Tin Warrior Predator: The Hunter Held At Area 57
The unnamed hunter of John Shirley's short story "Tin Warrior," published in the 2017 anthology Predator: If It Bleeds, was a living Yautja held at the high-desert blackout base called Area 57. The U.S. Army had found it unconscious after a scout ship was shot down in the same desert, then confined it while engineers copied its gear into the Mark III suit. General Ervin Dault ordered an arena test that pitted Sergeant Nialls in that armor against the prisoner. The hunter escaped, recovered the landing craft in Special Hangar Fourteen, destroyed the administrative building with Dault inside, and left Earth without firing on Nialls and Lieutenant Olivia Curson.
Captivity At Area 57
The hunter was confined in a seamless cell twenty paces by forty, with no object that could be used as a weapon. An exobiology team studied it through hidden cameras and used body scans to decide what it could eat. The researchers had already dissected other dead Yautja and wanted this prisoner kept alive. As far as Lieutenant Olivia Curson knew, it was the only living extraterrestrial in custody at the base. After the scout ship was shot down, the Army built Special Hangar Fourteen around the craft. Once the unconscious hunter had been removed, the lander started a defense protocol that burned two technicians with plasma.
General Ervin Dault stripped the self-destruct from the hunter's gear while it was unconscious, then returned only chest armor, camouflage, and the spikes in its gauntlet. Engineers had already copied energy flow from a bio-mask, wrist-gauntlet circuits, and a cable-fed caster that stored one shot into the Mark III. Sergeant Nialls had tested the Mark I and Mark II suits, found them bulky, and took the armor assignment to help keep Rangers alive. He had spent three and a half months at the blackout base and was overdue for leave. Dault still sent him into the acre-wide testing field with orders to engage the prisoner, not to kill him.
Biography
The Arena Test
The hunter crouched, then shuffled into the field and assessed the walls, the snipers, and the closing gate. It was at least a head taller than Nialls in the Mark III, with hooded yellow-red eyes, exposed mandibles, a mane of thick hair around a bald mottled head, and skin like a desert toad. It had claws, chest armor, net-like material over its limbs that could project camouflage, and a gauntlet, but no caster of its own. It hunched down, spread its arms like a wrestler, and made low clicking sounds in its throat. When Nialls told it a feint was not going to work, the hunter parroted the words back.
Nialls fired the caster at the ground in front of the hunter, but the Yautja was already gone. It switched on its camouflage, leapt over the blast, and slammed its gougers into the faceplate. The faceplate held, though Nialls felt the strain. When Nialls fired at close range, the hunter grabbed the muzzle, turned the weapon, and sent the only stored shot into the wall. A fragment struck the Yautja, Nialls flung it off, and the hunter snapped the cable and took the caster. It tossed the gun after blasting more of the wall, took a scalp wound of yellow-green blood, and jumped through the break, beyond Nialls's reach.
Escape Into The Desert
Sniper Earl Smithson died after the first blast broke his collarbone and stunned him, and the hunter finished him. Cliff Javitz shot at the escaped prisoner and missed in the smoke, then the hunter left through a fire door. It killed sentries Cooper, Morris, and Lapsky, and a security camera showed it shoving three heads into a duffel bag. Dault told Nialls the escape was on him and sent him out in the Mark III with a rifle, because the caster would take a day to repair. He refused an attack helicopter or armored vehicles, saying the hunter was headed for town and he would not fire rockets among civilians.
Dault separately sent Javitz after them in a Stryker fitted with a 30mm cannon. He wanted a round through the hunter's leg for recapture, then a dead-center hit that would kill Nialls inside the armor, and he planned to send Lieutenant Curson out so her death could be blamed on the Yautja. Nialls and Corporal Ramirez picked up an infrared trail after dark and saw that the hunter had changed direction, away from town, toward a ranch and Hangar Fourteen. The Humvee radio wires had been cut, Nialls could not reach Dault through the helmet, and an unarmed observation drone watched them from above.
The Ranch And Hangar Fourteen
The hunter turned toward rancher Gage Binch's land, which ran up against the razor-wire fence around Hangar Fourteen. Gage saw a tall figure with a mane, a gnarly bald head, and strange hands, plus a bloody duffel on the ground, before the hunter vanished. A military trench knife went through Gage's belly, and when he tried to swing his chainsaw the hunter took it and turned it on his throat. The hunter then beheaded Gage's Brahman bull, spiked the head on a post beside the ranch road, and cut down an old oak so the tree fell across the fence and gave it a way into the compound.
Camouflaged, it ran across the asphalt with the duffel showing over one shoulder, as if the bag were moving on its own. Javitz's cannon wrecked the Humvee and killed Ramirez, leaving Nialls without the assault rifle that had been inside the burning vehicle. The hunter had ditched the chainsaw but still carried the duffel and the special-forces combat knife it had used on the sentries. It climbed onto the unlocked Stryker, killed Javitz, and drove the vehicle toward the hangar doors. Sentries fired, bullets sparking off the titanium sheathing, and the Stryker plowed over two riflemen before ramming the doors and lodging partway through.
Recovery Of The Landing Craft
The hunter climbed out of the stuck Stryker, killed the nearest soldier with a blade, then sprayed the men guarding the spacecraft until the clip ran dry. An enemy projectile struck it in the right side, and it dropped back into cover and pulled the duffel out. It switched on its camouflage and sprinted to the landing craft. After the unconscious prisoner had been taken out, the vessel held the Army at a distance, allowing scans but not disassembly. Once a Yautja master was in sight again, the lander lit up, fired plasma bursts that burned two men to ashes, and was already contacting a cloaked mothership.
The hunter roared and ran up the ramp with its trophies, still intending to finish one more duty before leaving. Nialls smashed through a personnel door in time to see it board the craft, about eighty feet long and fifty wide, shaped like a shovel blade. Copied Mark III circuits then locked the suit on the ship's control wavelength, freezing Nialls in place as the ramp closed. A burst of energy threatened to burn through the armor, the hangar ceiling exploded upward, and the lander rose on a pillar of energy with its legs folding beneath it. The suit returned control to Nialls only after the craft was gone.
Destruction Of The Base
About half an hour later, as Nialls and Curson drove back toward the blackout base, a blue flash destroyed the administrative building, and Dault was sure to be burning with it. A red beam from high above then destroyed the exobiology team's building. The spacecraft came over the wreckage, hovered above the two humans, and seemed to hesitate. Nialls waited for a blast that did not come. The craft then backed away, hung in the air, and shot up into the thin cloud cover, leaving Earth.
Curson guessed that the hunter had recognized Nialls as someone worth fighting at close quarters, and that the withheld shot was about respect. That was her reading, not a statement from the hunter. Both of them had already planned to testify against Dault, and Curson meant to request relief from the Army. An MP roadblock was being set up ahead, and the military police waved them away from the base. She turned the car around, fire trucks and crews from the external outposts passed them, and they headed toward town.
Appearance And Equipment
The hunter stood at least a head taller than Nialls, with mottled skin compared to a desert toad, a bald head framed by a thick mane, hooded yellow-red eyes, and exposed mandibles. It could cloak, leap higher than the Mark III, and parrot human speech. Dault had left it chest armor, camouflage, and the barbed gougers in the left gauntlet after stripping the self-destruct. Those hidden spikes were still in place when Nialls was told the prisoner was unarmed. Luminous yellow-green blood ran from a scalp wound during the arena fight, and a later projectile hit the hunter's right side without stopping it.
After the escape, it used a stolen trench knife, a rancher's chainsaw, and a duffel that held the heads of three sentries. It also took the unlocked Stryker long enough to reach Hangar Fourteen, then boarded the shovel-shaped landing craft that had stood under a defense protocol since its capture. The lander's own plasma weapons cleared the hangar, and a cloaked mothership was already being contacted from the rising ship. The copied circuits in the Mark III were what froze Nialls at the last moment, not a fresh wound or a failed charge. No personal Predator weapon beyond the returned gauntlet spikes, armor, and camouflage is identified in the story.
Behind The Scenes
John Shirley wrote "Tin Warrior" for Predator: If It Bleeds, which Bryan Thomas Schmidt edited and Titan Books published on 17 October 2017. Shirley had already written the novel Predator: Forever Midnight. The story moves among Nialls, Curson, Javitz, Gage, and the hunter itself, who is called the prisoner or the escapee and is never given a personal name. The title refers to the Mark III suit as much as to the Yautja, and the hunter's reasons for sparing Nialls and Curson remain Curson's guess. The Army's copied caster stored only one shot unless the cable refilled it, a limit the hunter did not know when it took the weapon.
Conclusion
The unnamed hunter walked out of an arena at Area 57, crossed a ranch, and took back the landing craft that had brought it to Earth. It killed the men who stood between it and that ship, then destroyed the administrative building and the exobiology lab from the air. It hovered over Nialls and Curson and left without firing. Its name, clan, and rank were never recorded. What remains is the record of the escape and the ruin it left behind at the blackout base.
Appearances
- Predator: If It Bleeds, "Tin Warrior" by John Shirley (Titan Books, 2017)
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Novels | Predators Who Survived | Predator Lore
