by human will. He talked about synthetic E waves and hives he could quiet from a switch. Crespi asked how many crew had died in the research. Church said none had, and Crespi joined the work.

Mortenson Is Killed

A forensics tech then reported that kennel K4 was open and its captive was gone. McGuinness had no station assignment, but she walked into the monitor room on the alert anyway. Trackers put the drone in a breaker room next to Lieutenant Mortenson, who was changing decontamination-suit filters on station orders and humming to himself. Church sent him into a compressor room and had him lock the door, careful not to frighten him with the truth twenty yards away. The drone came down from the pipes behind him and killed him on camera, inner jaws through the skull, until blood covered the lens. Thaves wanted to know what Mortenson had been doing with the suits, and Church set that question aside. Techs later found the tracking tag cut by a blade and a pheromone smear on the pipes where the creature had waited.

Thirty-Four Dead

Few people came to the funeral. Church spoke over a plastiskin patch that could not hide the missing lower half of Mortenson's head, then zipped the bag and sent the body to the discharge tube himself. Thaves wanted the organs kept, but Church refused and jettisoned the bag. Later that day the same bag drifted past the mess window while McGuinness briefed Crespi.

She told him why she had volunteered. Lennox had been her fiancé. He had tried to leave the Innominata, sent her a coded message that arrived scrambled, and then died of a reported heart attack. Her apartment was robbed of everything he had sent her, including letters. She had counted thirty-four crew deaths in three years, found altered medical files, and found three unscheduled shuttles a year for five years. The kennel door and Mortenson's work order both came from the station. Crespi told her to keep digging in secret and report only to him. Church watched that meeting on a hidden camera and filed it.

Trixie And The Dead Drone

The next day Church walked a harnessed drone, Trixie, through a public corridor. The metal casing forced the animal onto four legs and muzzled the jaws. Church shocked it when it lunged. A woman at a floor panel screamed, and the crew around her fled. Crespi came out of the gym with a pistol and listed improper handling, reckless endangerment, and criminal insanity. Church turned the drone around and sent Blackman to prep a cell.

That night the same animal collapsed in the pit. Church called Crespi out of a bad sleep to watch it die, then cut it open in B lab. The organ he wanted most sat in the skull, lined with Fullerite-encased Hurlantium and packed with dense binary neuron fans. In a healthy animal it filled the cavity, but in a captive it withered, which Church used to explain the telepathine pause. Strong electromagnetic fields, he added, hurt that organ the way a sudden chill hurts a human skull. Crespi wanted a reconstructed receiver and called the research too important to stop.

McGuinness had pirated the surveillance feed through the autopsy. Station resource records did not match consumption. Something hidden was using a third again as much power as every known system, including the alien lab. She put that overage on K lab, listed as a zero-G room on Church's maze deck, locked by three single-access doors and missing from the mainline. Church kept the key on a code slate in his unity office. After the dissection, Crespi believed Church and ordered her to stop. When she showed him the power gap, he went for the slate himself.

Crespi Takes The Slate

The unity office was empty at that hour. The slate lay on Church's cluttered desk, exactly where McGuinness had seen it. A drone dropped from the ceiling as soon as Crespi picked it up. The first blow threw him through old plexiglass into the next lab. He burned the creature with hair spray and a live cord, then dropped it with a portable electromag generator. Two electrical techs found him there and called for an armed team. Crespi walked out with the slate and went back to throttle McGuinness, sure she had sent him there to die. She asked for one chance to open K lab instead.

The Hidden Lab

The three doors opened on Church's private work. The room was cold and wet, and it stank of feces, disinfectant, and Xenomorph musk. A headless heavy man knelt on a table with tubes in every opening and bone plates rising from his back. The body next to him was swollen as if it carried a child, the chest a mass of scars, no sex left to name. A monitor between the tables listed pulse rates for both living bodies. Tanks held mutated embryos, a tangle of human limbs, and a naked Mortenson who had never been jettisoned. At the back, the head and upper chest of David Lennox came out of a wall of circuitry, joined to a monitor by a metal arm. McGuinness recognized him and shouted the name as Church walked in.

Forty-Three Days In The Hive

Church lifted McGuinness off the floor by the throat, then took Crespi's pistol and bent the barrel. Crespi called him a synth. Church said he was human aside from implants, and that the lab made no sense without his history. About forty years earlier he had been twenty, traveling on the terraform ship Incunabulum with his parents Jason and Lucian Church, the synth botanist Judith, crewmen Taylor, Hewett, and Johanson, and passengers Quentin, Louise, and Rebecca Clark. They set down on a numbered moon for a routine time-box pickup and found a deserted jumper beside a Genesis station. Jason and Judith checked the empty ship first. The air smelled of decay that did not belong on a world only fifteen years into terraforming.

Adult Xenomorphs took all ten of them into a hive hidden under moss. Stun-wands did not stop the attack. The drones probed mouths and hair instead of killing at once. One pulled a handful of Johanson's hair and tasted Church's vomit off its own claws. Two of them tore Rebecca apart while fighting over her. Judith tried to stop it and was beaten to wreckage with the severed leg. Taylor's grenade killed only two drones.

Church was webbed in a chamber of hanging hosts and force-fed rotting flesh from a drone's mouth. Another drone brought Quentin in screaming, one arm half gone and a hole torn in his trousers, then shoved his head into a green pool and glued him to the wall. Quentin screamed until he could only make a wet sound. Later they made Church watch Louise's belly split into three eel-like young that died in the drones' hands. A sickness ran through the nest. Dead drones and dead Facehuggers lay in piles, and some adult Xenomorphs moved slowly.

Church Poisons The Nest

After Louise died, Church stopped waiting to be killed and started watching. He copied the drones' tasks so they would leave him alone, then hid samples in a recess and tested them on one another. The leech-like animals in the pools secreted a colloid the hive used as medicine against a black mold that was toxic to them. He used large amounts of that mold to wreck the living medicine factories. Adult Xenomorphs began to die in days. He fed the last ruined crewmen when the drones expected it, and he used their skulls and arteries as dishes and tubing.

They finally dragged him behind a heap of drone corpses to his mother, her limbs gone, and tried to force a mating for new hosts. He strangled Lucian there. A weak Facehugger was helped out of a sick egg and put a probe into his chest. He woke alone, walked out of a dead hive, and reached the untouched Incunabulum after forty-three days. Ultrasound showed a dead, rotting Chestburster. He cut it out in the ship's medical bay in seven hours. A month later a rescue party found him on his feet. The smugglers on that moon had been trying to farm the species. The Company paid him with a full biomechanical makeover, and the hive was burned before he could show anyone the mold or the pool animals.

Church Sends Them Into The Maze

Church then told Crespi the hidden work was legal on the Innominata and that he used the bodies of soldiers who had died in the field. He called Lennox a willing body donor and a lover, and he said McGuinness had faked the photograph that made Crespi trust her. He called Mortenson a Grant Corporation spy under Thaves's watch and named McGuinness as the partner who had gotten him killed. He asked Crespi to arrest her for a tribunal. Crespi had just heard the hive story and could not decide which of them was lying, so he started to take her in. She ran through the partly open hatch.

Church sent him after her and sealed doors from a wall panel, cutting the corridors until both of them were in the drone pit. From the rail he told Crespi the maze speech had been a lie. Survival in the numbered-moon nest, he said, had made him the hive. The public tests had been cover for a mix of human and Xenomorph that he meant to join. He wanted their brains for the chemicals that would make that mix work. Crespi refused the open maze door, and Church shocked both of them until they crawled through it.

Crespi Dies In The Maze

The first adult Xenomorph was harnessed to a wall in a dark chamber. A second one waited at the top of a ladder, grabbed McGuinness by the shoulder, and could not lift her because Church's tests had left the captives weak. She tore free, fell, and landed on a twisted ankle. Church then released the harnessed animal. The loose drone held back, waiting for a shock that did not come, and both people reached the next door as it closed. A talon opened Crespi's back from shoulders to spine.

McGuinness tried to stop the bleeding with her torn overshirt. Crespi forced himself up and made her walk the sealed hall with him. They kicked an electrode bar off the wall until the support cracked free. Church released the last drone through a hole in the ceiling. Crespi met it with the length of metal. The skull cracked, acid blood poured across his chest, and the wounded animal fled through a newly opened door. Church's captives had weaker blood than a wild brood, but it was enough to open Crespi's torso into a smoking cavity. He asked McGuinness not to leave the body for Church, and she broke his neck.

McGuinness Hunts Church

Church wanted the brain tissue and watched it go to waste on his monitors. The wounded drone hid at a dead end with diluted acid dripping from its skull. McGuinness left Crespi on the floor and moved through the maze. Church opened the first chamber and sent two more drones after her. She chose turns without a map, then stopped in a corridor. The hunters took the wrong passage, found the blinded wounded drone, and tore it apart because they did not recognize it as their own, leaving only one hunter.

McGuinness reached the open kennel while Church waited at the rail with the shock control. She climbed the camera mounts above the field. The last drone knocked her down, then backed away instead of finishing the kill. She climbed the rail, smashed Church's face into the metal, and threw him to the animal. Station guards blew the drone off him and knocked her out with a rifle butt.

Crespi In The Tank

Three weeks later Church was in sickbay and working again. Admiral Thaves told him the Marines had taken McGuinness, called her Crespi's killer, and reminded him that Church's viral work had saved Thaves's own daughter. Church had locked the private lab before that last maze run, so Thaves never saw it. Late that night Church rolled a chair into the hidden room and spoke to a holding tank. Anthony Crespi's body was growing a dark semisynthetic plate system, shoulder spines, and a dorsal fin. McGuinness was on a transport toward Earth, locked in a cell.

The Innominata

The Innominata was a standard 700-series military lab hull with cheap plasticrete corridors, a public alien pit, and a maze under G Lab. Church used five-eighths of the station's nonrenewable resources on the visible Xenomorph work and another third again as much power on the locked K lab. Armed techs, live kennel guards, and motion-triggered electrodes were presented as the station's safeguards. Thaves signed transports and releases and left Church alone.

The public research measured how adult Xenomorphs chose targets, how fear and drugs changed those choices, and how a withered skull organ received E waves. Church shocked captives to keep them awake, walked one in a metal harness, and talked about telepathine and a time serum. K lab held the private research. He kept wrecked human bodies alive on pumps, grew mutations, and wired Lennox into a wall. After the maze he started the same work on Crespi.

The Sick Hive

The hive on the numbered moon sat under vegetation beside a Genesis station, a nest that ranked with the largest Xenomorph hives. It was large enough that the Incunabulum crew missed it on landing. A sickness ran through that brood. Facehuggers lay dead in stacks, some newly burst young died at once, and adult Xenomorphs moved as if drunk. Pool animals secreted a colloid the drones used as medicine against a black mold that was toxic to them. Church poisoned those pools and watched the nest collapse from the inside.

The same sickness left him with a dead Chestburster and an exit he could walk out of. He never found the mold or the pool species again after the Company burned the site, and he never explained why the drones isolated him or took him to the birthing chamber. Forty years later he used what he had learned in that hive for his work on the Innominata.

Key Characters

• Colonel Doctor Anthony Crespi was a forty-one-year-old theoretical analyst and the only survivor of the fight near Solano's moon. He joined Church's public research, opened the hidden lab, and died in the maze after acid opened his chest. McGuinness broke his neck at his request. Church later put the body in a transformation tank.
• Colonel Doctor Paul Church ran the Innominata's Xenomorph work. He spent forty-three days in a sick hive at twenty, cut a dead Chestburster out of himself, and received a biomechanical makeover. McGuinness threw him to a drone. Guards pulled him out, and he kept the station.
• Lieutenant Sharon McGuinness came aboard as a systems tech to find out how David Lennox had died. She found thirty-four crew deaths in the station files and a hidden power drain, walked the maze after Crespi died, and was taken to Earth as his killer.
• David Lennox had been Church's last assistant and McGuinness's fiancé. She found his living head and chest built into the hidden lab wall. Church called him a willing body donor and a lover.
• Admiral Thaves commanded the station on paper and did what Church wanted. He never saw the private lab. He later told Church that McGuinness was gone and that Church's viral work had saved his daughter.
• Lieutenant Mortenson was changing suit filters on station orders when the escaped drone killed him. Church cancelled the space burial and put the body in a tank.
• Admiral D. U. Pickman headed ETops and gave Crespi authority to seize the Innominata. He had ordered the Myna 8 wipe.
• Karl Gibbs got Crespi off Solano's moon and died on the drop lock when an inner jaw came through his skull.
• Cady Trask was in Crespi's cave team. Acid took her arm, and an adult Xenomorph pulled her into the nest.
• Captain Wilcox, Rupp, Hollister, and the rest of that twelve died in the caves.
• Jason and Lucian Church died in the numbered-moon hive, Lucian by her son's hands after the drones tried to breed them. Rebecca Clark was torn apart. Louise Clark died giving birth to three young that failed at once. Judith was wrecked defending her.

Place In The Bantam Line

Labyrinth was the seventh 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, and Aliens: Rogue in December 1995. Perry had already co-written The Female War with Steve Perry. This was her first solo Bantam Aliens novel, and it follows Crespi, McGuinness, and Church. Yvonne Navarro's Aliens: Music of the Spears followed in October 1996.

The comic was a four-issue Dark Horse series from September 1993 to January 1994, written by Woodring, drawn by Plunkett, and colored by Matt Hollingsworth. Crespi's earlier fight had already appeared as Aliens: Backsplash in Dark Horse Comics #12 and #13. Titan Books reprinted Perry's novel with Sandy Schofield's Rogue as The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Three on 27 December 2016. Titan lists that paperback at 496 pages.

Continuity

The Arkham wake screen dates the docking to 2467. Church's hive was about forty years earlier, when he was twenty. The numbered moon later had settlers, and he never went back. Earth-side rumors on the Arkham included Spears and a drone army, the same kind of story Nightmare Asylum put on General Spears.

Official crew strength on the Innominata did not match the body count. Three extra shuttles a year for five years fed replacements that never appeared in the public files. Church told Crespi that Grant Corporation had a spy in Mortenson, then used that claim to frame McGuinness and drive both of them into the pit. A viral treatment from Church kept Admiral Thaves's daughter alive, and Thaves signed the unscheduled traffic that kept the station stocked.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the American paperback in April 1996 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, under the cover title Aliens: Labyrinth. The copyright year is 1996. The text runs 243 pages. John Bolton painted the cover, a fleshy hive wall with an adult Xenomorph in the foreground and two human faces in the haze, plus the tag line that no one gets out of the maze completely human. Millennium published a British paperback in November 1996 as The Labyrinth at 216 pages. Titan's 2016 omnibus reprints the novel with Rogue, and no film or game adaptation followed.

Behind The Scenes

Perry dedicated the book to her father, for the work and the career, and to Mÿk, the man she was going to marry. The epigraph is from Francis Thompson in 1893, the lines about fleeing down the labyrinthine ways of the mind. The title page says the story is based on the Fox films, the designs of H. R. Giger, and the Dark Horse graphic novel by Jim Woodring and Kilian Plunkett. Bolton painted this Bantam paperback.

Perry kept Woodring's main plot: Church, Crespi, McGuinness, the Innominata maze, a murdered crewman, a hidden lab, and a doctor who walked out of the last fight alive. She also expanded two histories that the issues only sketched:

• Crespi's cave fight is written here as the disaster near Solano's moon. Wilcox's team died in the caves, Gibbs got Crespi up a slope, and a Queen almost took him there. Dark Horse had already told that fight as Backsplash in Dark Horse Comics #12-13, and the Labyrinth issues point back to it.
• Church's hive stay is given as forty-three days, with named family, the sick pools, the forced mating, and the seven-hour removal of a dead Chestburster. The comic puts that past in a shorter flashback.
• McGuinness is Lennox's fiancée in this text and the person who found thirty-four crew deaths in the station files. Church tells Crespi the photograph is fake, and the last chapters use that accusation to send both of them into the pit.
• Crespi dies in the maze after the acid hit. The novel then shows his body in Church's tank with new plates and spines, while McGuinness is shipped to Earth and Church remains on the Innominata.

Conclusion

Aliens: Labyrinth is S. D. Perry's 1996 Bantam novel of Jim Woodring and Kilian Plunkett's Dark Horse comic. It follows Anthony Crespi, Sharon McGuinness, and Paul Church on the Innominata through the public maze tests and the locked lab behind them. The book ends with Crespi dead in the maze and stored in Church's tank, McGuinness on a transport to Earth, and Church running the station.

External Sources

• The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Three at Titan Books
• Labyrinth at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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