Blior: Evanston's Private Hunt World

Blior was a private hunting world in the Norn system, the fourth of seven planets around a GO sun, settled by Livermore Evanston as a safari for rich clients. David Bischoff's 1994 novel Aliens vs. Predator: Hunter's Planet brought Machiko Noguchi there after she had left a Yautja pack. Evanston wanted her because alien hunters were loose on the world and were seeding it with Xenomorphs. A hunter had taken Evanston's skull, Machiko held the headquarters with Ned Sanchez, and the wild Xenomorphs were multiplying.

The Planet

Blior was an Earth-type world with a workable atmosphere, a spin that gave it mild seasons, and a balance of sea and land. It had five moons, none of them large, and twenty-nine continents about the size of Australia. Evanston had colonized only one of those continents, an island he named Livermoreland. Its capital was Evanstonville. The novel put the world far outside the usual lanes of interstellar traffic, in the same broad neighborhood as Dullworld. Machiko read the specs before she landed and, once the yacht set down, found the air and the country as rich as the file had promised.

Flora & Fauna

Blior did not need terraforming. Its native ecosystem was complex enough that new species had to be introduced with care. Livermoreland held a deciduous rain forest of alien trees, plains, and rivers, with bright colors in the green and brown. Yanga trees, vines, and flowers grew in the mist, with alien savanna and mountains beyond. Native herds used that country, along with a rainbow-plumed bird and the bisor, a small doglike mammal.

Evanstonville lay in a valley where two rivers met, with trees, grass, and plains around the settlement. Its central park was planted, with sculpted trees, grass, flowers, and other blended plants, streams, waterfalls, ponds, and a lake stocked with fish and a wide variety of Earth ducks, swans, and other waterfowl.

Zangoids were imported carnivores, feline in principle, with a lizard's head and hide and six limbs. Some called them snake centaurs. They hunted in packs, preferred the brush, and a lone zangoid was more dangerous. A genetic and cloning factory could build DNA patterns, not only copy old DNA, and it produced a Tyrannosaurus rex. Xenomorphs were not native, and the wild population was growing.

Livermore Evanston

Livermore Evanston was the owner of Blior. He traveled in a private KX yacht, poured old burgundy for guests, and presented himself as a cheerful man with red cheeks and open eyes. His interest in war started as a hobby in business school, where he replayed battles from Waterloo to the Battle of the Millennium on a computer. As his ties to the Company grew, he treated economic power as a step toward conquest and thought the Company itself had no vision. On Livermoreland he fielded a trained security force of two hundred, with a hundred in reserve, and he liked them in exaggerated uniforms modeled on Napoleonic officers. They fired salutes when he returned, and he staged old battle reenactments as sport. He told Machiko that an unprepared planet was a doomed planet, and that warfare was another kind of hunting. Evanston's business sold hunts to paying clients. The opening safari was a party of lawyers with hired guides after a zangoid, used for the early trips because the guides knew its habits.

Xenomorphs And Hunters

The first safari went wrong when the zangoid in the clearing convulsed and a Chestburster tore out of its chest. Evanston later told Machiko that Blior had other hunters, with no native civilization to account for them, and that those hunters were the source of the Xenomorphs. He hired her because she knew who they were. She had been Blooded by Broken Tusk and had lived with a pack before her loyalty to humans pulled her off that path on Gordian. Inside the factory, Evanston's real project was a line of cybernetic Xenomorphs. He wanted them bred for higher intelligence, fitted with control hardware, armor, and weapons, and run by radio. He thought of them as an army. When the visiting Yautja closed in, he tried to use that stock against them.

The End Of Evanston's Rule

Machiko and the hunters took the headquarters. She triggered the kill switches in the cyborg Xenomorphs, and the machine half of each one blew apart. She went on the all-comm, told the armed staff to put their weapons down, and said the Yautja would not harm anyone who was unarmed. Livermore Evanston ran for his yacht. Attila, Machiko's android, had left a headless body in the pilot's chair, and a hunter boarded the ship. In the headquarters the elder Bakuub had a warrior hold out a net bag with Evanston's skull, spine, and one eye, and he called it a trophy.

Ned Sanchez asked what she would do with the world. She said it belonged to the people in that room, not to her alone. Attila said the right contacts could supply a Blior independent of the Company, free to choose its own trade and colonists. The wild Xenomorphs were another matter. Attila warned that they had been increasing while the humans fought each other, and that clearing them was the next work. The hunters left to rest and talk the next day.

Behind The Scenes

David Bischoff wrote Hunter's Planet as an original sequel to Aliens vs. Predator: Prey, not as a comic adaptation. Bischoff dedicated the book to Donald Maass, with editorial thanks to Kij Johnson and Janna Silverstein. Bantam Spectra published it in 1994. No comic, film, or game used the planet. The novel remained the only account of Livermoreland and Evanstonville.

Conclusion

Blior was Livermore Evanston's Earth-type safari world, one colonized continent among twenty-nine, stocked with imported zangoids and a DNA factory. Yautja packs used it as a hunt, Xenomorphs spread from that contact, and Evanston answered with radio-controlled cybernetic Xenomorphs. Machiko Noguchi broke that program. The novel leaves Evanston dead, his skull a hunter's trophy, and Machiko, Ned Sanchez, and Attila holding a world whose wild Xenomorphs were not finished.

Appearances

• Aliens vs. Predator: Hunter's Planet by David Bischoff (Bantam Spectra, 1994)