Aliens: Nightmare Asylum: Plot, Characters & Lore

Aliens: Nightmare Asylum is a 1993 novel by Steve Perry, published by Bantam Spectra in May 1993. It novelized Mark Verheiden and Denis Beauvais's Dark Horse comic of the same name, and it kept Wilks and Billie after Alien 3 killed Hicks and Newt on screen. The book followed Aliens: Earth Hive with Wilks, Billie, and a wrecked combat android named Mitch Bueller on cargo drone 302, The American. They reached General Thomas A.W. Spears's Third Base, where he was breeding adult Xenomorph soldiers under a Queen. The book ended with Spears trying to reclaim Earth with that Queen, who pulled his head off on landing, and with Wilks and Billie safe on Gateway Station.

Plot Summary

A week out of hypersleep, Billie, Wilks, and the upper half of Mitch Bueller sat on an automated cargo drone with nowhere they could name. Earth traffic showed cities falling, a man praying in an empty church until an adult Xenomorph punched through his skull, and a classroom wall that read DARWIN ESTIS KORECTO. Wilks treated the signals as history. The ship had been built for robots, not passengers, and he could not read its destination.

Earth Casts Reach The American

Bueller had sealed the wreck of his waist with medifoam and rerouted his own tubules after a drone tore him in half on the homeworld. He could not break the navigation codes. Billie loved him and also hated him for hiding what he was, and the android who came out of sleep was colder than the man she had known. Wilks kept himself busy with push-ups and the last of their ammunition: five rounds in an M-41E carbine and seven in a pistol taken from the Earth general who had shot Blake.

Billie dreamed Wilks bursting open and an adult Xenomorph climbing out of him. She woke sure the dream was a contact, the same pressure she had felt from the elephant-like spacefarer in the last book. Wilks did not believe her until they found melted cable, fire foam, and a hole eaten through the aft cargo bulkhead by acid blood.

Four Infected Sleepers Wake

Four hypersleep chambers in the aft hold held the remains of four people. Someone had iced the hosts as cold as a body could go without dying, hoping to keep the implants dormant. The cold did not hold. Four adult Xenomorphs had hatched, killed one of their own, and used its blood to burn an exit. Those three then ate most of the four bodies.

One drone stepped into the light. Wilks put a 10mm round through the open mouth and out the back of the skull. Acid hit a dump hatch, ate toward vacuum, and the hull-breach doors came down. Billie jammed the pistol under the plate and dragged Wilks through by the wrists as the gun bent and shattered. The hatch would have cut him in half the way the homeworld hive had cut Bueller.

They wired a camera to a cleaning robot and found the last two drones on a corridor ceiling. Billie had the robot make noise inside a lock. When both aliens followed it, Bueller shut the inner hatch, cut the gravity, and blew them into space. One of them survived hard vacuum long enough to climb back onto the hull. Powell later named the trick: an in-head compression chamber and a regulator that heated the acid so the creature would not freeze.

Billie Goes Outside The Hull

Wilks could not stand after the hatch crushed his back. Bueller had no legs. Billie put on an inspection suit, took the carbine, and went out on magnetic boots. A drone launched from behind the main antenna. Recoil tore her boots off the hull. One shot hit, and the creature's own blood under pressure shoved it away into the dark.

A thin frozen trail looped back to the rear thruster. The last drone waited inside the tube. Billie pushed clear, and Bueller fired the rocket. Two days later they picked up coded military traffic and found a moon-sized planetoid that had sat on the far side of the local sun. Wilks took it for a Colonial Marine pressure-dome base.

Spears Wants His Specimens

The drone dropped through a roof hatch into a bay. Four armed marines and a brigadier with a cigar met them at the ramp. The holopatch on his fatigues said T. Spears. He had expected the four sleepers, not three live passengers, and he wanted those Terran-bred specimens for mutation work. When Billie said they had killed the drones, he ordered the trio into isolation and a scan for implants.

Third Base held more than a hundred adult Xenomorphs in tall cylinders of fluropolymer fluid, plus tables of limp Facehuggers. A Queen laid eggs in a guarded chamber, and people were webbed in front of those eggs. Spears had come from an artificial womb on a marine base, kept the middle initials that marked that birth, and treated the war as a job for soldiers as hard as the enemy. He planned to retake Earth with tame drones under a Queen he could threaten.

Deserters Run For The Air Plant

Corporal Peterson and Privates Renus and Magruder stole food and a crawler and ran for a civilian terraforming colony four days away through the Thousand Canyons. They knocked out the South Lock guard, burned the outer door, and left. Spears watched the whole run on hidden cameras and called it a lesson in bad tactics. He put the failed lock guard into the egg room.

The air plant ran on its own. Major Powell later told Wilks that Spears had given the one hundred sixty-eight civilian terraformers to the aliens. Peterson, Renus, and Magruder walked into resin-coated halls. Drones took Peterson for implantation, killed Renus, and tore Magruder open. Spears arrived in time to kick Magruder back through a door and call it supper. He had also moved one egg from the Third Base nest to that plant, so a second Queen was laying there.

Powell Asks Wilks For A Coup

Spears fed the prisoners soy roast, asked for field advice, and talked about matching ferocity with ferocity. Wilks played along because the other option was the egg room. Rehab fitted Bueller into a short hydraulic walker. Billie saw Earth casts of a girl named Amy, her mother Mona, and Uncle Burt, then an old silent picture of Ellen Ripley from the Nostromo years. A com tech said Spears studied every file on the creatures, including the rumor that Ripley had reached a prison world after LV-426.

Powell found Wilks in the empty hold of The American, the one room not yet bugged, and asked for help. He had studied for the priesthood and wanted to be a chaplain. He would not shoot Spears. He wanted Wilks to stop the project instead. He said the Queen would sacrifice drones without distress and would obey when Spears roasted an egg. Last month Spears had marched a dozen drones in close-order drill and put modified M-69 machine guns in their hands. They could not hit a wall at close range. Powell said the work was not about saving Earth. It was about Spears and the glory he wanted from a private army.

The Mutiny Locks The Base

A magnetic storm pinned Spears at the air plant. Wilks wrecked the long-range comms, Bueller shut the emergency doors with new override codes, and they rounded up the people Powell marked as loyal to the general. About half the remaining staff sided with Powell. The base had held close to five hundred marines once. Between those missing troops and the terraformers, Spears had given the hives more than four hundred people.

Powell wanted Spears taken alive and a review from higher command, not a marine shooting a brigadier on the pad. He would stand aside for the dirty work, but he would not give the order himself. Wilks said that was a mistake. If Spears reached the base he would have the troops who followed him, plus Queens that obeyed his torch, and the rest of them would go into the egg rooms. Third Base had no antiaircraft batteries. Some crawlers and hoppers carried 20mm guns, enough to knock down a light troop carrier if they fired first. Wilks and Billie took one crawler, loaded the computer with a hopper profile and Powell's arming code, and sat on the apron as backup in case the guns jammed.

Spears Sends A Decoy Hopper

Spears sent an empty hopper in first, then followed in a stealthed backup ship that did not appear on any local record. The crawler guns wrecked the decoy. The second hopper wrecked the crawler and every other surface craft on the apron. Wilks and Billie reached the South Lock on foot. Spears walked a camera-blind corridor under the fusion heat sinks, blew the East Lock, and opened the Queen chamber from a transmitter on his belt. A hologram of Spears waved a torch behind the Queen and sent her out to feed.

The Queen Walks Free

The Queen and her brood tore through the station. Wilks shot one drone in a corridor and kept moving for the starship hangars. Spears's men killed anyone in their path, left a paralyzed trooper for the hive when the gravity cut, and reached the ships through an escape tunnel Spears had built for himself. The hangar hatches would not open on Powell's command override. Spears had kept the starships on his own codes and wired concussion charges into the locks.

Wilks, Billie, and Powell burned a panel and started cranking a hatch by hand. The charges dropped them. Spears told them he was taking a small corps of drones to Earth, then leaving the rest of Third Base for a later court-martial. His own loyal guards were going to be left as well, once the cargo was aboard.

They Hide On The MacArthur

Bueller killed the hangar lights, then slammed them back on while the guards wore spookeyes. The flash blinded the men. Wilks, Billie, and Powell ran. They took uniforms off two troopers Billie lured off an empty cargo truck, then drove that truck into the loading line for the CMC MacArthur. A sentry recognized Powell. Wilks shot the sentry. A wild burst from the falling carbine hit Powell in the head and killed him.

Spears lifted in the command ship Jackson, slaved the MacArthur to it, and slagged the engines of every starship left on the rock, including the Grant, where his remaining human troops had been told to embark. Those men called for pickup while drones, cut off from the departing Queen, hammered the sealed hulls. Spears smoked a Jamaican Lonsdale and left the channel open.

Bueller Stays Behind

Bueller reached them on a secure channel from a desk on Third Base. He told Billie the MacArthur was slaved and that Spears had wrecked the other motors on purpose. He said the two of them were too different for the romance to have lasted, then signed off to help people dying in the halls. Wilks called him Mitch and said the android was the better man. The radio link cut out. Billie and Wilks went into hypersleep with Spears's numbered drones stacked in the hold.

An Escape Pod Reaches Gateway

The ships dropped back into normal space in the Solar System. Spears saw extra water, air, and sleep-chamber use on the MacArthur and planned to clear the stowaways on landing. Wilks and Billie jumped the two-kilometer gap in suits during deceleration, entered an aft lock, and were bottled there when Spears cut gravity, lights, and air and welded a pressure door.

Wilks bluffed that he had wired bombs on the MacArthur with a short timer. Spears launched an escape pod rather than risk the cargo. They hid under the Jackson's launch bay, where the ship's guns could not depress far enough to hit them, then burned past the MacArthur toward Earth. There were no bombs. Spears saluted the lie and kept going.

Gateway Station took the pod, ran decontamination, and confirmed the station itself was clean. On a live Earth cast, Wilks and Billie watched Spears walk down a ramp in dress blacks.

Spears Lands In South Africa

Spears put the MacArthur down in rain over the old Natal country of South Africa, near a wild hive, in dress uniform with a sword and two antique revolvers. He meant to command from the rear and film the first battle. Drone Number 15 would not move. Spears cut its head off with the sword. Acid wrecked the blade. Other drones carried the Queen out in her cage and opened the lock. She slapped the cigar lighter away, lifted Spears, and pulled his head off. The wild hive turned and left. The numbered drones followed their Queen into the rain.

After the debrief, a thin woman in shipper's coveralls found Wilks and Billie in an unused conference room. She said her name was Ripley. Official files had her dead. She sat down to talk.

The American

Cargo drone 302, nicknamed The American, was the ship Wilks, Billie, and Bueller stole at the end of Earth Hive. It had gravity drives, robot cleaners, cheap Cambodian cameras, and no public-address system. The aft hold also carried Spears's four infected sleepers, which is why the drone flew to Third Base at all. Wilks later used that same hold as the only room on the base that was not yet wired for sound.

The later ships in the book were the MacArthur, which carried the Queen and the numbered drones, the Jackson, which Spears flew alone, and the Grant, which never left the hangar after he melted its engines. The MacArthur had no lifeboat. That space had gone to cargo racks.

Third Base And The Queen

Third Base sat on a planetoid about the size of Earth's moon, in a direct orbit around a G-class star, under pressure domes and buried gravity generators. Ice came up from underground caves, melted on the way, and gave the station more water than most marine posts. The surface could not hold a breathable atmosphere. The civilian plant nearby forced gas into sealed caverns for food and later military or prison use.

General Spears ran the post as if Earth command had not fallen. He kept more than a hundred drones in chemical baths the scientists hoped would make them easier to order. The Queen in the main chamber laid without a mate. Powell said a drone could become a Queen in a hormone storm if no Queen was left, which is how Spears seeded the air plant with a second nest from a single egg. Guards on that door were there to keep people from getting out, not in.

Spears's Tame Army

Spears trained the Queen with fire. A trooper with a flamethrower roasted an egg while she watched, then he put a man in a cage with her and clicked a cigar lighter beside another egg when she moved. She learned fast. Drones a kilometer away in airtight rooms did what he wanted once the Queen was under that threat. He painted glowing tritium numbers into their skulls, seven colored corps for a New Colonial Marine force, and told himself they would always be faithful.

The drones were dull and the Queen was not. Psychologists on the base put her on a level with a human mind. On Earth she opened her own cage, ignored the lighter, and ended the experiment with her hands. The numbered soldiers followed her, not him.

Earth After The Fall

Wilks left Earth thinking the planet had taken a major nuclear strike. Powell said the feeds showed no big atomics, only tactical weapons. People on the ground sent pictures: a family around a blue fire, scavengers digging for a fake food cache, and soldiers who called themselves the Chosen and caught humans for a Queen. Those bug feeders treated service to the hive as an honor. The Amy broadcast was years old by the time the signal reached Third Base.

Gateway Station sat in L-5 orbit, about half the size of the old Luna One colony, and had taken on more modules for people who got off Earth. It was clean of Xenomorphs when Wilks and Billie arrived. That is where they watched Spears die, and where Ripley found them.

Key Characters

• Wilks was a Colonial Marine sergeant who survived Rim and the homeworld run. He wrecked Third Base comms, hid on the MacArthur, bluffed Spears with a fake bomb, and reached Gateway with Billie.
• Billie was the Rim child the military failed to wipe. She felt the drones on The American, killed two of them outside the hull, and walked Spears's guards into a trap so the last truck could reach the MacArthur.
• Mitch Bueller was the combat android torn in half on the homeworld. Third Base put him in a walker. He blinded Spears's hangar guards, stayed behind when the ships lifted, and signed off while drones tore the base apart.
• Thomas A.W. Spears was a brigadier grown in an artificial womb. He bred Queens on Third Base, numbered his drones, slagged the leftover ships, and died in South Africa when the Queen he thought he owned pulled his head off.
• Powell was Spears's first officer, a would-be chaplain who would not shoot his own commander. He gave Wilks the coup, then died from a stray burst in the MacArthur hangar.
• Peterson, Renus, and Magruder deserted for the civilian air plant and walked into the second hive. Spears fed Magruder to the drones on purpose.
• Amy, Mona, and Uncle Burt were Earth survivors whose old broadcasts reached Third Base. Later casts showed armed men taking people for a Queen.
• Ripley appeared on an old Third Base recording, then in person on Gateway after the debrief, asking Wilks and Billie to talk.

Place In The Bantam Line

Nightmare Asylum was the second book in Bantam Spectra's Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line, after Earth Hive in October 1992. It novelized Verheiden and Beauvais's second Dark Horse Aliens miniseries. Perry wrote Aliens: The Female War the same year with his daughter S. D. Perry. Those three books are the Wilks, Billie, and Bueller trilogy, also called the Earth Hive trilogy or the Earth War trilogy.

The first comic printing used Hicks and Newt after Aliens. After Alien 3, later comic printings renamed them Wilks and Billie. No edition of this novel used the Hicks and Newt names. Perry wrote it after the rename, so the book uses Wilks and Billie throughout. Ripley does not join the plot until the last pages. The Female War continues with her.

Titan Books reprinted Nightmare Asylum with Earth Hive and The Female War as The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume One on 19 January 2016. Titan lists that paperback at 832 pages.

Continuity

The book starts on the cargo drone that left Earth at the end of Earth Hive. Later Earth War material and the Alien timeline put Third Base and the Gateway landing in 2193. Wilks's people never hear a local name for the planetoid. The text calls the installation Third Base and the nearby civilian works an air plant and terraforming colony.

The grown aliens in this book match the usual lifecycle. They have acid blood, they come from eggs, and they use Facehuggers and Chestbursters. A Queen can develop from a drone when the hive needs one, which is how the air-plant nest started from a single egg. Drones here can live for minutes in hard vacuum. The First Law bound Bueller, which is why he would not shoot men and why he stayed in life support instead of holding a line.

The homeworld bombing in Earth Hive did not end the species. The Female War later went back to Xenomorph Prime for the Queen Mother. This book ends on Gateway with Ripley alive in front of Wilks and Billie. Later printings and the next novel treat that Ripley as an android built from her records, so the trilogy no longer contradicts Alien 3.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the American paperback in May 1993 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line. The copyright page uses that month. The Catalog of Copyright entry dates the book to 5 April 1993. The text runs 277 pages, plus an uncredited about-the-author leaf. Dave Dorman, also credited as David Dorman, painted the cover. Titan's 2016 omnibus reprints the novel with the two books on either side of it, and no film or game adaptation of this text followed.

Behind The Scenes

Perry dedicated the book to Dianne, and to John Locke. He thanked Mike Richardson, editor Janna Silverstein, and Vera Katz and Sam Adams. The epigraph is from Rudyard Kipling's The Law of the Jungle. The title page says the story is based on the Fox films, the designs of H. R. Giger, and the graphic novel by Verheiden and Beauvais.

The comic's first run used Hicks and Newt, and this novel never does. Dorman's cover is a close Xenomorph head and hand, with the line about space leaving nowhere to hide. Compared with Verheiden and Beauvais's comic, the novel keeps Third Base, Spears, the numbered drones, the MacArthur run, and the South African landing. Perry adds more of Bueller in the exoframe, Powell's time in seminary and his refusal to shoot Spears, and the Earth broadcasts Billie watches on the base. Ripley walking into Gateway at the end is in both.

Conclusion

Aliens: Nightmare Asylum is Steve Perry's 1993 Bantam novel of Mark Verheiden and Denis Beauvais's Dark Horse comic. It follows Wilks, Billie, and Bueller from The American to Spears's Third Base, then onto a slaved cargo ship bound for Earth. The book ends with Spears trying to reclaim Earth and dying in the rain when the Queen pulled his head off, Bueller left on the planetoid, and Wilks and Billie on Gateway Station with Ripley.

External Sources

• The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume One at Titan Books
• Nightmare Asylum at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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