Anders Kramm: No Exit Investigator & Soulages Survivor

Full name: Anders Kramm
Species: Human
Affiliation: Weyland-Yutani (former), Omnitech, Planetus
Role: Alien assault investigator and Planetus sleeper
Family: Unnamed wife and daughter Becca (both died on Soulages)
Setting: Soulages, C-3 L/M, and the Soulages moon station
First appearance: Aliens: No Exit (2008)
Status: Alive on the Soulages moon station at the end of the novel
Injuries (novel): Broken wrist, torn shoulder, and acid burns on Soulages. Lost two fingers and part of the left palm in the farm

Anders Kramm was a former Weyland-Yutani Alien assault investigator and the main character of B. K. Evenson's 2008 DH Press novel Aliens: No Exit. After Xenomorphs killed his wife and his daughter Becca on the terraform world Soulages, he left the Company and spent thirty years frozen as a sleeper. The firm Planetus woke him to inspect a reported outbreak on a shared world, where he exposed a staged massacre. The trail then led him back to a hidden Company Xenomorph farm on Soulages and to the moon station that ran it.

Biography

Earlier Life

Kramm drifted into his profession gradually. He began by taking measurements and readings from a safe distance, went along as support for an investigation team, and finally joined the team as an Alien assault investigator for Weyland-Yutani. On an early job a Facehugger sprang from an egg onto the man beside him. Ex-Marine Hermann Ungar said the man was as good as dead, but Kramm shot the parasite with his plasma rifle instead and burned away much of the man's face. The victim begged to be killed for three days until his chest swelled, and Kramm then shot him and the Chestburster inside him.

A few years later, when a Facehugger covered Ungar's own face, Kramm followed his advice and killed him. Another assignment took him to a world being terraformed, where a caretaker family had sent a distress call. He went in with an ex-Marine Company employee and a nuclear charge the size of a softball, under orders to check for survivors and sink the bomb near the hive. The ex-Marine vanished, and Kramm found only scattered limbs. He planted the charge, crawled out injured, and fainted aboard his ship. The Company blamed the deaths on a nuclear generator malfunction and paid him a large hazard bonus to keep quiet.

Tragedy On Soulages

Kramm later lived with his wife and their daughter Becca in a settler prefab outside the walled colony on Soulages, a Weyland-Yutani terraform world. He came home to find hive slime in the main room and his wife dazed on the bed, unable to remember anything after she opened the closet, where a tunnel ran beneath the house. A juvenile Xenomorph climbed out of the hole, and he killed it with three shots from his plasma pistol. Company policy treated a host as lost, so after she fainted he kissed her and smothered her with a pillow. He then cut her open and found a dead, nearly grown Chestburster.

In the hive beneath the house, his daughter was fixed into the wall among eight empty eggs, with the middle of her body burst away. An adult Xenomorph attacked him in the dark, broke his wrist, tore the flesh from one shoulder with its tail, and burned him with acid blood. For 8 days he was lost underground in a state close to madness, and rumors later said the creature had glued him to the wall before he killed it. When he reached the surface, he called the Colonial Marines, and the Soulages colony was quarantined.

The colonists were withdrawn, and Weyland-Yutani cleared Kramm of all charges but issued him a citation for not acting in the Company's best interests and docked his pay. Kramm blamed himself, because he had followed Company policy instead of calling the Marines when the first infestation was found. He resigned and signed with a small start-up called Omnitech as a sleeper on a minimal retainer, frozen until his skills were needed, so that the dreams of that night would stop. Planetus later absorbed Omnitech and inherited the contract, paying to keep him in cryo.

The C-3 L/M Investigation

About 30 years later, Planetus technicians thawed Kramm, and he asked why they could not have left him frozen for another thirty. A psychiatrist read his file aloud, calling him antisocial, depressive, and at times close to suicidal, and marked him marginal but fit for work. Official representative Matthew Darby explained that Planetus needed an Alien expert whom Weyland-Yutani could not buy. The two firms had bought the planet C-3 L/M together and split it in half, and the Company had reported Aliens at a Planetus border outpost. Kramm told Darby the story of Soulages before he agreed to go.

At the C-3 L/M spaceport, Planetus security officer Frances Stauff reached Kramm before the Company's man, Charles Braley, could take him aside. The team entered the sealed outpost with Company guards and three Planetus technicians, Duncan, Gavin, and Kelly. Six bodies lay in a neat row beside a shredded synth, but the wounds, the fake slime, the blood, and the calm faces did not match a live hive. The fingerprints on the tools belonged to manual laborers rather than the skilled crew named in the files. Kramm concluded that the scene had been arranged.

Kramm owed Braley an Alien finding for the official record. A data device from Darby linked to implants in the corpses, and Frances recovered a recording from the eye camera of the Planetus spy Tobin A. Marshall. The footage showed Braley's men raid the outpost with tear gas, shred the spy synth LaFargue, and drug the replacement workers. The prisoners were fed nanotech strips that burst out of their chests as mechanical chestbursters. The fake outbreak was meant to drive down Planetus shares so that the Company could buy the other half of the planet cheaply.

Back aboard his shuttle, Kramm found that a juvenile Xenomorph and two eggs had been planted in the engine room. A Facehugger dragged Frances into a vent, and Kramm killed the juvenile and the parasites before she was implanted, then cut her hand free of the resin. He also found the cuffed body of the outpost engineer, Victor Standish, in a cryo unit. Weyland-Yutani announced the deaths of Kramm and Frances before the fight was over. The pair then picked up the former Marines Bjorn and Jolena Heyward, who had killed three Company assassins at the port, along with the three technicians.

Return To Soulages

A Planetus remote navigator took control of the ship and set its course for Soulages. A message showed Darby tortured after Weyland-Yutani seized his firm, and Braley told Kramm that the creatures on the shuttle had come from a farm on his old world. A new dome covered the colony, and Kramm's prefab lay half buried in dust beside two stripped wrecks. Under the dome the Company bred eggs from a Queen and fed people to the hive through a cage called the Fodder Gate. In the old prefab the team found a male corpse and a suicide note warning that there was no exit.

Inside the farm, a Facehugger covered Duncan's face, and Kramm shot through the parasite and Duncan's head. He then shot Kelly, whom the creatures ignored because she carried an embryo, and Frances called him a monster for deciding who was dead. In a tunnel another adult Xenomorph bit off the little finger, the ring finger, and much of the palm of his left hand while its inner jaw strained to strike, until Jolena killed it. Bjorn used his own grip as a tourniquet. Jolena died in the hive, a Company virus killed Gavin, and Bjorn was crushed under the egg harvester.

Escape To The Moon Station

Kramm found a tempered steel rod while he was preparing to end Bjorn's suffering, then realized he could use it as a lever and freed him instead. He used the same rod to finish an adult Xenomorph that Frances had shot, and the three survivors flew a short-range C-40 flyer out through the farm roof. A stowaway adult Xenomorph boarded through an emergency lock he had left open, and he killed it with the rod. They crashed the flyer through the airlock of the moon station that ran the farm, where 7 Company men in lab coats met them with guns.

Kramm refused to raise his hands, shot the dark-haired leader with his last round, and bluffed the other six into giving up their weapons. He planned to put Bjorn into surgery, treat the infection in his own maimed hand, have Frances send a distress call and a report on the farm, and freeze the scientists until colonial law arrived. The prisoners warned that Company ships had tracked them since the hive and would arrive long before the galactic council sent Colonial Marines. Kramm expected those ships to bring adult Xenomorphs from the farm, and the novel ended with him waiting on the station.

Personality & Traits

Kramm was withdrawn and fatalistic, and his file described him as antisocial, depressive, and at times suicidal. He blamed himself and Weyland-Yutani in equal measure for his family's deaths on Soulages, and he chose cryo over suicide because he feared that death might only repeat the nightmare forever. He trusted almost no one, questioned Darby's motives, and joked that he was thirty years older than he looked. His knowledge of ships and technology was decades out of date, but his long experience with the creatures made him the one member of the team who could read a hive.

That experience made him hard. After Ungar's lesson he treated anyone implanted by a Facehugger as dead, smothered his own wife, shot Duncan and Kelly without warning, and briefly planned to kill Bjorn rather than leave him trapped. Frances Stauff condemned him for it, but she went on fighting beside him, and he protected her through the hive. He remembered small details of his family, such as his wife's hair and the way his daughter ran as a toddler with her arms stretched behind her. Once the takeover of Planetus became clear, a desire for revenge on the Company drove him on.

Weapons & Equipment

Kramm carried a plasma pistol on Soulages and used it to kill the juvenile Xenomorph in his prefab. On his earlier assignments he carried a plasma rifle and used an acid neutralizer on burns from Xenomorph blood. During the C-3 L/M investigation he had a sidearm, a knife, and a data device from Darby that read the implants in the outpost corpses. In the farm he used a meter-long tempered steel rod as a lever and a club, and he reached the moon station with a gun holding a single bullet, which he spent on the station's leader. On the caretaker job he had carried a Company nuclear charge the size of a softball.

Behind The Scenes

Brian Evenson created Kramm for Aliens: No Exit, writing as B. K. Evenson, and DH Press published the novel on 8 October 2008. Kramm was an original character with no link to Ripley or the films, and the book gave no calendar year for his thirty years in cryo. The Soulages attack was told through his memories and nightmares, and the novel itself questioned whether he had really found the Chestburster inside his wife or only imagined it so that he would not have to face killing her for nothing.

The text was not fully consistent about Kramm. Rumors at Planetus said an adult Xenomorph had glued him to the hive wall on Soulages, while his own memories described a fight in the dark, and neither version was confirmed. The caretaker world where he planted the nuclear charge was never named, though it was reopened for settlement afterward. Darby's file had gaps because Weyland-Yutani persuaded a court to keep parts of his record confidential. The final scene left the six surviving scientists unfrozen and Company ships inbound, so his fate after the last page is unknown.

Conclusion

Anders Kramm was a Weyland-Yutani Alien assault investigator who lost his wife and his daughter to a hive on Soulages and spent thirty years frozen as a sleeper. Woken by Planetus, he exposed the Company's staged outbreak on C-3 L/M, survived the shuttle ambush, and was forced back to his old world, where he found a Company Xenomorph farm. He lost most of his team and part of his left hand in the hive, then took the moon station that ran the farm with Frances Stauff and the maimed Bjorn Heyward, and waited there for the Company ships.