Lieutenant Johnny Mains: VoidLarks Of The Rage War

Full name: Johnny Mains
Species: Human
Affiliation: United States Colonial Marine Corps (USCM)
Rank / role: Lieutenant; CO, 5th Excursionists (VoidLarks)
Known for: VoidLarks; Southgate Station 12; UMF 12 crash; Othello nuke
Partner: Gemma Lieder, VoidLark pilot
Setting: Outer Rim / Human Sphere, 2692 Rage War
First appearance: Predator: Incursion (2015)
Status: Last seen arming a nuke on an Othello attack craft; ship later confirmed destroyed
Injuries (stories): Broken left leg on Othello; combat suit depleted after UMF 12
Kills (stories): 8+ adult Xenomorphs · 1 human mercy (Durante)

Johnny Mains was a Colonial Marine lieutenant and commanding officer of the 5th Excursionists, the VoidLarks, in Tim Lebbon's Rage War novels Predator: Incursion and Alien: Invasion. He named the unit on their first day out from an Outer Rim drophole, and they spent a little over three years beyond the Rim on the Arrow-class Ochse. In 2692 he fought Yautja at Southgate Station 12, crashed on the habitat UMF 12, boarded the Rage sister ship Othello with Gemma Lieder, and was last seen arming a hangar nuke.

Biography

Addison Prime

While he was still a corporal, Mains fought on Addison Prime against a rogue Marine outfit, his first firefight against other trained soldiers. His combat suit's CSU failed and took his issued weapons offline, and a fully restored antique shotgun on his back kept him alive. He kept that gun after he left the regular Corps.

Excursionists

He later went to Tyszka's Star, about two hundred light years in from the Outer Rim, for Excursionist training. That hub pulled the crews together and launched every Arrow ship. Excursionists sat under General Paul Bassett with the Spaceborne and Terrestrial arms of the Corps. Their public work was escorting Titan ships as those hulls pushed past the Human Sphere and built new dropholes. The rest of the job was quieter: small crews on Arrow-class ships, months or years beyond the Rim, watching threats that regular Marines never reached, and those missions were meant to avoid a fight.

The VoidLarks

Mains named the 5th Excursionists the VoidLarks on their first day out from an Outer Rim drophole. Other numbered units ran the same kind of watch, including the 9th, 13th, 17th, and 23rd. His eight-person crew had been out a little over three years and had met other people only three times in that stretch, because few Marines could live that far from human contact for that long. He treated them as family, and in private none of them used formal rank.

Gemma Lieder flew the Arrow and shared his cabin, with Corporal Sara Cotronis as second in command. Snowdon handled Yautja tech, Faulkner ran weapons and science, and McVicar cooked and worked comms. Privates Brian Willis and Lizzie Reynolds rounded out the unit. For a little more than a year their classified job was a Yautja habitat several light years beyond the Sphere, later tagged UMF 12, a miles-long hull that had looked inactive and had never seemed much of a threat.

Their ship was the Arrow-class Ochse, an Excursionist assault and reconnaissance hull with laser cannons, a particle beam modulator, a sub-space limiter, micro-nukes, three drones, and a computer the crew called Frodo. ArmoTech cloak gear, which Marines called Gadget Guy work, let the Arrow blend into background clutter or sit disguised as an asteroid. Mains treated that kit as perishable, because cutting-edge cloak work did not stay secret for long.

Southgate Station 12

In March 2692 two hunters spent about two days inside Southgate Station 12, an Outer Rim research post of more than a hundred people. They killed at least seventeen, ten of them hired independents, before the VoidLarks reached the fight. Reynolds lost her head while covering a man and two children, and Willis died leading a hunter away from civilians. Those were the first VoidLarks killed in action, though they were not the first troops Mains had lost to Yautja.

The remaining crew killed both hunters. Mains's third laser blast cut one wrist so the gauntlet could not fire, and Snowdon stripped the weapons while the corpse's stealth field kept cycling. He took the station from commander Niveau, ordered the survivors into hibernation, and sent the bodies inward for Weyland-Yutani. He would not escort the evacuees, because the unit had a classified watch on a miles-long Yautja habitat.

Funeral And The Habitat Watch

An hour after lift-off, Mains held a short committal for Willis and Reynolds in the rec room and had Frodo fire their coffin suits away from Earth. It was the first funeral he had run since leading the VoidLarks out of Tyszka's Star. After a Darkstar resupply they went back on station, and the crew rode suspension pods while Frodo flew the next leg.

The habitat later tagged UMF 12 ran about six miles long, with bone-like skin, docking towers up to three miles, and a slow spin around a star beyond the Outer Rim. It was the third Yautja habitat humans had seen, and the Ochse had watched it for a little more than a year. General Wendy Hetfield at Tyszka reported a ninety-day spike in contacts. The 11th Excursionists were missing in the Holgate system, and any launch toward human space was to be treated as hostile.

Bastard Ships Off UMF 12

In July 2692 four ships left the habitat, and one closed on the cloaked Arrow. Mains decloaked, warned Tyszka, and opened with lasers rather than burn the habitat itself. He treated wrecking the habitat as an act of war, and he kept the particle modulator off any line that put UMF 12 at risk. The VoidLarks destroyed several of those hulls, tagged Bastard One through Seven, and let a crippled seventh go. Bastard One straddled the Ochse with a laser spray, and parts of McVicar drifted through the cabin.

Crash On The Habitat

Radiation from that fight was fatal for Cotronis when she stayed in the engine room to buy the landing. Her suit was not graded much above level three, and Frodo put a full containment breach about twelve minutes out. Lieder put the damaged Arrow on the habitat's outer surface, close to the heavy central third. The crew ran for an entry as the reactor went critical and the Ochse detonated. Inside they met thin air, about fifteen percent oxygen, and hunters coming down the tunnels.

Four Weeks Inside

The VoidLarks lasted about four weeks in the habitat. On the first day they dropped several hunters, including one whose trophies held a Xenomorph skull, then hid. Snowdon treated them as the first humans inside a habitat, and the early attacks as uncoordinated loners. On day eleven they found ten to twelve Yautja torn apart, and two days later they entered an empty house whose trophy wall held talons, wings, and eight or ten human skulls.

Cotronis Last Stand

On day sixteen three live hunters came without cloaks, drawn by Cotronis's screams. Radiation had wrecked her by then, and she took the defender and four plasma grenades and detonated the stand. Lieder took shrapnel through the upper right chest, a punctured lung, and two broken ribs, then walked again by day twenty-two. Later they found a Yautja ship they could not fly and a non-Yautja wreck at a tower window, with residual radiation that pointed to exploding ships. Then dozens of non-Yautja contacts filled the scanners.

Patton's Ship

Adult Xenomorphs were on the habitat. An inner jaw killed Snowdon through her suit mask, and Faulkner lost his right arm to acid in a nest, then died of the wounds a day after their warning transmission. On the surface, vacuum froze Xenomorph blood and Mains used the antique shotgun. They boarded a grown Rage ship on three docking arms, where skulls in the nest were stamped PATTON. Scores of Xenomorphs and Yautja lay dead in the boarding space, the hunters' left arms torn off so the wrist bombs would not fire.

On the bridge, the android general Patton was pinned to the wall by a Yautja spear, legs gone, one arm crushed, tongue pulled out, jaw broken. The hunter who had done it lay dead at his feet. The panels used old English. Mains and Lieder could not fly the ship, and Lieder treated the locks as genetic. They sent an open-frequency warning to every Colonial Marine unit, with the VoidLarks down from eight to three, then to two after Faulkner died.

Nurseries

UMF 12 and Patton's docked ship were falling toward the local sun, and Patton's remaining eye was moving. Mains and Lieder worked the scanners and found a sub-space grid ahead of human tech, with at least twelve red traces. Seven or more were old Fiennes sleeper ships inbound to drophole locations at speeds those hulls should not have had, among them the Susco-Foley, which had left about five hundred years earlier with some seven thousand people in cryo, and the earlier Aaron-Percival. Mains called those hulls nurseries and started another warning as claws scratched up from below the flight deck.

HellSparks Rescue

In September 2692 the two Marines made their stand on that bridge as adult Xenomorphs came through the doors. They were down to the antique shotgun, a thin laser charge, one plasma shot, and a last grenade they meant to press against the hull. Lieutenant Eddie Durante of the HellSparks reached them in the Arrow Navarro in time for that blast. Mains grappled under a panel with Lieder, the grenade went, and a larger blast drove metal through Patton's face, titanium skull, and computing core.

Mains had not seen Durante in more than six years. They had shared a Colonial Marine regiment before Excursionist training, then gone to different Arrow watches from Tyszka's Star. Medic Radcliffe treated them on the Navarro. They sent Tyszka a report on Patton's control methods, the self-destruct that followed a fatal wound, and the returning Fiennes ships they treated as nurseries. Durante filled them in on Yautja strikes inside the Sphere and on a ceasefire that had been sealed while they were trapped on the habitat.

Navarro To Othello

About thirty days after the rescue, Mains and Lieder were on the Navarro for drophole Beta 37 when they intercepted a hull more than three miles long with almost no emissions. The interior looked grown. Mains pushed Durante to close on that ship rather than only warn the Beta control base. They sat in spare combat suits in seats welded to the rear bulkhead, armed with standard Excursionist weapons after the shotgun stayed behind on UMF 12.

Boarding Othello

One hold held about forty thousand gel pods, each with a naked human and a shriveled Facehugger, and the computer Spike counted five more holds like it. Three survivors met them, shipborn who called themselves Founders again. The ship was Othello. A Wordsworth remnant had killed the Rage elders there, at the cost of most of the original thousand crew. Android general Jones held the control decks with a little loyal shipborn and more than a hundred hatched Xenomorphs, and he hatched more whenever one died. Macbeth was drawing Marine attention on the Rim, and Othello was meant to slip in unseen, split into a dozen attack vessels, and strike Sol.

They hid in a waste channel under the pods while Xenomorphs passed, then Jones started a mass birthing. Three Xenomorphs boarded the Navarro. A plasma grenade vented the Arrow, killing the remaining HellSparks and taking Spike with the ship. Mains and Lieder stayed inside Othello with Durante, Moran, Hari, the rebel medic Sara, and a burned engineer.

Moran stayed as rear guard in the ducts and did not come back. Lieder shot the burned engineer after a plasma flash wrecked his face, and in a lobby ambush a tail went through Hari's chest. A plasma grenade then burned Sara and Durante, and Mains finished Durante before he and Lieder fell down an elevator shaft. The fall broke his left leg and ruined Lieder's left arm at the shoulder.

Hangar Nuke

They reached a hangar of two attack craft, each about half the size of the Navarro and heavy with weapons. Hundreds of adult Xenomorphs flooded the bay. Lieder put a burst into the first wave, and Mains dropped seven more with a laser pistol before the hatch sealed. The creatures cracked the cockpit glass and killed each other to melt the gap with acid, and Lieder could not fly the craft. In the weapons hold she hot-wired a fist-sized nuke with her one good arm while Mains held it.

Final Fate

Macbeth later received an automated signal from Othello, the first in seven years, timestamped at the moment of the ship's destruction. Mains and Lieder were last seen in that attack craft as the nuke was armed.

Confirmed Kills

On the surface of UMF 12, Mains used the antique shotgun against adult Xenomorphs whose blood froze in vacuum. On Patton's bridge he put that shotgun into at least one adult Xenomorph that came at him, then later dropped seven more in the Othello hangar with a laser pistol. After a plasma grenade burned Eddie Durante, Mains finished him.

Weapons And Equipment

Mains fought in an Excursionist combat suit fitted to him, fireproof, self-sustaining, and loaded with med-packs. The micron-thin layer resisted Xenomorph blood to a point, flexed as armor, and carried retro-engineered Yautja cloak gear. A clear helmet layer hugged his face and fed a virtual display over whatever he was looking at. Each shoulder pad held a mini-drone that could travel about fifteen miles, map a fight, and launch a remote attack.

His main gun was a compact com-rifle built for Excursionists, programmable for plasma bursts, laser sprays, micro-dot solids, and nano-ordinance, and good as a sniping weapon out to about two miles. He also carried a laser sidearm on the right thigh and plasma grenades on the belt. The restored antique shotgun rode on his back from Addison Prime through the habitat surface fight, then was gone after the Navarro rescue. He lost the com-rifle in the Othello elevator shaft and finished the hangar with the laser pistol, two grenades, and the nuke Lieder wired.

Continuity Notes

Mains and Lieder were still on Patton's ship at the end of Predator: Incursion, with the android moving and adult Xenomorphs climbing toward the bridge. In Alien: Invasion the Navarro reached that fight, and the rescue blast destroyed Patton. Her first name in that novel is Gemma. Neither Marine is in Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon.

Behind The Scenes

Tim Lebbon introduced Mains in Predator: Incursion, published by Titan Books on 20 October 2015 as the first Rage War novel, and brought him back in Alien: Invasion on 26 April 2016. Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon closed the trilogy in September 2016 without him. In the first two books he shared the plot with researcher Isa Palant and the Rage android Liliya. Titan asked Lebbon for a military story set later than the films, with an outside force using weaponized Xenomorphs, and Lebbon made that force human Rage generals rather than Weyland-Yutani.

Conclusion

Johnny Mains was the lieutenant of the 5th Excursionists, the VoidLarks, and he held the watch on UMF 12 until the Rage boarding wrecked the habitat. He and Gemma Lieder were last seen on an Othello attack craft, arming a hangar nuke.