The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

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Space.

Cold. Silent. A billion twinkling stars. You can’t imagine the serenity out here. The peace and quiet, the way it seems as if you might drift forever on this dark, glittering ocean. It might go on for eternity, an infinite horizon of invisible tides and unknown energies. You could surrender yourself and sail into this beautiful dream. Stars fall and comets burn in the distance, suns blink out, planets are born, and the Hubble Space Telescope watches it all with mechanical indifference.

Until there’s a ripple in the void.

Close your eyes and you can see what I mean. The heat rising off a distant highway—the way the air shimmers above the blacktop—it’s like that. Then the velvet black curls and folds and something emerges at speed that would make the air scream, if there were any air out here. The gleaming spacecraft is smoking, the hull scorched and dented, shedding scales off its hull as its pilot tries to get it under control.

The Hubble’s in the way. The ship shears through it, both spacecraft and telescope now vomiting debris. Sparking and hissing, the ship’s been through hell, and when it hits the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere there’s a whump of resistance, like someone’s awkward dad just did a belly flop into the swimming pool.

Oxygen stokes the sparks into flames.

Far below—but closer with every second—the ice caps are melting. On board instruments show an atmosphere getting hotter and more toxic by the day, only the pilot’s not looking at those instruments.

He’s at the helm. Smoke fogs the inside of the craft. Sparks pop and lights flicker but he doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the control panel. His talons dance across it, trying to keep control—trying to navigate this craft so it doesn’t hit the ground at the same velocity it had when it sliced through spacetime, or smashed through the invisible wall of Earth’s atmosphere. The pilot does not want to die.

Urgently, he taps a new sequence into the control panel. A slot opens on the console and even he—even this creature—hesitates a moment before he retrieves the device from within. In his language, or the crude version of his language you might be able to pronounce, it’s called the Kujhad. The pilot snaps it into the gauntlet he wears on his wrist with a loud click that echoes in the smoke-filled cockpit of the shuddering spacecraft.

He rises. The pilot is no fool. The odds of the ship making it to the surface without tearing itself apart or exploding on impact do not favor his survival. He taps one final command into his control panel, initiating the escape sequence. As locks disengage on the primary escape pod, the control panel erupts in a fresh shower of sparks. But the pilot is already gone, heading toward the pod bay, moving more swiftly than his size should allow.

Seconds pass.

Outside the ship, a hiss and pop as the escape pod is jettisoned from the main body of the careening spacecraft. The pod bursts out in a blossom of flames, far from a clean exit, striking its edges against the ship as it tumbles away, trailing smoke, spinning in a descent as uncontrolled as that of the larger vessel.

The pilot will do his best to survive. It’s one of the things his kind does best. They survive… and they hunt.

On board the ship he’s vacated, sparks continue to fly. Smoke billows. Lights flicker, the control panel glitches, and then a sudden, savage burst of electric flame erupts—a power surge.

The lights fail. The ship slices across the night sky, trailing smoke in the darkness, until it fades out of sight above America’s southern border.

All is peaceful again.

Cold. Silent.

But not for long.