Predator: Forever Midnight: Novel Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: March 2006
Author: John Shirley
Publisher: DH Press
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 250
ISBN: 978-1-59582-034-1
Series: DH Press Predator novels
Setting: Midnight, May 2117

Predator: Forever Midnight is a 2006 novel by John Shirley, published by DH Press in March 2006. It followed UNISC commander Randall Ness on the colony world Midnight in 2117, a jungle planet the Hish-Qu-Ten called Safari Planet 3998. Those hunters were an offshoot of the Yautja. The United Nations Interstellar Settlement Corps had sent the cruiser Lazy Eye toward New Manchester, a geothermal dome of just under 300 people. A Hish expedition under Shesh-Kuk was already treating the world as a hunt.

Plot Summary

In May 2117, commander Randall Ness was taking the UNISC cruiser Lazy Eye to Midnight, about 21 light-years from Earth. The main continent faced the sun without a night cycle, so the open ground stayed bright while the jungle floor stayed dark. New Manchester sat under a hardened roof over geothermal water, with an outer wall, an electric fence, and four corner charge-cannons. Elana, a Choctaw-descended botanist and Ness's former wife, lived there with their son Derry, who was eleven. Chief admin Jim Lanahan counted just under 300 people in the dome.

Three other groups were already on the planet. Tree-village humans called Atavites were the descendants of people taken from Earth, starting with the East India cutter Patrick O in 1804. Reptile people called the Karna lived in burrows and dry river tunnels and could share thought at short range. Shesh-Kuk held the Hish expedition in orbit and on the ground, with cloaks, wrist scythes, and shoulder cannons. The Hish wanted a hunt inside the colony, not a wipe from space that would waste the Joy of Stalking.

The Patrick O

On 5 December 1804, lieutenant Lucius Broagham led the last survivors from the cutter Patrick O through an alien jungle. The hunters who had taken them from the ship had left them muskets and knives so the fight would last. Captain Gorridg, seaman George MacCruthers, and first mate Mr. Tolpen were already dead. Tolpen lost his arms, then his head. A blue fireball burned Emil Cadwallater. A spinning blade killed Murphy. Broagham kept Mrs. Winslow, her daughter Ophelia, and the remaining crew moving, and he treated that day as Year 1 of a long revenge. Later Atavite elders still used his name. His written Great Saying claimed Earth had been destroyed, so the exiles would stop looking for a way home.

Lazy Eye

On 14 May 2117, Lazy Eye fell into the gravity well of the system on the way to Midnight. Ness was forty, with sixteen years in service, and he had pulled strings so the assignment would put him near Elana and Derry. Sergeant Georgie Johnson ran the guns. Corporal Roy Mannen, lieutenant Slim Summers, and gunner Andy Gerrick were on the bridge watch with him. A horseshoe-crab shadow crossed an icy moon. Then a metal harpoon opened the cafeteria. Velma and Sam Wessentsky died in the decompression. Ness knew the attackers from classified briefing photos.

A decoy V-shaped freighter blocked the cruiser while hunters boarded. Brackett lost his head. Anderson, Herbert, Silverberg, Vance, Card, Smith, Pournelle, Niven, Laumer, and Sterling died in the same fight. Ness cut the Bridge segment free. The hunters fixed a hull bomb to what was left of the ship.

The Crash

On 15 May, the Bridge segment hit jungle more than a thousand kilometers from the colony. Seven people crawled out: Ness, Georgie, Summers, Mannen, Ramirez, Gerrick, and Hobbswell. They took the multi-terrain rover and blew the wreck so the hunters would have less to strip. An electromagnetic pulse then killed most of the colony's systems. Tam Chin, the hopper mechanic, treated the aircraft as dead. Ness sent a pickup call anyway.

Mannen Taken

On the trek, whale-sized burrowers called steamsnorters broke the ground. Mannen fired, ran, and was taken alive by about nine Hish. They locked a mind-probe helmet on him. Shesh-Kuk used that device, built by enslaved Amengi engineers from the homeworld, to imprint his own thoughts on the human. Young warrior Mersh-Trep then sent a challenge video to the colony screens, which forced Shesh-Kuk to move the parent-ship. Disk-shaped cerebral implanters launched toward New Manchester so the hunt could open from the inside.

Mannen woke as Shesh-Mannen. He saw Hish memories of the swamp homeworld and a kill-gland fight, and for a time he believed he was one of them. Hierarch Bel-Cann first let the slave-race test continue, then later reversed himself when the interface leaked both ways and a human fleet was already coming. Shesh-Kuk planned to feed Mannen to the Yautja children, the spawnlings, once the experiment was finished.

First Expedition

On 22 May, the rover crew entered deep jungle and walked into pack hunters the colonists called leapers and boomerstings. Hobbswell took a sting. The Hish then closed. Gerrick was beheaded on the rover gun. Plasma killed Ramirez. A scythe nearly took Hobbswell's head. Georgie was throttled and then dropped. Ness fell into an underground river. Shesh-Kuk called the expedition off early for Blood Remembrance, because the Joy of Stalking mattered more to him than finishing the survivors that night.

At the colony, an implanter had already taken Tam Chin. He wrecked the hoppers, then died in a generator-room blast. Derry and Elana learned he was dead, and they saw six colonists walking around empty-eyed, the start of the implant outbreak. Georgie and Summers used gunfire to pull hunters off Ness. A giant gridbug then fought the Hish at a bughill, and the two soldiers got clear. Ness climbed out of a steamsnorter carcass on a fungal stair and kept moving toward voices in the canopy.

Atavites And Karna

Ness met Ann Louise Vine-Walk, an Atavite from the aerial villages. The village voted to sell him to a cannibal southern tribe. She later broke him out of a cage he shared with Rattle, a Karna who could put words into a human mind. Elder Dinch High-Falls had eaten Rattle's last egg. Rattle killed him by knocking him from the village. After rain and sun, jewel-like swarms called sweeping teeth stripped two Hish off a hunting platform. Rattle took that platform, and they fled northeast.

Shesh-Mannen led a Hish hunt against a Karna family. He killed the father. Kaleps-Sis took the mother's head. The child escaped. Mannen learned the larger plan there: sterilize the planet after the hunt, and keep some humans as slaves. Ann Louise read him Lucius Broagham's journal, the lie that Earth was gone. Georgie lit a bonfire to draw either hunters or Ness. Summers pulled a young Karna named Pleth off a carnivorous slug. Ness, Ann Louise, and Rattle reached them. Mannen then faked an escape from the Hish and walked back into the human camp.

The Implanted Colony

On the morning of 24 May, implanted colonist Yavkowsky smashed nurse Mrs. Kelega's head on concrete. Derry stopped him before a second kill. In Central Gathering, a colonist-controlled cannon blew the hall. Shrapnel opened Lanahan's throat. Implanted girl Rachel, about ten, beat doctor Judith Melbourne to death with a pipe. Elana cut Rachel's throat. Harl Amundsen shot Yavkowsky. Shesh-Kuk's spawnling Huesh-Kuk had been driving those people from orbit, the way Hish young practiced so they would not eat one another. A Hish ship then dropped on the dome.

The Ravine

Mannen led Ness's group into a ravine he had already marked for an ambush. A Hish scythe took Summers's arm, then opened his gut. He died still hoping there was a hell. The same attack cut off Ann Louise's head. Rattle and Pleth ran. Ness and Georgie dropped into an underground river tunnel. Kaleps-Sis later handed Mannen a long-range plasma projector with eight shots, first disabled, then switched on, and sent him into that tunnel after them. On the homeworld, Bel-Cann ordered the Large Sterilizer after a colony emergency call, because a UNISC fleet was already moving. Floodwater hit the tunnel. Mannen turned the projector on a Hish platform instead, and he pulled Ness and Georgie out of the water.

Hijack The Lander

At the ruined dome, Amundsen, mechanic Kanesha Stine, Patrick Geoghan, and French veteran Foucalle were still shooting at cloaked hunters. Plasma took Geoghan, then Amundsen's face. Second admin Hank Muskie died in a walk-in freezer with other colonists while Derry and Elana crawled out through a vent. Ness's group seized a Hish lander. Rattle drew favored spawn Shesh-Terk and warrioress Ke-Meckna into the trees. The Small Sterilizer in the lander's bow burned Shesh-Terk. Two Amengi engineers died in the same hijack. Mannen took the controls and lifted for orbit. Ness nearly shot him for the ravine. Rattle talked him down long enough to use the ship.

The Colony Fight

From the air they broke two flying platforms over the colony, then set down in the wreckage. Stine killed a hunter that was stalking the cafeteria attic, then lost her left arm saving Derry and Elana from Ke-Meckna. Ness killed that warrioress. Blade-handed Gelecka-Dun tore out Foucalle's heart. Shesh-Kuk saw Ness on the monitors and refused the Large Sterilizer long enough to hunt that commander in person, hoping the man would come for his family. Mannen left the others and flew the lander to the parent-ship. In the jungle, Rattle and the modern Broagham armed Karna and Manchesterites with gridbug cocoons that threw lightning.

Kill Gland And The Springs

Ness took kill-gland secretion from a dead Hish and threw a jar of it across the cafeteria. The hunters went rigid, tore their helmets off, and cut one another down with scythes and plasma at arm's length. Shesh-Kuk killed the warrior who jumped him and stood as the only Hish left in that room. He burned the hatch open and followed Ness toward the geothermal station. Georgie tried to use Elana and Derry as bait to draw Shesh-Kuk. Elana shot her in the forehead. On the catwalk over the boiling springs, Ness dropped the walkway with grenades, then kicked Shesh-Kuk in the face. The clan leader came up once, bright red, eyes melting, then sank and cooked in the water.

The Mothership And The Fleet

Mannen docked on the parent-ship, killed old monitor Goreph and a scarred guard, and reached the Large Sterilizer controls. He reversed the weapon into the ship itself. The mothership blew in orbit around 4:40 p.m. Mannen died in that control room. Commander Afinan of the UNISC transport John McCain answered the mayday with a fleet overhead and a landing module for the survivors. Broagham, Rattle, Atavites, and Karna came in with the remaining colonists. Ness and Elana still had to return to Earth. UNISC would want the petroleum and the geothermal field, and Midnight would not survive that as a living world.

The Hish Hunters

The hunters called themselves Hish-Qu-Ten, the People Who Take Territory. Humans on Midnight just called them Predators. Shesh-Kuk meant Strong Grip. He was a Generative Breeder and expedition leader, counted in resource-units from the hunts he ran. His favored spawn Shesh-Terk was already an adult. Huesh-Kuk stayed in orbit and drove implanted colonists. Kaleps-Sis handled Mannen and later slid toward a Receptive She State, the hormone shift that was supposed to keep a warrior home. Bel-Cann stayed on the homeworld as an Exquisitely Blooded Hierarch and never set foot on Midnight. About 40 warriors were on the planet at Mannen's last count, plus five spawnlings and Goreph in orbit.

They did not keep the usual hunting rules. Unarmed colonists, women, and children were legal prey. They used cloaks, wrist scythes, plasma, personal shields, flying platforms, and disk implanters before they committed to a ground hunt. They took heads and wore skulls. They called humans tall monkeys. The Large Sterilizer could cook a stretch of ground about the size of Maryland, including deep basements unless a refuge sat about half a kilometer down. Enslaved Amengi kept the ships simple enough for the dullest clan member to fly. That mix of shortcuts is why later readers treated them as Bad Bloods rather than ordinary Yautja.

Confirmed Kills

Ness killed Shesh-Kuk in the geothermal boil, killed Ke-Meckna in the colony ruins, and burned Hish off a platform with Mannen's projector. Mannen destroyed the parent-ship and everyone still aboard, including Goreph. While the Hish still had control of his mind, he killed a Karna father on Shesh-Kuk's order. Stine killed one hunter in the cafeteria attic. Sweeping teeth ate two Hish on a platform. The cafeteria kill-gland riot killed the rest of that room except Shesh-Kuk, who finished the last of them himself. Shesh-Terk died under the Small Sterilizer. Kaleps-Sis died in the lander hijack.

The Hish boarding of Lazy Eye killed the Wessentskys and the named troopers in the corridors. On the first expedition they killed Gerrick, Ramirez, and Hobbswell. The ravine took Summers and Ann Louise. Inside the dome they killed Lanahan through an implanted gunner, Tam, Muskie, Amundsen, Geoghan, Foucalle, and the freezer group. Implant puppets killed Kelega and Melbourne. Elana killed Rachel, then Georgie. Rattle killed Dinch. Many more colonists, Karna, and Manchesterites died in the wider sweeps and were not named.

Key Characters

Randall Ness - UNISC commander, former Orbital Marine. Killed Shesh-Kuk in the springs and lived to meet the John McCain.
Roy Mannen - Trooper remade as Shesh-Mannen, later a human Predator who broke the imprint and died destroying the mothership.
Georgie Johnson - Combat sergeant. Fought from Lazy Eye to the colony, then died when Elana shot her.
Elana - Colony botanist, Ness's former wife, Derry's mother. Killed Rachel and Georgie. Lived.
Derry - Eleven. Jumped Shesh-Kuk, escaped through the vents with Elana, and lived.
Slim Summers - Comm lieutenant. Gutted in Mannen's ravine.
Shesh-Kuk - Hish expedition leader. Boiled in the geothermal pit.
Shesh-Terk - Shesh-Kuk's favored spawn. Burned by the Small Sterilizer.
Kaleps-Sis - Mannen's handler. Died on the hijacked lander.
Bel-Cann - Homeworld hierarch. Ordered the Large Sterilizer by subspace and never reached Midnight.
Rattle - Karna telepath. Decoyed Shesh-Terk, armed the jungle groups, and lived as a planned diplomat.
Ann Louise Vine-Walk - Atavite who freed Ness. Decapitated in the ravine.
Lucius Broagham / Broagham Rope-Pull - 1804 lieutenant and, in 2117, the elder who still led Manchesterites. Lived to meet UNISC.
Kanesha Stine - Colony mechanic. Lost her left arm. Lived.
Jim Lanahan - Chief admin. Killed by shrapnel from an implanted cannon.
Hank Muskie - Second admin, geologist. Plasma in the freezer.
Tam Chin - Hopper mechanic. Implanted, then killed in the generator blast.

Place In The Dark Horse Line

DH Press opened this stretch of mass-market Predator novels with Forever Midnight in March 2006. Predator: Flesh and Blood followed in 2007 and named the Hish-Qu-Ten without repeating Shirley's hormone shift, kill glands, or mind-probes. Predator: Turnabout and Predator: South China Sea came in 2008 and stayed with ordinary Yautja. Shirley had already co-written the film The Crow and a run of cyberpunk novels. This was his only Predator book. Later Dark Horse and Titan stories treated the novel as a side path, not the main line of Yautja culture.

Continuity

The novel never uses the word Yautja. The hunters are Hish-Qu-Ten from first contact to the last page. A warrior could shift from a He State into a She State. A breeder dropped at least six young at once, sent the weak into a recycler, and kept one or two. Kill glands under the collarbone could throw a whole room into a frenzy, which is how Ness cleared the cafeteria. Predator: Hunting Grounds later recast the Hish as ancient ancestors of the Yautja, the people Kaail freed from the Amengi. That reading dropped the Midnight hormone cycle and the kill-gland riot. Mortal Kombat XL kept only the name, as a playable variant.

Editions

DH Press released the first edition in March 2006 as a mass-market paperback. The printed book names Debra Bailey for design and Stephen Youll for the cover painting, and it uses the Fox copyright line. Dark Horse's catalog also listed a 10 May 2006 street date and 250 pages. The novel was never reprinted, and it remains one of the rarest Predator books, alongside Turnabout and Predator: South China Sea.

Behind The Scenes

The dedication is to everyone who worked on Predator, one of Shirley's favorite science-fiction adventure films. The thanks go to editor Rob Simpson and to Micky Shirley. Youll signed the same kind of painted cover he later did for Turnabout. The flap line is "The Hunt Is On Again." Dead troopers on Lazy Eye carry the surnames of science-fiction writers, from Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson through Bruce Sterling.

A short author's note sits in front of the prologue. Shirley kept the 2117 dialogue in present-day English so the book would stay readable. Atavite speech and Karna thought are rendered as the translations Ness's group make in their heads. Humans call a hunter "it." Hunters call a human "it." Hunters call one another he or she. Shirley also wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, including work on Curse of the Hidden Mirror, which the about-the-author page still lists beside his novels.

Conclusion

Predator: Forever Midnight is the 2006 DH Press novel most readers treat as the weak entry in the line. John Shirley put commander Randall Ness on Midnight against Shesh-Kuk's Hish-Qu-Ten, hunters who used mind-probes, implanted children, and an orbital sterilizer instead of a straight stalk. The hunt left New Manchester in ruins and the Hish expedition gone. Later books barely touched that version of the species, and the paperback was never reprinted. It still sits among the Predator books as the Hish experiment that did not stick.