Aliens: Music of the Spears: Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: October 1996
Author: Yvonne Navarro
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 275
ISBN: 978-0-553-57492-0
Series: Bantam Aliens novels
Setting: Manhattan, 2123-2125

Aliens: Music of the Spears is a 1996 novel by Yvonne Navarro, published by Bantam Spectra in October 1996. It novelized Chet Williamson and Tim Hamilton's Dark Horse comic of the same name. Composer Damon Eddington worked for Synsound in 2123 Manhattan, ten years after the Homeworld War. He wanted live adult Xenomorph screams for his Symphony of Hate, and he named the captive Mozart.

Plot Summary

Manhattan in late 2123 ran on smog, grit rain, and heated sidewalks. Synsound owned almost all recorded music and filled Presley Hall with hellrock acts and rebuilt dead singers. Vice president Jarlath Keene had a Duplidroids contract on his desk to rebuild Jane's Addiction for the quarter-century mark two years out, and he hid it before Eddington came in. MedTech held the medical side of the city, including a hive under its tower and a lease on Central Park that dated to 2075. Jelly addicts waited in lines for distilled royal jelly. Composer Damon Eddington hated that market and wanted a live Xenomorph scream for the Symphony of Hate he had promised at a press conference.

Eddington Asks For An Alien

Keene kept Eddington waiting outside his Tower office while secretary Marceena stalled him. Eddington drank blackberry brandy on the couch and recorded experimental notes modeled on detox screams until she called him in. Keene heard the request without surprise. Eddington had already promised a Symphony of Hate at a press conference, and he refused both the Homeworld War discs and a studio synthesis. The army recordings were handheld magnetic tape undercut by tank fire, and he wanted a live animal in front of a microphone. A Homeworld expedition or a military bribe would have cost more than the company wanted to spend. Keene proposed a theft from MedTech instead.

Synsound chief Yoriku called the request too expensive until Keene put MedTech in the plan. Yoriku agreed and assigned his ninja Ahiro. He wanted MedTech to learn it was Synsound only after the finished record came out. Three minutes after Keene sent for him, Ahiro was standing in front of the desk with the ragged scar across his right eye.

Keene Hires Mina

Keene had his own reason to hurt MedTech. About twenty-three months earlier the firm had rejected him after six months of interviews for a marketing post. In a dark Manhattan penthouse he paid Mina to leave the man she was with, implied to be Yoriku, for a younger MedTech executive. She took the job on the condition that the meeting stay secret and that the bonus wait in cash until she called for it. Later rumor said she had moved to a MedTech bed. Keene treated that rumor as the crack that made Yoriku hate MedTech enough to approve the raid.

The Egg Theft

On Christmas Eve, Ahiro and six other ninjas left a building at 103rd and Manhattan Avenue after midnight and crossed Central Park with copied GuardTech transmitters. Robot dogs shaped like Dobermans and rottweilers surrounded them, then turned away. MedTech's tower rose one hundred and twenty-three stories over the park, with a halo of electricity around the upper labs. Ahiro and Yosako killed two night watchmen with swords. Below ground the corridors ran stainless steel, then sprinklers, then flame nozzles and fireproof lock chambers every twelve feet. Five levels down, the hive door accepted only six keys that morning. They used a stolen cardkey later traced to Elite Security officer Eddie McGarrity.

Three adult Xenomorphs came out of the alcoves where they had wrapped around the water pipes. Higuchi slipped in grease, and the first animal punched through his skull with its inner jaw. Yoshi was too slow, and one animal took half his chest before Matsuo cut another from neck to hip. Acid blood wrecked Matsuo's face, tongue, and voice. The four survivors switched to the joints and crippled the last two. Beyond that door the nest was resin over the cables, with eggs on small hills. Ahiro locked the nearest egg with a four-prong clamp driven into the X-slits, then tore it free of the resin before the other eggs opened.

Rice Finds The Dummy Card

On Christmas morning MedTech Elite Security chief Phillip Rice took McGarrity and Ricardo Morez to the Alien Resources Lab. McGarrity's card set off the alarm twice because the square in his pocket was dummy plastic. Rice locked the nest behind a Bioscience password, canceled the remaining keys, and spent three hours in the ninety-degree humidity with the dead. Morez got nothing from CityWide or WorldWeb DNA, and the three ninja corpses had no prints. Rice ruled out jelly addicts because an egg without a queen was only death. He treated the job as corporate and planned to put the harnessed drone Ol' Blue on the trail if the databases stayed empty.

Ken Hosts The Egg

Synsound built an apiary in unused warehouse space under Presley Hall and finished it on 31 December, Ahiro's birthday. He treated the job as service to Yoriku, who had saved him and his infant sister twenty years earlier. Keene and Yoriku refused a clone host because a legal clone cost more than the whole lab. Keene picked Ken Fasta Petrillo, Eddington's old college guitar partner, from a file he sent to Ahiro. In school Ken had played Damon's pieces on guitar, and the two of them had worked Manhattan and New Jersey clubs until Synsound called Damon and left Ken behind. Damon moved out of their Spanish Harlem apartment three weeks later. Ken used Ice, StarGazer, and then jelly, sold the guitar, and wanted the Queen Mother's music to take him.

Ahiro walked a long route through the Theater District and Murray Hill before he entered the midtown Church of the Queen Mother on East 49th and Third Avenue. He waited until Ken took the Latin blessing, then led him out of the line. On New Year's Day 2124 they showed Eddington the clamped egg. Infrared stimulators opened it. Ahiro locked Ken in a chair with shoulder braces. A Facehugger put him under in a few seconds. Ken woke after about fourteen hours looking healthier, then panicked because the music in his head was gone. A Chestburster tore out of him and fed on the corpse.

Mozart Grows

The infant's shell went from cockroach brown to blue-black. In eighteen hours it had legs, arms, and half its dorsal crests. In three days it stood about seven feet without straightening. Eddington named it Mozart. The cage used titanium bars sheathed in acid-resistant plastic, eighteen-foot quartz windows braced by steel I-beams, and later steel tunnels that a grown drone could not follow into human-sized shafts. The egg had sat in its own incubated glass case with the clamp on until the hatch. Keene then stayed out of the paperwork and called Eddington from a pay phone in Spanish Harlem, with a chauffeur waiting and an Electrostun pistol ready.

Recordings In The Apiary

Eddington recorded the birth and the first feeding, then sent live animals into the cage. A shelter cat and a forty-two-pound dog died in seconds and gave him only a hiss. A cow and a sheep added little. A wild gaur bull from India hooked Mozart under the ribs before the animal tore its head off, and that was the first usable scream. Ahiro stole a black panther from the Bronx Zoo. The cat clawed Mozart's back and slashed at him in midair before Mozart's barbed tail scraped its flank and Mozart opened it. After the theft the zoo tripled its security and treated the cat as loose on the grounds. Eddington called the takes too short. When Ahiro asked Keene for a harder animal, Keene talked about a lion or a bear until Ahiro put men on the table instead.

Five Men In The Cage

Keene called Yoriku for cover and found that Ahiro had already cleared the hunts. Ahiro then kidnapped five men and gave them Electrostun rifles that worked inside three feet. The team rebuilt the cage so a human could hide in shafts Mozart could not enter, and they waited twenty-four hours between kills so the animal stayed hungry. Four of the captives were street men. The fifth, a muscled blond taken from a car stopped in front of the World Trade Center, started to give a MedTech title before Ahiro cut the rifle and blocked bioengineer Michael Brangwen from gassing the cage. All five died. Ahiro left a second stun rifle in the tunnels for a last recording.

Darcy In The Cage

Bioengineer Darcy Vance had left MedTech a year earlier after a recruiter promised genetic work on show clones and a twenty percent raise. Synsound put her in the android-skin shop instead, tracking obsolete parts and trying to keep synthetic skin from tearing. When she tried to go back, MedTech treated the move as a defection and would give only a legal confirmation that she had worked there. The apiary was the first job that used the animal work she had wanted in school. She argued that Mozart showed attachment, and she was the only person the animal seemed to recognize. When she held a hand to the quartz, Mozart put its claws on the same spot from the other side, even with the cage soundproofed and the air scrubbed. Eddington wanted a recording of loss. He drank jelly that Ahiro had planted on Ken, hit Darcy in the neck with a small keyboard, locked her in the feeder cage, and told her to take the leftover rifle.

Mozart paused and tipped its head before it attacked. Darcy drove it back with stun bursts until Eddington used Ahiro's remote to kill the rifle and overdrove the speakers until the breakers tripped. She threw the dead gun, and Mozart recoiled the way it had learned to do. She fled into a resin-lined tunnel, shoved aside a cocooned blond corpse, and dropped through a manual hatch Ahiro had ignored. Mozart slashed her ankle to the bone. She was too weak to hit the alarm.

Damon Dies

That same evening Brangwen had Helltones passes and asked both of them to leave the apiary for a few hours. Eddington refused the mutadroid show. Darcy stayed at the glass. After he locked her in, Eddington grabbed Brangwen's portable recorder and raised the feeder cage to plant a microphone for the finale. Mozart charged. Eddington dropped the cage, toggled it off, then on again. The safety cycle lifted the glass. Mozart caught the rim, lifted him, and bit him from breastbone to gut. A jelly vial later lay under the body. Mozart left through an unsecured door toward the stage, where the mutadroid band Helltones was playing.

The Helltones Massacre

Brangwen sat in the second balcony on an employee pass because the apiary team had been ordered not to leave the building until the symphony was done. He had already swapped his lab coat for a white jacket and a leather tie for the show. The crowd first treated Mozart as a surprise android. Jelly vials on the floor drove the animal into a frenzy. Mozart tore off the lead singer's mechanical head, wrecked the rest of the band, then killed security men and people in the front rows. Human blood and milky android fluid mixed on the floor while part of the audience kept cheering and the rest ran.

MedTech Hunts Mozart

Rice, McGarrity, and Morez used a Manhattan substance-abuse ordinance that let them search without a warrant if a Homeworld creature was the tracking tool. They forced loading-dock guard Higgins and security chief Morton to open the doors. Ol' Blue followed an old hive scent to Damon's corpse. On the balcony, laser fire only stung the carapace and hit bystanders. Rice put a grenade into Mozart's chest. The death scream and the acid wounded people nearby. Official news a week later listed seventeen dead and thirty-two injured and called the night a sewer infestation.

Morton's silent beeper called Ahiro. He and his two best men found Brangwen over Damon's body and charged Rice's team with swords. Rice, McGarrity, and Morez shot them. Ahiro's last words dedicated his life to Yoriku. Brangwen named Ahiro's team as the thieves and Damon as the client, and he hid the blond captive's MedTech job. He then pulled Darcy from the hatch. She told him Mozart had hesitated.

The Android Restaging

Three months later Synsound rebuilt the Helltones as cheaper mutadroids and restaged the night as the Presley Hall Slaughternight. A city ordinance forced a warning, and the company used that warning as advertising. A life-size android Xenomorph leaped from above the stage, wrecked the band androids, and "killed" about twenty selected android fans copied from the security cameras. At the climax a grenade split the android, and the hall played Mozart's real death scream, taken from Synsound's stage microphones on the night of the massacre.

The Rage Symphony

Brangwen finished Damon's mix and premiered it as the Rage Symphony at Gorasmi Recital House, two blocks from Presley Hall. The house was sparse. Keene sat in front with a date, and Darcy came on crutches. Yoriku arrived with Mina and introduced her as Ahiro's sister, back from a business assignment. Keene recognized her at once. The finale used Damon's death cry. Local critics sat through it with open dislike.

Jariah

Synsound paid Darcy's medical bills and full disability, then expected her back in android repair. A week after the recital she was on the street on crutches when a thin red-haired man told her he knew what she needed. He looked enough like Ken that she followed him to the midtown church. She refused the jelly vial in the line and asked the preacher for something else. He sent her to the steel door and took her behind it after the blessing. She became Jariah, the first female preacher of that Manhattan church. The addicts called her the Limping Woman and invented stories about the scar and the dark circular tattoo on her ankle. At night she burned incense to a queen image and dreamed of Mozart.

Synsound And MedTech

The Synsound tower from Aliens: Music of the Spears

Synsound ran its Manhattan headquarters as the Tower, with thirty-four other vice presidents in that building. Keene sat fifth or sixth from the top and still needed approval for any decision over two thousand credits. The company bought competitors quietly to dodge monopoly law and paid mutadroid shops to rebuild old bands. Yoriku piped Damon's music into his penthouses and treated the dead composer as better marketing than the living one.

MedTech's tower stood about three miles away, one hundred and twenty-three stories of chrome and glass over a secret hive. Six years before the story its Atmosterilyzer wrecked Synsound master discs with electrical spikes. A court let MedTech keep the device after damages and a force field that confined the noise to its own grounds. Rice's team, Ol' Blue, and a worldwide net of fake jelly churches were the company's street tools. They were two of Manhattan's mega-corporations, and they stayed rivals after the raid, the concert, and the cover story that followed.

The Church Of The Queen Mother

A Church of the Queen Mother priest blesses a follower beside a Xenomorph statue

The midtown Church of the Queen Mother sat two doors in on the southwest corner of East 49th and Third Avenue, in a rotting building more than two hundred years old. Addicts stood in line for the Latin blessing and for tiny vials of distilled jelly plus experimental drugs. A miniature queen statue sat on a pedestal. MedTech made those statues by the hundreds. The back door looked like painted rot and was hardened steel.

In this novel the preacher was a MedTech employee, not a user, and the church was one of thousands of covert drug-test sites. Christian Bloomer, at twenty-four, had found that fertilized queen secretion could intoxicate lab rats and then distilled it for people. Only a queen produced useful jelly, and eggs had to be fertilized, which needed at least one drone. An unopened vial almost never left an addict's pocket unless someone planted it. Ahiro planted one on Ken so Eddington would find it.

Key Characters

Damon Eddington was a Synsound composer who wanted a live Xenomorph scream for the Symphony of Hate. Mozart killed him at the feeder cage while he tried to plant a microphone.
Jarlath Keene ran Music Development and sold the MedTech theft to Yoriku. He was alive at the Rage Symphony premiere when Yoriku introduced Mina as Ahiro's sister.
Ahiro was Yoriku's ninja. He stole the egg, took Ken, fetched the panther, kidnapped the five men, and died with two of his men after the concert when Rice's team shot them.
Ken Fasta Petrillo had been Damon's college guitar partner and a jelly addict at the midtown church. He died as Mozart's host.
Mozart was the stolen-egg drone. It grew in three days, escaped after killing Damon, wrecked the Helltones show, and died when Rice put a grenade in its chest.
Darcy Vance was a Level One bioengineer who left MedTech for Synsound. Mozart slashed her ankle. In spring 2125 she became Jariah, the first female preacher of the Manhattan church.
Michael Brangwen was a Level Three bioengineer past the 2113 corporate retirement age. He hid Darcy, finished Damon's mix, and premiered it as the Rage Symphony.
Yoriku ran Synsound, approved the raid, and brought Mina back as his companion after Ahiro died.
Mina took Keene's paid assignment in the prologue. The premiere revealed her as Ahiro's sister.
Phillip Rice headed MedTech Elite Security. He tracked the theft with Ol' Blue, destroyed Mozart, and warned Synsound against a wider war.
Ol' Blue was an older harnessed drone Rice used as a tracker. The team brought him back to MedTech after the concert.
Eddie McGarrity and Ricardo Morez were Rice's men. McGarrity's stolen cardkey opened the hive. Both lived.

Place In The Bantam Line

Music of the Spears was the eighth 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, and Aliens: Labyrinth in April 1996. This was Navarro's Bantam Aliens novel of Williamson's comic. It follows Eddington, Keene, Ahiro, Darcy, and Mozart in Manhattan.

The comic was a four-issue Dark Horse series from January 1994 to April 1994, written by Williamson, pencilled by Hamilton, inked by Timothy Bradstreet, and colored by Matt Webb. Titan Books reprinted Navarro's novel with S. D. Perry's Berserker as The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume Four on 27 June 2017. Titan lists that paperback at 592 pages.

Continuity

Chapter 1 dates the Tower scenes to 2123, the egg arrives on New Year's Day 2124, and the Homeworld War sits about ten years earlier. Those printed years do not line up with the Alien timeline. Alien is 2122, so Navarro's ruined Manhattan sits one year after the Nostromo, with leftover Xenomorphs the films do not have. Aliens is 2179, and the Earth War in the earlier Bantam novels is 2192. A hundred-year shift, to 2223, would put Music of the Spears after that war and closer to the leftover-hive cleanup those later books already use. The novel itself never makes that change.

Eddington first heard Xenomorph screams on a NewsVid of an infestation at the Long Island Incarceration Colony, then in poor military discs from that war. Rice had served in Special Operations on Homeworld cleanup, and Ol' Blue had nearly ended his off-planet career there. They hunted leftovers after the war for MedTech, not for the Colonial Marines.

MedTech's Central Park lease and GuardTech fence dated to New Year's 2076. The Atmosterilyzer fight sat six years before Keene's meeting with Damon. Official news after Presley Hall claimed a sewer infestation and seven other aliens destroyed that day. The grenade shooter was shown as a street weapons dealer, a cover for Rice. A later rumor said Damon died in a skiing accident with a closed-casket funeral.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the American paperback in October 1996 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, under the cover title Aliens: Music of the Spears. The copyright year is 1996. The text runs 275 pages. John Bolton painted the cover, a dark green hall with a large adult Xenomorph standing over a small human figure, plus the tag line that a death follows when an alien sings the blues. Titan's 2017 omnibus reprints the novel with Berserker, and no film or game adaptation followed.

Behind The Scenes

Navarro dedicated the book to Patty Wold, and to music ended far too soon. The epigraph is "Miz Von, do you have time?" The acknowledgments, dated fall of 1995, thank agent Howard Morhaim, editor Anne Groell, and Chet Williamson for the comic story. 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 Williamson, Hamilton, and Bradstreet. Bolton painted this Bantam paperback.

Navarro kept Williamson's main plot: Synsound, MedTech, Eddington, Keene, Ahiro, Ken, Mozart, Presley Hall, and a company that restages the massacre with androids. She also expanded histories the issues only sketched:

Keene pays Mina in the prologue, and the last chapters show her as Ahiro's sister on Yoriku's arm.
The midtown church is written as a MedTech drug-test front, with Christian Bloomer's jelly work and the Latin blessing behind the steel door.
The apiary recordings are given as a full ladder from pets and livestock to the gaur, the Bronx Zoo panther, five kidnapped men, and Darcy in the feeder cage.
Darcy survives the hatch, attends the Rage Symphony on crutches, and by spring 2125 is Jariah at that church. Michael Brangwen finishes the mix and hears Damon's death cry as the finale.

Conclusion

Aliens: Music of the Spears is Yvonne Navarro's 1996 Bantam novel of Chet Williamson and Tim Hamilton's Dark Horse comic. It follows Damon Eddington, Jarlath Keene, and Ahiro through the theft of a MedTech egg and the recordings that become Mozart. The book ends with Eddington and Mozart dead, the massacre restaged with androids, Brangwen's Rage Symphony in a small hall, and Darcy preaching as Jariah.