Creen Dinashin: Phalanx Inventor Of Caminus Paste

Full name: Creen Dinashin
Also known as: Uncle Creen
Species: Human
Affiliation: Lemeth Hold; later unified Ataegina
Role: Runner; later inventor
Known for: Caminus paste; Nan-Shan salvage; steam cart; Pendaran hunt with Yeh'kull
Family: Parents dead of forgetter's syndrome; Amy Dinashin (ancestor)
Setting: Ataegina, after the Rising
First appearance: Aliens: Phalanx (2020)
Status: Alive after Another Mother
Build (novel): A head shorter than Ahiliyah Cooper; orange-yellow eyes
Injuries (novels): Facehugged; slashed face in the Nan-Shan hive; branded by Yeh'kull
Kills (novels): Queen-chamber adults with Ahiliyah · Pendaran protector (finished)

Creen Dinashin was a sixteen-year-old runner from Lemeth Hold on the lost colony world Ataegina in Scott Sigler's Aliens: Phalanx and in Another Mother, his story from Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey. He served with Ahiliyah Cooper and Brandun Barrow. The locals called adult Xenomorphs demons and fought them with spears, shields, and hidey-suits of leaves. Creen boiled the caminus paste that stopped burning blood, lived through a Facehugger in the hive under Black Smoke Mountain, and about twenty years later hunted a new Queen with Ahiliyah and Yeh'kull, an unblooded female Yautja.

Biography

Growing Up In Lemeth

Creen grew up inside Lemeth Hold after the Rising emptied the plains. His parents had died of forgetter's syndrome while he was very small, and he did not like to be reminded that he was an orphan. Boys in Lemeth finished runner duty after five circuits, then went to the warriors. At sixteen he was a head shorter than Ahiliyah, with orange-yellow eyes and a mouth that made enemies faster than friends. Signalmyn Panda would not let him into the station because Creen called him fat, and most of the hold treated him the same way.

The Fifth Circuit

Creen was on his third run, walking Ahiliyah's fifth circuit with Brandun through Keflan and Dakatera. Senior runner Aiko Laster had trained crews to freeze if anything snapped on the trail, because demons usually hunted after dark. Brandun snapped a stick, and an adult Xenomorph crawled toward them in daylight. Ahiliyah held the crew in place until it moved on. Creen had stuffed so many crimson caminus leaves into his hidey-suit that he could not put his arms down, and he wanted to make the wall before night rather than wait.

At home he gorged on berries the holds did not grow underground, then spent the welcome groaning. Later, after he mocked Brandun, Brandun choked him until Creen drove a short knife, the little friend, through Brandun's forearm. Creen was the smallest of the three, and he used that knife because he could not win a straight fight against a boy heading toward six feet.

Caminus Paste And The Factory Lab

On Ahiliyah's sixth run a demon reached into the vootervert hole that hid Creen. Brandun drove a spear into its back, acid blood burned Brandun's right hand, and Ahiliyah finished the creature with a rock through the skull. Crimson caminus leaves on the hidey-suits turned grey where the blood hit, and pressed leaves stopped the burn. That plant was the first clear Xenomorph weakness the holds could use. Creen later showed the council the small holes in his shirt and treated Brandun's spear as the strike that splashed him. He did not claim the kill.

After Keflan fell, Ahiliyah asked Margrave Aulus Darby to take Creen off the runner roster and put him in the factory lab to study the leaves. Creen wanted a dead demon for that work. Councilman Tinat took the request as a joke. Creen went into the lowest factory room anyway, the last chamber before solid mountain rock, in a level where everyone else could swim and he could not. He ground caminus leaves into mush, boiled them in water, strained the mash, added starch, and boiled the mix again until it thickened. A full barrel took about six hours. The paste foamed burning blood into grey ash on contact and poisoned blades. Margrave Darby blocked warrior tests of the mix, so the trio hunted another demon against orders and brought the body back.

Creen later fitted a glass vial of the paste into the hollow inner jaw on Ahiliyah's necklace, the toothtongue she had cut from the sixth-run kill. Brandun had left the runner roster for the Hold Guard under Drasko Lamech. When Jantal fell and the Margrave ordered warriors to turn refugees away, Creen wanted the hold to take the people in. Darby refused.

Lemeth Falls And The Southern March

Diggers opened Lemeth from below, and demons came through the factory levels and the living corridors. Former general Sinesh Bishor died when an inner jaw punched through his face, and Aulus Darby was carried away alive. Creen and Tolio Minsala, with help from the factory level, built portable kettles so the army could boil more poison on the move. Ahiliyah formed a corridor shield wall, smeared the spears with Creen's paste, and held the line until about 2,000 people reached the plateau. About 1,000 fighters from Lemeth, Dakatera, and the Keflan remnant later locked shields on a hilltop and killed more than 150 demons there. That stand was a phalanx kill, not a named solo count for Creen.

Takanta promised 1,500 warriors and Vinden promised 1,000. The combined army of about 3,000 marched through Bigsby's Pass and onto the Boiling Plains. Thousands of demons hit the column, the Takantan line broke, and the survivors pushed on to Black Smoke Mountain. Demons took the last fighters into the mountain instead of killing them on the slope.

The Nan-Shan Hive

The hive was inside the wreck of the colony ship Nan-Shan. Creen tapped a halfstaff on a bare patch of floor and heard wood on metal, then treated the burrow as an old hold the demons had taken over. A synthetic named Zachariah, registration WY2100023, had served Weyland-Yutani and had lived in the wreck for 319 years by his own count. He had taken 119 children aged ten and under off the dying ship. Those children became the Ataeginians. Among them was Amy Dinashin, the likely ancestor of Creen's line, with Kyle Barrow and Samuel Cooper for Brandun and Ahiliyah. He used the old words: demons were Xenomorphs, the magic spiders were Facehuggers, and the worms that came out of chests were Chestbursters.

Ahiliyah, Brandun, and Creen were glued to a wall in a room of eggs. One of those Facehuggers locked onto each of them. Creen had eaten caminus leaves after one took him, hoping the paste in his blood would poison that stage of the Xenomorph life cycle. Ahiliyah cut herself free, pulled a ruined Chestburster from Creen's mouth, and cut Brandun loose after he vomited the same white stage. Creen's face was a slashed ruin from that capture. He wanted to go home after that, then went on because there was no hold left to go back to. Zachariah later pinched the cuts closed with a ship tool and wrapped his head.

Zachariah hid them, then led them toward the Demon Mother, a Queen hanging over an egg sac and a geyser, with two large Queen protectors. The first geyser plan failed because mineral crust on her body blocked the heat, and a protector killed Zachariah. Brandun climbed the egg sac, killed a protector, and drove a poison tailspike into the Queen's chest. She crushed him, and the poison killed her after that. Ahiliyah's foot was caught in the inner jaw until Creen jumped onto the Queen's head and hammered the crest until the jaw opened. Ahiliyah and Creen killed more adult Xenomorphs in that chamber, then left the mountain without Brandun. Creen later wore the Queen's inner jaw as a trophy.

After The First Queen

Two years later Ahiliyah was General Cooper, and Creen was the person the new towns leaned on for tools. He designed a faster mortar for wrecked mountain holds, a way to make iron harder than bronze and able to hold an edge, a street grid for the new city of Hellan, a plow that cut fields more cleanly, and a far-seeing tool he called a farglass. He continued to pull knowledge from the Nan-Shan wreck and bring it to the holds. Ahiliyah's people treated Brandun as the man who had saved the world, and they treated Creen as the future of Ataegina, scars and all.

Pendaran And Yeh'kull

About twenty years after Brandun killed the Demon Mother, Ataegina's population had more than doubled, and demons had returned. Ahiliyah ran a shrinking-perimeter search so a new Queen could not grow. Creen left his labs in Lemeth for that hunt and drove a steam cart of iron-bound wood, gears, and a boiler that needed wood and water. The cart was more than twice as fast as the old runners, and it rattled, hissed, and sometimes blew apart. Ahiliyah's ruined foot made the ride necessary. Module leader Brandun, her son named after the dead runner, hailed them as General Cooper and Uncle Creen. Creen wore the Queen inner jaw in the open, larger than the three soldier jaws on Ahiliyah's necklace.

Runner Rowan Winden was found with his hidey-suit split and his head and spine gone. Green blood was on a spearhead, with no acid scoring. Creen treated that smear as proof that something new had reached Ataegina, not a demon. Unblooded huntress Yeh'kull wrecked the steam cart on the road, lifted Creen by the throat, and put him on the dirt beside Ahiliyah. She saw the Queen jaw and would not take a trophy as a gift. Creen read the rolled search map and circled the volcanic Pendaran tunnels as the likely nest. She wanted that kill herself before the mothership arrived.

The Pendaran Hive

Yeh'kull dropped a double-pointed spear in front of Creen, gave Ahiliyah a light metal bow, and brought a cloaked scout craft down in a clearing. She killed more than twenty Warriors with her plasmacaster on the way into the hive. Two protectors ambushed them. Ahiliyah wrecked one skull with the bow, Creen finished that body through the mouth, and Yeh'kull opened the other with wristblades after a shoulder gore.

In the Queen chamber Yeh'kull removed caster and helmet for an honor melee. Ahiliyah held a poison arrow in case that fight failed, and she sent Creen to smash eggs. The young Queen smashed Yeh'kull into the wall and turned toward Creen before the huntress recovered. Yeh'kull killed her with disc and blades, branded Ahiliyah, Creen, and her own helmet with a severed Queen finger, hung the Queen inner jaw on a wire, and threw a charge that shook the mountain. Ahiliyah and Creen walked out after that with the bow and the double spear. The young Queen, her protectors, and the runners Yeh'kull had taken were dead.

Personality And Traits

Creen was the sharpest mind in Lemeth, and Ahiliyah treated him that way even when the rest of the hold wanted nothing to do with him. He read maps, metal, heat, and plant mash faster than anyone around him, and he assumed other people were slower on purpose. That made him useful and hard to live with. He mocked size, weight, and piety, saved his kindness for a very small circle, and cut corners on a run because he thought the rule was dumber than he was.

He was eccentric by hold standards, not theatrical. Spear-and-shield Ataegina had little room for a boy who talked like a lab and built machines that sometimes blew apart, then went back to the bench as if that were normal. He mixed crude jokes with fussy names for glassware, wore a Queen inner jaw where everyone could see it, and lit up at a new kind of blood while other people were looking at a ripped body. Most Ataeginians treated demons as a curse. Creen treated them as a problem with parts.

Creen was arrogant, and he was also afraid, and he hated being reminded of the second part. He was small, orphaned young, and quick to lash out when someone used that against him. He would rather invent than stand in a shield wall, and he would rather be right than liked. Years later he remained impatient, certain he was the smartest person in the cart, and the one Ahiliyah wanted when the search needed a mind instead of another spear.

Behind The Scenes

Scott Sigler wrote Creen Dinashin for Aliens: Phalanx, published by Titan Books on 25 February 2020 in a 512-page hardcover. Blackstone Publishing released the audiobook the same day, read by Bronson Pinchot. Sigler dedicated the novel to Myke Cole, whose Legion vs. Phalanx answered questions about ranks, spears, and shields. Creen returned in the short sequel Another Mother, collected in Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey, a Titan anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Jonathan Maberry and published on 1 March 2022. Ahiliyah and Tolio named their son Brandun after the dead runner. That son hailed Creen as uncle on the Pendaran search.

Conclusion

Creen Dinashin was a Lemeth runner who made the caminus paste, lived through a Facehugger in the Nan-Shan wreck, and spent the years after Brandun's Queen kill turning salvage into mortar, iron, roads, and a steam cart. About twenty years later he mapped a second hive for Yeh'kull, finished one protector in that chamber, and walked out of Pendaran branded and alive, with the double spear in his hands.