Midnight: The Hish Safari Planet
Midnight was an Earth-sized jungle planet about 21 light-years from Earth in John Shirley's novel Predator: Forever Midnight. Its main continent faced a large yellow sun without ever turning away, so the name was ironic. Its jungle floor, under a canopy a quarter of a kilometer high, was the only place that stayed dark. The Hish-Qu-Ten knew it as Safari Planet 3998, a stocked hunting preserve. By 2117 a small UNISC colony, the tree-dwelling Atavites, and the telepathic Karna all lived there, and a Hish clan under Shesh-Kuk came to hunt every one of them.
The Planet
Sun And Moons
Midnight orbited a large yellow sun a little over halfway in from the outer planets of its system, which also held a gas giant and an icy moon. It lay about 21 light-years from Earth and was close to Earth in size, and humans could breathe its air. Several moons held it in a lock so that one face always looked toward the sun. The planet did not fully rotate. It wobbled instead, and the sun circled the horizon rather than setting, so the main continent never had a true night.
The Continent
Most known land lay on a single continent covering tens of thousands of square miles. Sudden warm rainstorms swept it, often with heavy lightning, and the planet had high background magnetism and intense solar flares. Hot springs and terraced sulfur hills marked the geothermal ground under the Colony. Deep below the jungle lay huge petroleum deposits, and the giant trees held a second fortune in lumber. Those two resources were the reason UNISC saw Midnight as more than a research post.
Flora & Fauna
The Jungle Floor
The jungle canopy rose about a quarter of a kilometer. Layered mats of growth hung inside it, the first about 30 meters up and broader galleries near 50 meters, and the ground below stayed pitch dark despite the endless day. Underground rivers ran beneath many meters of root mulch, and sinkholes opened into them without warning. Mold and fungus spread quickly over anything that stayed in one place. At the edge of the jungle the trees stopped abruptly at a veldt of yellow plains, gray-blue trees, and black grazing herds.
Steamsnorters were burrowing herbivores 60 to 70 meters long that vented steam and bled yellow. Leapers hunted in packs and threw detachable boomerstings that paralyzed prey. Gridbugs attacked with sound and built bughills about 30 meters high, guarded by a winged queen variant the size of a bull, and their grubs gave off electricity. Some animals mimicked trees with prehensile twigs. Giant transparent slugs ate whatever they caught. A phosphorescent squid swam in the under-rivers, and a multi-necked grazer fed in the canopy.
Canopy And Veldt
Fields of flowers covered the roof of the canopy, and one symbiosis paired a creature called a flying fist with the blossoms it fed on. Blue fruits held drinkable water, and a grass-eel plant consumed itself. Root grubbers were eaten for their intestines, and grasshoppers floated on helium sacs. Flying jellyfish called Queen's Caps drifted over the treetops, and cricket-headed imps lived in the branches. The most feared swarm was the sweeping teeth, jewel-like helium fliers that stripped two Hish hunters to the bone.
Inhabitants
The UNISC Colony
The United Nations Interstellar Settlement Corps founded the Colony about a year before the hunt. It covered about one square kilometer on a ridge, with prefab domes under one transparent roof, an outer wall, an electric fence, a mind-nudger that drove animals away from the walls, and four 16mm charge-cannons. A geothermal station was built 40 meters below ground, and the colonists ate petro-tein made from local oil. Three hoppers handled long-range travel across the continent until sabotage grounded them, and the main street, United Nations Avenue, ran between the domes.
Chief admin Jim Lanahan counted just under 300 residents. Second admin Hank Muskie was a geologist, Tam Chin maintained the hoppers, and botanist Elana lived there with her eleven-year-old son Derry. Her former husband, commander Randall Ness, was on his way aboard the cruiser Lazy Eye when the hunt began. The colonists studied the wildlife and surveyed the petroleum. None of them knew that the Hish had used the planet as a preserve for centuries, or that other humans lived in the jungle.
New Manchester
The Atavites were about two hundred descendants of people the Hish had abducted from Earth, starting with the East India Company cutter Patrick O in 1804. They called their settlement New Manchester and lived in tree villages joined by rope bridges, with grub farms and hide hoods they pulled on during False Night. The elders guarded relics from the ship: a pocket watch, a tricorn hat, old guns, and Lieutenant Lucius Broagham's journal, the Great Saying, which claimed that Earth had been destroyed.
Leaders took descriptive names such as Broagham Rope-Pull, Dinch High-Falls, Ann Louise Vine-Walk, and Bogger Stench-Make. Other human groups lived elsewhere on the continent. A Swedish tribe lived apart from the others, a cannibalistic southern tribe worked metal and bought prisoners, and an American tribe from the Civil War era had been wiped out by what the Atavites called the Sky Crabs. The villagers voted to sell Ness to the southern tribe after he reached them, and Ann Louise freed him from his cage.
The Karna
The Karna were telepathic amphibious reptiles the Hish had taken from a system about 10 light-years away. Roughly a hundred were left, living in burrows and dry river tunnels, and they could put words into a nearby human mind. Rattle shared a cage with Ness in the Atavite village after Dinch High-Falls ate his last egg. He killed Dinch, decoyed Hish hunters, and armed the jungle groups with gridbug cocoons. A young Karna named Pleth survived a slug attack and the ravine ambush.
Safari Planet 3998
To the Hish-Qu-Ten, Midnight was Safari Planet 3998, one of their stocked hunting preserves, with abandoned alien bases left on the surface. Shesh-Kuk's clan came in a parent-ship carrying his spawnlings, the old monitor Goreph, and enslaved Amengi engineers. Roy Mannen counted about 40 hunters on the ground. They took minds with probe helmets and disk implanters, and the spawnling Huesh-Kuk drove implanted colonists from orbit as practice. The Hish planned to take some humans as slaves. The clan also brought flying platforms, cloaks, and plasma weapons.
From the Hish homeworld, the ruler Bel-Cann ordered the Large Sterilizer once a UNISC fleet was on its way, and the hunt was meant to end with every intelligent species on Midnight dead. The weapon could cook a stretch of ground the size of Maryland. Shesh-Kuk held it back so he could stalk Ness in person, hoping the commander would come looking for his family. The clan ignored the usual hunting rules and treated women, children, and unarmed colonists as legal prey, including the Atavites and the Karna.
History
The 1804 Abductions
On 5 December 1804, Lieutenant Lucius Broagham led the last survivors of the Patrick O through the jungle after Hish hunters took them from their ship. The hunters had left the sailors muskets and knives so the chase would last. Captain Gorridg, first mate Tolpen, and several crewmen had died before that march. Broagham counted that day as Year 1 of the exile. His Great Saying told later generations that Earth was gone, so the exiles would stop looking for a way home and build New Manchester in the trees instead.
The 2117 Hunt
In May 2117, the UNISC cruiser Lazy Eye reached the system and was ambushed by a decoy freighter and Hish boarders. Ness cut the bridge segment free, and on 15 May it crashed in the jungle more than a thousand kilometers from the Colony. Seven survivors took a rover toward the dome. An electromagnetic pulse then disabled most colony systems. On 22 May implanted mechanic Tam Chin wrecked the hoppers before dying in a generator blast, and hunters killed Gerrick, Ramirez, and Hobbswell in the deep jungle.
Hunters captured Corporal Roy Mannen on the trek after steamsnorters broke the ground, and imprinted him with Shesh-Kuk's thoughts. As Shesh-Mannen, a human Predator who believed for a time he was Hish, he led Ness's group into a ravine ambush that killed Slim Summers and Ann Louise. Mannen then turned his weapon on a Hish platform and pulled Ness and Georgie Johnson out of a flooded tunnel. By that time Ness had met the Atavites and the Karna, and both peoples were arming against the hunters.
The Colony Attack
On 24 May, implanted colonists turned on their neighbors. Nurse Mrs. Kelega died when Yavkowsky smashed her head on concrete. A colonist-controlled cannon blew Central Gathering and killed Lanahan, and Elana killed the implanted girl Rachel after Rachel beat Judith Melbourne to death. A Hish ship then dropped on the dome, and Muskie and others died in a freezer. Ness's group hijacked a Hish lander, while Rattle and Broagham armed Karna and Atavites with gridbug cocoons that threw lightning and stripped the hunters' shields.
In the cafeteria, Ness threw kill-gland secretion from a dead hunter, and the Hish tore off their helmets and killed one another. Shesh-Kuk survived and followed him to the geothermal station. Mechanic Kanesha Stine lost her left arm saving Elana and Derry from the warrioress Ke-Meckna. Elana shot Sergeant Georgie Johnson when she tried to use them as bait. On the catwalk above the boiling springs, Ness dropped the walkway with grenades and kicked Shesh-Kuk into the water, where the clan leader cooked.
The Parent-Ship
Mannen flew the stolen lander to the parent-ship, killed Goreph, and reversed the Large Sterilizer into the ship itself. The parent-ship exploded in orbit, and Mannen was not seen again. Soon after, Commander Afinan of the UNISC transport John McCain arrived with a fleet and a landing module. The surviving colonists, the Atavites, and the Karna were taken off the planet together. Rattle was to travel with them as a diplomat for his people, and Broagham led the Manchesterites aboard.
Fate Of Midnight
Midnight was left without its Hish clan, its Colony, or most of the people it had sheltered once the evacuation began. Randall Ness expected UNISC to come back for the petroleum, the geothermal field, and the lumber, and to strip the planet bare. Elana vowed to return and fight that plan. The underground rivers, the bughills, the flower fields, and the steamsnorter herds remained when the last transports left orbit. No later story records what happened to the planet after 2117.
Behind The Scenes
John Shirley wrote Forever Midnight for DH Press, which published it in March 2006. The title refers to the planet's ironic name, because the main continent never had night. The back-cover copy says the colony held more than a thousand settlers, while Lanahan gives the number as just under 300. The text gives Midnight several moons that hold one face toward the sun, but it also says the planet wobbles rather than rotates, and it never explains how both are true.
Distances in the text also shift. The bridge crash is placed more than 1,000 kilometers from the Colony, about 3,000 miles to the north-northeast in another passage, and over a thousand kilometers to the southeast in a third. No later Predator novel or comic returned to the planet or its peoples, and Elana's vow to return was never followed up. The 2007 novel Predator: Flesh and Blood used the Hish again but set its hunt on Felicity, and the films placed their hunts on worlds like the Game Preserve Planet.
Conclusion
Midnight was an Earth-sized jungle world held in endless daylight, the Hish preserve Safari Planet 3998, and home in 2117 to a small UNISC colony, the Atavites of New Manchester, and the Karna. Shesh-Kuk's clan hunted all three, then lost its leader in the geothermal springs and its parent-ship to Roy Mannen. The survivors left with the UNISC fleet. Ness expected the planet's oil and lumber to bring the Corps back, and Elana planned to be there when it did.
Appearances
- Predator: Forever Midnight (2006)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Planets | Predator Hunt | Predator Lore
