Lieutenant Joseph Henry was a Colonial Marine officer, the son of an Earth politician, and commander of a punishment platoon on the Colonial Marine ship USS Melville in Dark Horse's Aliens: Colonial Marines. After he broke a superior's jaw, Petrovic sent him to escort an Alphatech executive and dump toxins at the Sun Gun, instead of the discharge his father had arranged. Henry led the misfits, including Carmen Vasquez, through a Xenomorph infestation, Bracken's World, and a war against the Bug-Men cult. He killed the mad scientist Ernst Kleist in Alphatech research station 2378, then ordered the synthetic Liston to get the survivors out. Liston obeyed by ripping out Henry's heart so the neck micro-bombs would not fire.
Biography
A Politician's Son
While posted on Frontier Mobile Base 82, also called Dover, Henry received a recorded message from his father, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. The older man said he had been at a budget summit when Henry's mother died, and that his staff had failed to get him to the services. He talked of endowments in her name, then told his son not to waste himself on a frontier career he compared to a Foreign Legion fantasy. Public Service on Earth, the father said, would honor her legacy better than a life in the Corps. Henry cut the call off with a bitter agreement.
That call left the shape of the family plain. Henry's father had money and political reach, and he used both when his son got into trouble, which only made the lieutenant angrier. Marines around him already knew the chairman of the Armed Services Committee could keep a young officer out of the stockade. Henry wanted the Corps on his own terms, not as a favor his father could withdraw. The nickname Hank followed him through those arguments, and so did the record of insubordination that his father's influence had never quite erased.
Assigned To The Melville
Petrovic found him still breaking things, and reminded him that at least this time it was not a superior officer's jaw. Henry had smashed Captain Campomanes after catching the man beating a fourteen-year-old prostitute, and he did not pretend to be sorry. Witnesses were the only reason both men were still walking. When another Marine told him to be grateful his old man had the ear of the brass, Henry asked what his father had to do with it. Petrovic told him not to play dumb: the man was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and that was clout.
The same clout had already arranged a discharge and a ticket back to Earth. Petrovic intercepted it. He said Henry was getting out, but he was not getting off, and he gave him the latrine duty of the day: command of a misfit crew on the USS Melville for a year in the middle of nowhere. The brief was to haul a replacement labor crew to an under-construction deep communications array, dock at an Alphatech Sun Gun facility to dump toxins, and escort a company executive with his security team. Petrovic told him to take the Melville at 1800 hours, and to grow up.
Aboard The Melville
On board, Henry welcomed Beliveau and the Alphatech party with a dry remark about breakfast, then asked whether this was the executive's first wagon train on the frontier. Sergeant Nyland already had an impressive service record, and she pulled Henry aside before the squad went into hypersleep. She had serious misgivings about his qualifications for command, and she warned him that unprofessional behavior with this bad bunch could have grave consequences. Henry said he would bear that in mind. The warning did not soften the lecture he then gave the platoon.
Private Carmen Vasquez tried to clown him in front of the lineup, saying she had not joined the Marines to dig ditches. Henry read her file aloud: sister of Jenette Vasquez, a Marine decorated posthumously as a top bug killer, and herself a long list of screw-ups with no combat record. He told the rest they all knew the score, and that this detail was still better than the stockade for most of them. Then the huge security synthetic Liston appeared, and Henry wanted to know who the hell he was. Nyland introduced him, and Henry ordered the squad to square away their gear for hypersleep.
The Sun Gun
When the Sun Gun facility, also called KL-7, failed to answer, Henry summoned Beliveau and then woke the Marines over the executive's protest that the matter was not a military one. The squad was disinclined to gear up, and Henry had to force the issue with his hands before they boarded the silent dump. Inside they found a Xenomorph hive already dug into the works, and armed Bug-Men moving with it. Carmen froze on her first live Alien until another Marine hauled her clear. Henry kept the survivors moving and refused to treat the fight as a simple pest clearance.
With specialists Chen and Rake, and a civilian survivor named Dinkel, Henry purged a tox-bay hatch and blew Aliens into open space to clear a path. The remaining Marines reached the Melville in EVA gear, taking a hybrid Bug-Man captive and Beliveau's shaken security man Vormitag with them. The cost in dead and wounded was high, but the platoon was no longer trapped on the rail platform. Henry now treated the infestation as a campaign with a commander, not a random nest. The dump run that was supposed to punish him had become a war.
Mission To Bracken's World
Henry first planned to dump Beliveau, Liston, and Vormitag on the wet colony world Bracken's World and return to base. In orbit they found a local comm in contact with a sub-space array in a kelp farm, and Henry took a recon team to a rogue Alphatech outpost. A Bug-Men transmission was on the screens when the ambush hit. Maryland's APC pulled the survivors clear, then aquatic Xenomorphs hit them in the kelp until a second dropship arrived. Henry would not tell the council or Nyland everything he had seen.
Henry climbed up and talked colonists and Marines into a defense, promising no rescue from Earth, only that running without a line would kill them faster. During that stand he bought miniature explosive implants, intending to put them in his people's necks and wire them to a detonator in his own chest. With help from the mercenary Herk Mondo the swimming Aliens were held off, but the colony was left in fiery ruins. The council blamed the Marines for destroyed farms, and Henry dismissed their claims cold. Beliveau then picked his curiosity with classified talk of Alphatech interests and a missing array.
Mission To The Father
Henry revealed the neck micro-bombs to the shock of the squad, then learned that the USS Melville was gone. Liston reported that crewman Beech, left aboard in royal jelly withdrawal, had failed to hold the ship's decaying orbit, and the Melville tore apart above Bracken's World. Stranded, Henry struck an uneasy deal with Beliveau for the Joliet Mining Facility, an Alphatech weapons cache held by a Shop Steward synthetic and other prototype units. The Marines fought through that station, loaded what they could, and escaped on Beliveau's assault craft when the hive pressed too hard. En route, Rake disabled Liston until Henry reclaimed the synthetic with rewritten obedience.
Royal jelly withdrawal tore the company party apart from the inside. Vormitag, deep in jelly psychosis, killed Beliveau, and Rosemas bludgeoned Vormitag in turn. The reprogrammed Liston then laid out the real brief: Alphatech wanted its name cleared and a USCM colonel named Alan Bradshaw found. At research station 2378, Liston slaughtered a Xenomorph horde until the surrounding Aliens went disoriented, and Henry abandoned Nyland there to keep the synthetic close. That choice split the crew from him, and he still pushed on, crashing a path into the hive-wrapped communications relay.
Henry Kills The Father
In the core Henry found the Father on a throne of company tech and ritual junk. The man admitted he had once been Professor Ernst Kleist, a survivor of the Charon disaster from Aliens: Rogue, and that Major Bradshaw had been a convenient Alphatech scapegoat already dead for months. He called himself the Cosmos' Herald and mocked Henry's psych file and politician father. Henry had already lost most of the assault team getting that far, and he was still bleeding from the fight in. Henry screamed him down and shot him.
Kleist's death tripped the station's destroy sequence. Henry had already paid for the last push in blood, and he was not going to leave the core. The bombs in his people's necks would fire if his heart stopped, unless the detonator died with him. Bleeding out, he still had the authority to give Liston one last order. The people he had kept on that leash were not going to die just because he did.
Death
Henry ordered Liston to get the surviving Marines back to the ship at any cost. Liston confirmed the order, then ripped Henry's heart and the detonator from his chest so the neck micro-bombs would not fire when their controller died. Henry did not leave the core. His body was destroyed with the research station when the Alphatech relay tore itself apart in a white-hot ring of fire. The punishment tour that had started as a dump run ended with its commanding officer still inside the hive he had forced his way into.
Below the blast the last of the Melville's people punched clear of the dying station. Afterward Liston's damaged unit drifted in open space, named Ernst Kleist as the Father, noted Alphatech's liability, and shut itself down. Carmen was already dead in the relay hive, Beliveau was already dead to his own wrecked security man, and Nyland had been left behind on Henry's order. What remained of the roster got out because Henry's last command, and Liston's obedience, had defused the bombs that would have killed them with him. The heart that had held the platoon hostage was the same switch Liston had to tear out.
Personality And Traits
Henry was an arrogant and unstable officer, quick to insubordination and quicker to take a slight from his father as a wound. He resented the chairman who had neglected him except when trouble reached Earth, and he loved the mother whose death reached him late, in a recorded lecture about Public Service. Petrovic still called him one of the best field soldiers he had ever seen, even while he was done bailing him out. That mix of real ability and raw grievance is what the Melville inherited. The misfits under him got a commander who meant to fight like a Marine, and who did not trust them to stay.
As the campaign went on, paranoia ate the rest. Henry hid what he had seen at the outpost, bought the neck micro-bombs, rewrote Liston to kill on his order, and left Nyland behind when the synthetic mattered more than the sergeant. The crew grew to despise him, and he kept them on a leash anyway. In the core, wounded and running out of blood, he used that last authority to save the people he had terrorized. The heart Liston tore out was the switch that had held the platoon hostage, and ripping it out was the only way to let them leave.
Behind The Scenes
Henry appears only in Dark Horse's Aliens: Colonial Marines, the ten-issue series published irregularly from January 1993 to July 1994. Chris Warner wrote the opening arc with Tony Akins and Paul Guinan on art, Kelley Puckett and Allen Nunis handled the Bracken's World stretch, Guinan returned for the weapons-cache issue, and Dan Jolley finished the series with John Nadeau. Robert Mentor and Joe Phillips painted the covers, Clem Robins lettered the run, and Randy Stradley and Dan Thorsland edited it. The early covers billed a twelve-issue series, and the cut to ten compressed the Melville deaths into the Alphatech finale.
The book also tied itself to Aliens: Rogue by bringing Ernst Kleist back as the Father after Charon Base's destruction, which gave Henry a specific enemy at the end of a company war. Dark Horse later collected the story in Aliens Omnibus Volume 2, and Marvel reprinted it in the Original Years omnibus line. On AvP Central, Henry already appeared in the Colonial Marine officers list, the Aliens: Colonial Marines overview, and the Carmen Vasquez profile. This article is the dedicated pass on his punishment command, the neck bombs, the killing of Kleist, and the last order that cost him his heart.
Famous Quotes
- "I think Campomanes was beating the crap out of a fourteen-year-old hooker. I think I didn't like it." - Henry to Petrovic after breaking the captain's jaw
- "What the hell does my father have to do with this?" - Henry, after a Marine credited the chairman with keeping him out of worse trouble
- "So this is where it ends." - Henry, at the entrance to the Father's core
- "I'm here, 'Father'. You know my mission... do you know my name?" - Henry confronting the Father
- "Shut up shut up shut up! Just shut your friggin' mouth!" - Henry, after Kleist mocked his psych file and his father
- "Liston... Liston, I've lost too much blood. I... God, Liston, you've got to get them back alive... get them back to the ship, whatever it takes, you've got to get them back to the ship..." - Henry's last request before he made it an order
Conclusion
Lieutenant Joseph Henry entered the Alien comics as a punished officer with a politician father and left them as a corpse in a company hive. He took the Melville's misfits, including Carmen Vasquez, through the Sun Gun, Bracken's World, and the Alphatech relay, wired their lives to his heartbeat, shot Ernst Kleist, and died when Liston tore out his heart to save the last of them. The tour that was supposed to humble him burned almost the entire roster out for good. What remains is the command record, the bombs, and the final act that undid them.
Appearances
- Aliens: Colonial Marines (Dark Horse, 1993-1994)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Colonial Marine Characters
