Aliens vs. Predator: War: Novel Plot & Lore

Published: December 1999
Author: S. D. Perry
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Format: Paperback
Pages: 209
ISBN: 978-0-553-57732-7
Series: Aliens vs. Predator, Book 3
Setting: Unnamed hive world / Bunda

Aliens vs. Predator: War is a 1999 novel by S. D. Perry, published by Bantam Spectra in December 1999. It adapted the Dark Horse Aliens vs. Predator: War comic and followed Machiko Noguchi after a year with Topknot's Yautja clan. The book ignored Hunter's Planet and picked up the comic line from Prey, with Broken Tusk's mark still on her forehead. She broke with the clan on the jungle world Bunda, joined three survivors from Aliens: Berserker, and killed the novice she called Shorty before they left.

Plot Summary

The novel follows two groups that meet on Bunda. Topknot was Leader. Machiko Noguchi had spent a year on his hunt ship, still wearing the mark Dachande cut into her forehead after Ryushi. Second Lieutenant Katherine Lara, convict volunteer Martin Jess, and technician Brian Ellis were dying in a shuttle after DS 949 burned. Weyland-Yutani executive Lucas Briggs came to lock down those survivors and the MAX exo-suit they had taken off the station.

The Queen Hunt

Topknot's party dropped just after dawn on an unnamed marsh world to take a live Xenomorph Queen. The ship burned a path through the hive, and the hunters formed a pyramid with Machiko in the rear. She had already outscored most of the unblooded on earlier trips, including six drone kills on the last hunt, one behind the Leader. Being human still put her at the back.

The drones came in one wave through the mud. Machiko burned five in the first minute while the ship's guns kept a lane open to the nest. Near the egg chamber the attack slowed, because the hive would not risk the eggs. A novice she had nicknamed Shorty, barely a head taller than she was, shoved her aside to steal a kill.

Shorty mocked her as soft meat and a female, then copied her English to laugh at her. A drone dropped from the ceiling onto his burner arm. She waited until he understood he was finished, then shot the drone out of his hands. Topknot put him in the protected middle of the line, and the other students laughed.

The Capture

The nest used four-limbed pink hosts instead of rhynth, but the walls and opened chests looked like the tug Lector. Eight hunters roped the Queen while Machiko, Shorty, and two others watched for drones. Three-Spot held her upper left wrist. Topknot cut the egg sac with a scythe-sword he called an h'sai-de.

The Queen slammed Three-Spot to the floor and crushed his chest. With one arm loose she knocked four more down. Machiko dropped her burner, grabbed the empty rope, and held until the team had her again. Topknot struck Machiko for leaving her post and told her the failure of one was the failure of all.

Getting the Queen aboard was the dangerous part. Scar lost a rope, drones hit the ramp, and acid took a novice. Machiko threw her burner into the Queen's inner jaws and ran into the nest so the hatch could trap her. Topknot's victory sign locked Machiko in with the Queen. She climbed an air shaft, cut the Queen's fingers out of her hair, and dropped back into the dock to no greeting.

The Nemesis Survivors

Lara, Jess, and Ellis had about twenty hours of air left in a bare shuttle that could not find a port on its own. Their ship Nemesis, registration WY-49392, had been destroyed with the rest of DS 949. Pop had run the MAX program until it killed the volunteer inside, then left the team to die. Ellis had climbed into suit 09 without a surgical implant and pulled Lara and Jess out.

Teape and Pulaski, the man Jess called Candyman, had already died under Jess's command. Ellis spent most of the flight unconscious. Lara steered toward a survey office she half remembered in the low eights. Bunda survey answered with a few hours of air still in the tanks.

At Zen's Respite, Briggs learned from Julia Russ that the MAX short-range beacon had left the blast and that Nemesis was probably gone. He wanted the survivors before anyone else debriefed them. His bodyguards were Keene and the synthetic Nirasawa. He told Bunda's station manager to quarantine the shuttle and wait.

Other hunt ships docked with the training carrier Machiko called Shell before the Bunda drop. She could not say the Yautja name and used that word for the seashell shape. A young Blooded came aboard with two aides, scars on his brow and a strip of Colonial Marine banner tied around his right wrist. The comics called that hunter Light-Stepper. The novel never names him.

Machiko stepped forward to touch the cloth without asking leave. He knocked her down. Topknot and the students still treated the visitor as a hunter of songs, a Blooded who won children and trophies. She took the banner as proof that the clan honored a human kill.

The honor code forbade hunting intelligent prey, but Dachande's students on Ryushi had already shown how thin that rule could get. Machiko decided the Bunda hunt would be her last. She expected Topknot to put her off at a human world and go on without her. The next knock on her door was the Leader, not a ride home.

The Kehrite Fight

Topknot walked her to the kehrite and named Shorty as her opponent. A Blooded who lost to a novice lost every hunt. He handed her a mask first, because a human skull was thin next to a Yautja one. About sixty hunters packed the room.

Shorty rushed her. She put him on his back three times, kicked the knee she had already hurt, and lined up a finish. Someone in the crowd grabbed her ankle. Shorty head-butted her, smashed a fist into the back of her skull, and kicked her off the stage.

The room roared for Shorty. No one helped her up. She had fought clean and still lost her place. After a year with the clan, that was the end of it.

Bunda Survey

Bunda was a two-year botanical post, a pale-sky jungle of birds, primates, and thick plant cover. The station was an ME.Hess, gas envelopes and decks on slim posts so the labs barely touched the ground. Acting station manager Kevin Vincent was a botanist, not an executive handler. He parked the shuttle on Deck Seven and told the three to stay aboard.

Jess opened the hatch anyway. Warm air came in, and so did armed station staff who would not talk. Soil man Davis Pratt and geologist Harold Rembert were already in the trees with a shotgun and no radio. A drone jumped their lunch site.

Pratt missed. Rembert ran. Pratt found him on his knees with a Facehugger on his face, then a second one took Pratt. Vincent still thought the worst problem on Bunda was Briggs's visit.

Briggs

Briggs landed in a private Sun Jumper with Keene and Nirasawa. He cut Vincent off on the pad, searched the shuttle, and offered the survivors money and a ride if they handed over a locked Trader log from DS 949. Lara and Jess had invented that log. Ellis sat through it looking tired and far away.

Jess jumped Briggs when the executive started talking about the MAX experiments. Briggs said DS 949 had been a planned test of how fast a hive could take an isolated station, not an accident. Keene beat Jess until he vomited. Lara later killed Keene with a strike to the throat.

Briggs left the station when the envelopes started to burn. Vincent stayed. Lara, Jess, and Ellis tried to refuel the Nemesis shuttle while the alarm kept running and the decks kept tilting. A cloaked hunter hit Jess on the pad before they could lift.

The Shell

After the kehrite, eleven shipworkers stayed on the Shell and the rest dropped on Bunda. A station distress call said the attackers were invisible. Machiko took that as a human hunt, killed Prient'de and a second shipworker at the console, and unlocked the Queen.

Nine hunters were still aboard. They would not burn a Queen without the Leader, and they tried to rope her again with mallets, picks, and braid. The Queen killed Beads, Inu, and the rest of that dock party while Machiko flew the Shell into Bunda's night. Machiko looked at her through the window and thought of the Black Warrior the hunters named before a fight. The Queen left her alone.

Machiko set the ship toward Topknot's signal and the fire on the survey station. The Queen later walked free of the crash with a length of chain still on her comb. Machiko had erased what Dachande's mark meant to the clan. They would hunt her if they caught her.

The Station Falls

An envelope fireball threw Lara, Jess, and Ellis off the listing deck after their shuttle went over the rail. All three lived through the fall. Vincent woke in a bush with a broken shoulder and watched a hunter mimic his own plea, then open wrist blades and kill him. Thirteen Bunda people were already missing, with eight confirmed dead, before the station finished coming down.

Ellis slipped back into MAX 09 without telling the others. The suit stood about three and a half meters tall, pulse rifle and grenades on one arm, flamethrower on the other. He cleared a cluster of adult Xenomorphs around Lara and Jess, then killed three hunters in the trees. He told them that if they lived, they still needed him in the suit.

Nirasawa came out of the dark carrying Briggs, a Facehugger locked on the executive's head. Jess pulled the dead hugger off. It was already too late. Machiko told Lara and Jess the hunters wanted her head, and they refused to split up.

Shorty

Shorty found her in the jungle with four other hunters. Machiko told Nirasawa to keep the extras off her so the fight stayed one to one. The synthetic broke one hunter's shoulder, took a staff through his fuel cell, and crushed the last Blooded's throat before he shut down. He had killed four, three unblooded and one with a star mark.

Shorty feinted, then waited after she cut his right arm and kicked the old knee wound. She told him, in hunt speech, that he wanted a human woman and her children. He charged. She cut through his forearm so the hand hung by tendon, then put the blades through his throat.

Lara and Jess kept west with Ellis. MAX burned a hunter with white phosphorus, and they shot two more. A later pack of drones, more than a dozen, ran into the MAX flamethrower's napthal, HEAP grenades, and two hundred armor-piercing rounds. Ellis had started calling himself and the suit "we."

Home

The hunter transport sat in a hill clearing, a rounded gray hull like a pitcher on its side. Lara could not read the console. Machiko came out of the trees in time to take the controls. Jess opened MAX and pulled Ellis out, bloody and cold.

They left Briggs on the ground. He was still unconscious and still implanted, and they had no use for a company hostage. Ellis was barely out of his teens once the suit was off. Lara said his pulse was good, and nothing else.

As the transport climbed, Jess asked where they were going. Lara said home, meaning Earth. Machiko took the word as a life she had not reached yet. In the epilogue Ellis slept, remembered that his name was Brian, and did not dream again.

The Yautja

The War comic had already shown Machiko's year with Topknot and the break on Bunda. Perry's novel keeps that clan on the page and writes the hunt rooms from inside the ship she called the Shell. She had waited two years on Ryushi after the colonists left, then a year with this ship. She had not spoken to humans in three years when she met Lara. Scar and Three-Spot were Blooded aides. Retired hunters ran the ship and were still treated as worthy because they had lived long enough to stop.

Students wore loincloths in the kehrite. Blooded added a chest harness. Ranks still sat on the last fight, so a Blooded could lose every hunt to a novice. Machiko's Hunter name in this book is Dahdtoudi, "small knife," the same mark Dachande used when he blooded her as a human Predator, spelled without the hyphens Prey used.

The clan forbade a human hunt in speech and still praised the Blooded who wore a Marine banner. Shorty took out his size on Machiko, then needed her to save him, then needed a grabbed ankle to beat her. She killed Prient'de, the unnamed shipworker, Shorty, and left Nirasawa's four in the clearing. Topknot lived. The novel never brings him into the last fight.

The Hard Meat

Hunter lore in the book claimed the breed had arisen on many worlds at once, which kept the clan from owning the seedings. Machiko treated that as a story that saved them from blame. The unnamed marsh hive used local four-limbed hosts. The Queen stayed on her sac until Topknot cut her free, then tried to break the ropes at the ship.

Ordinary drones did the killing in the marsh, in Bunda's trees, and on the falling decks. They had no eyes, so the hunters skipped camouflage and used heat and sound. Facehuggers took Pratt, Rembert, and Briggs. The Queen that Machiko freed killed the nine left on the Shell, walked away from the crash, and may have known the human who had opened her cage.

Confirmed Kills

The Queen crushed Three-Spot in the nest and later killed Beads, Inu, and the other hunters left on the Shell. Facehuggers took Davis Pratt and Harold Rembert. A cloaked hunter killed Kevin Vincent in the wreckage. Pop's MAX program killed the volunteer on DS 949, and the station blast took Teape, Pulaski, and the rest of that crew.

Machiko killed Prient'de and the second shipworker, then Shorty. Lara killed Keene. Nirasawa killed four hunters and was destroyed when a staff pierced his fuel cell. Ellis in MAX killed adult Xenomorphs around the survivors, three hunters in the first tree fight, two more after the phosphorus grenade, and a later drone pack on the way to the transport. Lucas Briggs was left on the ground with a Chestburster coming.

Key Characters

Machiko Noguchi had spent a year with Topknot after Dachande blooded her on Ryushi. She lost her hunt place in the kehrite, turned on the clan when the Bunda hunt proved to be humans, freed the Queen, killed Shorty, and piloted the survivors off Bunda.
Topknot was Leader of the Shell. He captured the Queen, handed Machiko a mask for the kehrite, and was still in the field when she stole his ship. The book does not kill him.
Shorty was an undersized novice who shoved Machiko, needed her to save him, and won the kehrite only after a spectator grabbed her. She cut off the use of his right hand and killed him in the jungle.
Katherine Lara was second lieutenant on Nemesis and the only one of the three with flight time. She spoke for the shuttle, killed Keene, refused to leave Machiko, and called the way off Bunda home.
Martin Jess was a convict volunteer who had lost Teape and Pulaski on DS 949. He attacked Briggs, took a cloaked hit on the pad, and pulled Ellis out of MAX.
Brian Ellis was a young technician who interfaced with MAX 09 twice without an implant. He saved Lara and Jess, fused with the suit on Bunda, and was alive but unconscious when they lifted.
Lucas Briggs was a Weyland-Yutani executive hunting a board seat against Julia Russ. He beat answers out of the survivors, fled the station, and was left on the ground with a chestburster coming.
Kevin Vincent was Bunda's botanist station manager. He quarantined the shuttle for Briggs, survived the fall, and died when a hunter copied his voice and cut him down.
Nirasawa was Briggs's synthetic bodyguard. After Briggs was implanted he asked the survivors for help, then died keeping Shorty's party off Machiko.
Three-Spot was one of Topknot's Blooded. The Queen crushed his chest when his rope slipped in the nest.
Scar was another Blooded on the capture team. He kicked Machiko to move faster in the hive and later lost his grip at the Shell ramp.
Prient'de was an older shipworker whose name Machiko could pronounce. She killed him at the Shell console so she could free the Queen.

Place In The Books

War is the third of the seven core Alien vs. Predator novels, after Prey and Hunter's Planet and ahead of the 2004 film novelization, Ultimate Prey, Armageddon, and Rift War. It is a novelization of the 1995 Dark Horse War miniseries by Randy Stradley, not an original plot. David Bischoff's Hunter's Planet had already given Machiko a different sequel in December 1994. Perry's book ignores that story. The later comic line stayed with War, then Randy Stradley's Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War in 2010, another sequel beside Hunter's Planet. That comic puts Machiko with Colonial Marines against the Killer Predators.

The novel also crosses into Aliens: Berserker, bringing Lara, Jess, and Ellis from DS 949 onto the same jungle as Topknot's hunt. Prey's epilogue had sent Machiko out with Vk'leita. War does not use that party. It keeps her with Topknot for a year, the comic's version of the time after Ryushi.

That meeting comes from Stradley's 1995 miniseries, which already put the Frenzy survivors on Bunda. It does not fit the years on the page. In Prey, Earth is still a crowded home world with company mail and rhynth buyers, and nobody on Ryushi mentions a hive war at home. Machiko then waits two years after the colonists leave and spends about a year with Topknot. Berserker squads, and the MAX suit Ellis used, belong to the years after the Alien/Earth War that started in 2192, when the Corps built those teams to wipe leftover hives. War never names that war, and Lara still calls Earth home. Those two years on Ryushi plus the year with the clan are not enough time for Earth to fall, recover, and field leftover-hive teams, and Prey does not show that fall at all.

Editions

Bantam Spectra released the first edition as a paperback in December 1999 in the Dark Horse Science Fiction Novels line. The catalog length is 209 pages. John Bolton painted the cover, Machiko in clan mesh over a fallen hunter with a drone in the trees. Locus dated the book December 1999 and noted a November arrival in shops.

Titan Books put Prey, Hunter's Planet, and War into The Complete Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus on 29 November 2016, an 832-page mass-market paperback. That is the text used for later reprints. A German edition, Krieg, came from Panini in December 2005, still under Bolton's painting.

Behind The Scenes

Stephani Perry, credited as S. D. Perry, wrote the novel from Stradley's War miniseries. She had already co-written Prey with her father, Steve Perry, and novelized Aliens: Berserker in August 1998, a year before War. The omnibus author note places her in Portland with her husband and two children. The comic remains the source of Topknot, Shorty, Bunda, and the Marine-banner hunter.

The dedication is for Zach, and for editors Anne Groell, Juliet Combes, and Lynn Adair. The epigraph is Andrew B. Law: there is no such thing as an inevitable war, and if war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom. The novel adds Briggs's board fight with Russ, Ellis inside MAX, Nirasawa's last program, and the Pratt and Rembert seeding in the trees, none of which the comic had to carry at that length.

Conclusion

Aliens vs. Predator: War is S. D. Perry's 1999 Bantam novel of the Dark Horse War comic. It covers Machiko's year with Topknot, the Queen capture, the wreck of Bunda survey, and the fight that killed Shorty. The book ends with the clan hunting her, Ellis alive but emptied out of MAX, and Machiko flying Lara and Jess toward a home she had not reached yet.