Blue Marsalis: Cold Forge Geneticist Turned Xenomorph

Blue Grace Marsalis was a Johns Hopkins geneticist in Alex White's Alien: The Cold Forge and Alien: Into Charybdis. In 2179 she ran live Xenomorph work on Weyland-Yutani station RB-232, the Cold Forge, while Bishara's Syndrome took her motor control. She left with a praepotens sample, then died on Ghasreh Shab in 2184 after she infected herself and became a speaking Xenomorph.

Johns Hopkins And Bishara's Syndrome

Blue had Bishara's Syndrome, a terminal epigenetic disease that wastes muscle and strips nerves. She had been a fellow at Johns Hopkins and a working geneticist on Earth before that diagnosis. Twelve other cases existed worldwide, all children of lifelong colonists or spacers, and none of those patients lived past 30. After the diagnosis, news pieces called her a prominent geneticist with the same rare illness she studied.

Vice president Elise Coto recruited her for Weyland-Yutani after the diagnosis and covered thin progress from Earth. Blue's last unassisted steps were in her Boston apartment six years before the Cold Forge, after she spilled cereal trying to sit and a caretaker put her in a motorized chair. By 2179 she lived in a hospital bed with a colostomy, a gastric tube, failing eyesight from a damaged optic nerve, and Intellijectors that would not let her overdose. Her mother had died about ten years earlier.

Glitter Edifice And Marcus

On RB-232 Blue ran Glitter Edifice, the live-specimen genetics job, from that bed. She worked through a brain-direct interface in a male synthetic named Marcus. Weyland-Yutani had issued a 2169 body with blond hair and green eyes. The cheap gut could not digest food, and she kept the pain receptors on so she felt what the body felt. Lab assistant Kambili Okoro timed chimpanzees against imported eggs while she used the telesurgical arms.

The Weyland-Yutani contract was military control of the species. Blue's private goal was to isolate the Facehugger payload, Plagiarus praepotens, as a medical rewriter that might undo Bishara's Syndrome. She named the Facehugger Manumala noxhydria. Fear in the host concentrated the dose, so she kept the chimps awake. The same DNA reflex that maps host shape produced chimp-proportion adult Xenomorphs that preferred all fours.

There was no Queen on the station. Every egg was imported and inventoried at about $150,000 each. Blue had spent about 80 percent of the chimps and eggs, and half the funding, without starting the control-loop task she was paid for. She opened hidden wireless ports in Marcus so she could keep working when the station link failed. Those same ports later let someone off-station move the body.

Dorian And The Kennel Break

Weyland-Yutani auditor Dorian Sudler arrived on the yacht Athenian to fire scientists and seize assets. Chief of security Anne Wexler, who had once been Blue's lover and had ended it because Blue was too close to death, pointed him at an unauthorized kennel server. A rushed chimp surgery tore off half of Kambili's face. Commander Daniel Cardozo then locked Blue out of the science wing. She hacked Dorian's terminal, found a roster that listed everyone for termination, and agreed to an off-station extraction if she could deliver a sample.

Someone opened kennel cells by hand, and someone installed the neural-network virus Silversmile on the station computers. Lucy Biltmore, the virus's author, was a Seegson mole. Most of the 63 caged adult Xenomorphs cooked when kennel heat shields opened to the dwarf star Kaufmann. The Athenian undock then tore a bay wall open. Kambili shoved Blue's wheelchair under a sealing bulkhead, the door sheared off both of his arms, and an adult Xenomorph finished him.

Blue later found technician Javier Paz cocooned, hands chewed off, an egg crate still locked at his feet. He asked her to end it, and she crushed his throat with Marcus's hands. Marcus treated that as murder and would not kill Dorian, but he kept trying to keep her alive. Blue then pinned a Facehugger, bit the pharynx, and sucked praepotens into the synth's plastic stomach so she would have a sample to trade.

Power Loader And Escape

Dorian smashed Marcus's skull with a fire extinguisher, shut the air and heat in crew quarters, and painted a light trail from the kennels to Blue's room. She jammed an oxygen valve, hid in a vent, and lit his last match. The blast and an alcohol-cabinet fire killed one adult Xenomorph and melted her bed through the deck.

She then piloted Caterpillar P-5000 CP5000-03 through the same brain-direct interface. Marcus had flashed the firmware and given her shoulder lamps and a weld torch. A resin nest held crew in place with open, disarmed egg crates at their feet. Rose Eagle tech Charles begged her to kill him. She could not, and she left him for the Chestburster. The loader crushed several adult Xenomorphs before acid blood wrecked an arm and a hip. In med bay a Xenomorph pulled Dorian off her, the machine folded that adult Xenomorph in half, and it stuffed Blue into an empty egg crate.

Marcus, his feet beaten to stumps, lifted her from the crate into a cryo berth. He blamed her for Javier and for forcing him to keep existing. Dorian woke glued in resin, walked to his quarters as a host, and died there when the Chestburster came through his ribs as the station fell toward Kaufmann.

Seegson Takes Blue

Blue next woke in a Seegson facility under the synthetic Rook, after the company destroyed Marcus in the extraction. Helen and Dan used the raid to hit Weyland-Yutani's share price hard enough for a board seat. They wanted a portfolio of uses from praepotens, not only a cure, and they would keep Blue alive to finish the work. She took the deal, asked for a male remote body again, and planned to design a cure and outplay them the same way she had outlasted Dorian.

By 2181 she was little more than a head on a rack of artificial organs. Her veins were plastic, a machine the size of a refrigerator ran her lymph, and catalytic gills oxygenated lab-grown blood because she had no lungs. Seegson no longer paid her. Once a year the bosses reminded her that she would die without their machines. She inhabited Rook the way she had inhabited Marcus, a state-of-the-art surgical body that followed the same pale default as Bishop, Walter, and David. She taught Rook her history through the link until he would act to keep her alive.

Queenscode And Blackstar

Chief science officer Richard Scales told the Seegson board the tests were failing and prepared to shut the project down. On 25 December 2181 he wrote president Aimee Matheson that they had enough to force a buyout and that the expeditionary ship Blackstar was coming. Blue broke into his office, showed Rook the mail, and took control of the body after he made her promise not to use his hands as a weapon.

Using Rook's custodian identity, she withdrew a vial she called Queenscode, the same editor she had used on a rat, with switches flipped in the Hox genes. She flooded the nerve tanks under her cranium with high-calorie matter that would kill her in minutes, then pushed the syringe into her artificial jugular. The change wrecked Scales and two lab techs. Rook, damaged in the fight, put credentials into Blackstar and told her to leave. She could not speak with the new mouth. He told her he was glad she was free.

Hasanova And The Speaking Xenomorph

In 2184 Blackstar reached Iran's Hasanova data colony on LV-991, an atoll around a lava-tube shaft the crew called Charybdis. Colonial Marines under Captain Kylie Duncan boarded the resin-coated ship, took frozen eggs, and caged the large black Xenomorph that used the name Marsalis. The body had human-like lips, no eyes, a speaker box on the skull, and lighted finger rings for typing, closer to a speaking Xenomorph hybrid than a mute drone. Duncan planned to open the colony storehouses on a timer so adult Xenomorphs grown from those eggs would kill the locked colonists and hide the raid.

The McAllen synthetic Marcus, a different unit from Blue's Cold Forge body, used a company keycard to free her from the marine cage. Marines then shot that Marcus down. In the Solutions lobby she killed Rankin, Ames, and Wallace. She later typed that she had stolen praepotens samples, the adult Xenomorph drones, and Blackstar from Seegson, and that Rook's databanks held hidden Weyland-Yutani sites like the Cold Forge. When contractor Noah Brewer hit Corporal Russell Becker with a chair, she pinned Noah and called him a murderer, then let Becker pull him away.

Blue led safety officer Kamran Afghanzadeh and flight officer Mary Fowler down through the hive toward the buried Weyland ruins. Blue used praepotens as if she could control it. It could grow on metal and glass, and it could make Facehugger-like grabbers. Hasanova had no Queen. Eggs remained, so the hive used the Facehugger-to-adult Xenomorph cycle, separate from a pathogen lake under Ghasreh Shab that behaved like the black goo from the Prometheus films.

Ghasreh Shab

Duncan chased Kamran, Mary, and Marsalis into those ruins after a pathogen vault opened. Acid blood stuck Sergeant Hubert Lee's corpse to Blue. Kamran tackled Duncan, and Mary shot the creature that came out of the captain. Blue led them across the pathogen lake and up toward the hillside above Blackstar. During the climb she typed that she had thought she could change things and save people. Mary counted Kamran and herself as the two she had saved.

On the open pumice Blue slowed, sank, and curled inward. Kamran and Mary stayed with her until the shell went still. The Seegson synth Rook, calling himself Father after Blue removed his safety limits, took her body aboard Blackstar, launched the ship, and put Kamran and Mary in an escape pod toward ICSC space.

Confirmed Kills

The Cold Forge and Into Charybdis never gave Blue a hive-wide body count for Hasanova. Her confirmed kills were:

• Solo confirmed adult Xenomorphs on RB-232: 7. One in her room with the oxygen-and-alcohol fire. In the P-5000 she smashed two into walls, cut one in half with a steel conduit, batted two with a hydrophobic egg crate, and folded one more in the med-bay hall.
• Humans on RB-232: 1. She crushed Javier's throat after he asked her to end it. She left Charles for the Chestburster.
• Humans after the Queenscode change: 6. Richard Scales and two lab techs during the Blackstar escape, then Rankin, Ames, and Wallace in the Hasanova Solutions lobby.
• Adult Xenomorphs on LV-991: uncounted. She killed more adult Xenomorphs in Javaher and the shaft. The novels never number them.
• Eggs / Queen / Facehuggers: 0 attributed as combat kills. She milked one Facehugger for the sample on RB-232. Hasanova had no Queen.
• Spared: Noah Brewer. Becker talked her off the kill after she pinned him.

Continuity Notes

The Cold Forge was set in 2179, the same year as Aliens. Carter Burke ran a parallel special project that year, and the Governance Board had not trusted him to finish it. Gateway Station was the civilian destination if a pod could be flown from RB-232. Seegson is the same company that owned Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation, forty-two years earlier.

The Hasanova outbreak sat in 2184, five years after the Sulaco mission. The McAllen Marcus on that job was a later unit, not the Cold Forge body Seegson destroyed. Rook later turned up as the Bishop-bodied pilot of the Righteous Fury and handed Olivia Shipp's Jackals a list of hidden Weyland-Yutani sites tied to Blue's work. Zula Hendricks was on Jericho 3 in Alien: Prototype in the same Titan window. That story was not part of Blue's.

Conclusion

Blue Marsalis was a Johns Hopkins geneticist who spent the last years of a failing body trying to turn Plagiarus praepotens into a cure for Bishara's Syndrome. She was the only human who left RB-232. Seegson kept her alive as a head on a rack, she infected herself with Queenscode to stay alive, and she died on the hillside above Blackstar after leading Kamran and Mary out of the hive.

Appearances

• Alien: The Cold Forge (novel, Titan Books, 2018)
• Alien: The Cold Forge (audiobook, Blackstone Audio, 2018)
• Alien: Into Charybdis (novel, Titan Books, 2021)
• Alien: Into Charybdis (audiobook, Blackstone Publishing, 2021)
• The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death (omnibus, Titan Books, 2023)

Sources

• Alex White, Alien: The Cold Forge (Titan Books, 2018)
• Alex White, Alien: Into Charybdis (Titan Books, 2021)

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Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors