UNIC Hornblower: Steel Egg's Doomed Saturn Survey Ship

Name: Hornblower
Registration: UNIC ship 8775
Type: Survey and exploration ship
Operator: United Nations Interplanetary Corps (UNIC)
Captain: Daryl Corgan
Length: About 800 meters
Drive: Heim gravity-muting drive
Auxiliary craft: Lander One; Lander Two
Setting: Orbit of Saturn and Iapetus, 2058
First appearance: Aliens: Steel Egg (2007)
Status: Destroyed; pushed into Saturn's atmosphere

The Hornblower was a United Nations Interplanetary Corps ship in John Shirley's 2007 novel Aliens: Steel Egg. Commanded by Daryl Corgan, it reached Saturn orbit in 2058 on a survey mission and found an ancient egg-shaped alien vessel hiding behind the moon Iapetus. Three crewmen seized by Facehuggers aboard that vessel were brought back to the ship, and the creatures that emerged from them killed most of the people aboard. After a rival CANC expedition arrived, the crippled Hornblower was forced out of orbit by attached engines and destroyed in the atmosphere of Saturn with one adult Xenomorph still inside.

Design And Layout

The Hornblower was a long, narrow ship built as a series of sphere-linked cylinders, about three times bigger than the old space shuttles. A flat disk set sideways to the cylinders at the prow held the Bridge. With the artificial gravity turned off, a crew member who knew what he was doing could fly the ship's eight-hundred-meter length in under a minute. Its corridors were pentagon-shaped and lined with pipes, vented panels, and sensors, and a lift tube connected the decks. Maintenance engineer Dix, who had signed on for the Lunar Base before being transferred, complained that the ship was far more cramped.

Open Observation, which the crew called Oh-Oh, was a metal-reinforced bubble on the lower starboard side and one of the few places aboard where space could be seen directly. On the top hull, halfway back from the bridge, a semi-globe held the out-scan room, whose scanner pushed through the ceiling into a metal array outside. An identical scanner projected from the bottom hull, and disconnecting one made both inoperable. Other spaces included a hangar bay at the aft of the ship, an infirmary that served as the quarantine ward, and a kitchen whose ducts ran all over the vessel.

Drive And Systems

For the trip to the outer planets the crew engaged the Heim Envelope, a gravity-muting drive that warped space in front of the vehicle. The port engine room held three rows of six Heim generators, which looked like twisted stacks of silver plates with dark green tubes rising into the ceiling. Navigation ran through Navi-Grip, which could be set to track-and-push to keep a moving target in sight. A force field deflected small meteors and screened out solar and planetary radiation, while advance tracking steered the ship around larger rocks. Hovers moved around the ship on electromagnetic fields enhanced by steering rotors, and maintenance robots such as MR Seven worked aboard.

The bridge had its own backup power source rather than a weak emergency battery. If internal power failed, the life-support system could draw on solar or planetary electromagnetic energy to keep heat, clean air, and artificial gravity running, though most of the lighting would eventually go dark. The ship carried two arrowhead-shaped landers, Lander One and Lander Two, with extendable, shiftable jets on their undersides. Looking back at the ship from a lander, Corgan saw it as "a little traveling den for humanity; a tiny, warm, safe place in the endless cold reaches of space."

Mission To Saturn

Orders And Journey

The Hornblower's orders were to take a radar reading of the interior of Saturn and make a brief survey of Iapetus. The mission statement also asked the crew to check a high-metal reading on the moon. First Lieutenant Nate Eusebius read that as UNIC scouting Iapetus as a possible military base, while Corgan took it as a sign that UNIC had some idea something was there. The crew used the Heim Envelope for the accelerated trip to the outer planets. Once the ship entered Saturn orbit, they spent much of their time in Oh-Oh, where the view was better than anywhere else in the solar system.

The Anomaly Near Iapetus

Science officer Ashley Norton woke Corgan to report an anomaly near the moon. From Oh-Oh he first took it for a lunar feature, a steel-colored arc above Iapetus, until communications and scan specialist Beresford brought up an egg-shaped craft almost two and a half kilometers long, with surface markings that looked like writing. The object kept slipping below the moon's horizon as if trying to keep Iapetus between itself and the Hornblower, and Navi-Grip had to work to keep up. A CANC probe was already approaching, and an age probe showed the craft was at least a thousand years old. Corgan chose to move in without waiting for orders from Earth.

Survey Of The Alien Ship

Two landers left the Hornblower for the alien hull. Norton piloted Lander One with Corgan, Beresford, and exobiologist Eli Reynolds, while Dorea Rondell flew Lander Two with Cruz, O'Neil, and Collindale. Eusebius, head of ship's security, stayed behind in command. Inside the alien vessel, Facehuggers from a hidden chamber of Xenomorph Eggs attached themselves to Cruz, Beresford, and Collindale. Corgan set aside UNIC encounter procedure and brought all three men back to the Hornblower, where they were kept in the infirmary under the care of Julie Murteno.

Outbreak Aboard

The quarantined men were hungry all the time and yet felt full. While Corgan led an armed team back to the alien ship, Chestbursters emerged. Cruz was killed, Beresford died after cutting into his own torso with a surgical scalpel, and Collindale held Julie at gunpoint and took Lander Two back toward the alien craft. The juveniles stayed aboard, fed on stored food and human tissue, and reached adult size in about a day. One of them killed Bayfield and escaped into the kitchen vents, whose ducts reached every part of the ship.

Corgan called up a holographic display of the ship's decks to plan the search and moved the survivors to the bridge, which was the easiest part of the ship to defend. In the port engine room he sent MR Seven ahead as a decoy, but an adult Xenomorph killed Dix, and the second adult killed Dinswood. The crew fought with assault rifles that could only be fired inside a pressurized vessel, along with improvised flamethrowers. Over the following hours Buxton, Chang, and Dorea were also lost.

Sabotage And Boarding

Reynolds, one of two civilians aboard, had betrayed the ship to CANC. In the out-scan room he cut every wire he could reach inside the scanner array so that the Hornblower would have no warning when the CANC ship approached. Later an adult Xenomorph reached the bridge, and Norton shot it in the mouth. Its acid blood burned through the control panels, and the ship began to shudder. Just before the inter-ship radio failed, the crew heard a hail to UNIC ship 8775 from the CANC exploratory vessel Glorious Sun, under Dr. Kyu Kim, ordering them to prepare to be boarded.

Destruction In Saturn

CANC soldiers surrounded Corgan's lander with vacuum-ready shoulder launchers. Corgan told Kyu Kim that the ship was crippled, its controls wrecked and its out-scanners blinded, and that it was not safe to stay aboard. Kim pulled his men back to their Detachment Vessel and placed the Hornblower under Priority Quarantine. As Corgan realized, "Priority Quarantine was evidently a euphemism for complete destruction." Four external attachment engines, originally developed to steer asteroids and push derelicts, were fixed to the hull. They forced the ship out of its orbit around Iapetus, and Corgan watched it vanish into the atmosphere of Saturn.

Losing the ship meant the survivors could not return to Earth aboard it, and they were stranded on the alien vessel with the CANC party. Reynolds, by then working against everyone, was glad to see it gone and thought of it as "The late, great Hornblower!" Only Corgan and Norton lived through the rest of the crisis, and they were picked up by the UNIC ship Al Gore. Corgan's court-martial was a formality, and no one blamed him for losing the Hornblower. UNIC classified the proceedings and took the suit-camera footage, and Corgan later heard that The Company had paid people off to get it.

Key Crew

Capt. Daryl Corgan - Commander. Survived and was rescued by the Al Gore.
Ashley Norton - Science officer and pilot of Lander One. Survived with Corgan.
First Lt. Nate Eusebius - Head of ship's security and Corgan's old comrade from Lahore. Killed aboard the alien vessel.
Second Lt. Dorea Rondell - Pilot of Lander Two on the first survey. Killed during the outbreak.
Corporal Beresford - Communications. Implanted on the alien ship and died after cutting into his own torso.
Dr. Eli Reynolds - Civilian exobiologist and CANC informant. Killed by Xenomorphs aboard the alien vessel.
Immanuel "Immy" Cruz - Engineer. The first man implanted, killed by his Chestburster.
Horus Collindale - Exogeologist. Implanted on the first survey, later fled with Julie Murteno in Lander Two.
Julie Murteno - Life support and nurse. Taken hostage by Collindale.
Jim O'Neil - Medic.
Collin Hesse - Ship's computers.
Joel Dinswood - Ship's electronics. Killed in the port engine room fight.
John Chang - Engines and Heim drive.
Bayfield and Cyril Dix - Maintenance and mechanical upkeep. Both killed by Xenomorphs.
Harl Buxton - Engineer.

Continuity Notes

The novel states that the Hornblower carried fifteen crew members, but the named crew, counting engineer Harl Buxton, comes to sixteen people. The book also once has Corgan identify the ship as a vessel of the United Nations Intersteller Corps, a slip for the Interplanetary Corps named everywhere else. The ship's 2058 voyage takes place long before the Nostromo answers the beacon on LV-426, and the recordings from Corgan's and Norton's suits mean The Company came away from the Hornblower's loss with footage of the creatures, the alien ship, and its interior.

Conclusion

The Hornblower was the UNIC ship that found the alien vessel near Iapetus in Aliens: Steel Egg. Corgan's decision to bring three implanted men back aboard turned the ship into the site of the outbreak, and Reynolds's sabotage left it blind when CANC arrived. After acid wrecked the bridge controls, Kyu Kim had external engines push the ship into Saturn. The ship had left for Saturn as a survey vessel with orders to read the planet's interior. Corgan and Norton were the only members of its crew to survive.