It's 1988 and the small independent Dark Horse Comics wisely acquires the license for last

year's
megahit Aliens.

There are two things you can do with a license: you can launch out in breathtakingly original way, building
upon the original's universe to create something new, fresh and exciting; or you can continue the story.
Dark Horse took the latter route, again wisely.

They took two of the surviving subsidiary characters of Aliens, Space Marine Hicks and Little Orphan
Newt, already insanely popular by all accounts, and they gave them their own comic book.

Perhaps they left Ripley alone out of fear that any proposed sequel - already gestating in development
hell, waiting for the right combination of factors like scripts, ideas and directors to coalesce around it
before it bursting bloodily into production - would inevitably involve her and retcon the comic out of
whatever canon the fans were building.

Or maybe they dropped her like the dead stone that she was, their readership probably not terribly
interested in the exploits of a forty-something working mum.

Half-a-million sales later, the now larger independent Dark Horse Comics aptly demonstrated how
marketable its wisdom was. And that long-gestating sequel was about to writhe free of the innards of 20th
Century Fox and into cinemas across the Earth, generating more publicity, more consumer interest and
more potential sales of licensed Dark Horse Comics property.

In 1992 Alien 3 crashed onto the silver screen like a plummeting EEV with poor guidance control, and
killed Dark Horse's Hicks-&-Newt-i-verse dead. For Hicks, not just dead but mangled until legally
unrecognisable. For Newt, not just drowned in her stasis pod but dissected on the autopsy table to
prove she had no further plot potential.

And that was always going to be the problem with continuing a story that didn't belong to you. At some
point, the real owners of the intellectual property might just set about continuing their own, and scatter
your carefully built sandcastles into whatever void newly non-canon media inhabits in the collective
fanboy mind.

For Dark Horse Comics, not a problem. Realising that Alien 3 offered another inherent cash-in potential,
and that wisdom whispering to them that they'd sewed up the comic-book format, they opted to
re-canonise the Hicks-&-Newt-i-verse as a series of novels, adapted from the comic and retconned in
Alien 3's wake. Hicks and Newt were dead, therefore any mention of Hicks and Newt would have to be
scourged from the story. This fell to Steve Perry, who was to author a number of these adaptations.

Winston Smith, in Orwell's 1984, faced a similar challenge to Perry when it was decided that history would
need to change. This was no easy task for the Ministry of Truth, or poor old Winston: 'What was worst of
all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough to merely substitute one
name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination.'

Likewise, for Perry, it was often enough simply to substitute one name for another and perhaps to forget
about the care and imagination part. Hicks became Wilks, and Newt Billie, and we had the new,
recanonised Wilks-&-Billie-verse. Simples.

Or maybe not. Because there's some reluctance to make a clean break from the filmiverse. So while
Wilks, Billie and an unnamed marine were the sole survivors of a colony overrun by Aliens, escaping by
the skin of their teeth from a reactor malfunction, Wilks later hears of a very similar situation where two
civilians, a dismembered android, and a colonial marine did exactly the same. And then went missing...
Not dead on a beach, but missing.

I don't know whether that reluctance was to do with not wanting to completely write Hicks and Newt out of
the franchise (Aliens still happened in the novelisations) and to let the fans cling on to the belief that
maybe they escaped their filmiverse fate in the Wilks-&-Billie-verse, but it leads to some very weird
coincidences. It's almost as if the Wilks-&-Billie-verse is fractal, self-similar events flourishing again and
again (we'll come back to that towards the end). How likely is it that both Wilks and Hicks escape with
identical wounds, and with young girls, for example? Why did the Colonial Marines send that second
squad into near-identical circumstances without the benefit of any form of knowledge about the first
outbreak? It's that care and attention part coming into play...

-------------------------------------------

It's worth noting that a sizable amount of Aliens fanbase did not take well to the strewn corpses of Hicks
and Newt in a smashed EEV within the first few minutes of Alien 3. It was, as has been said far too
many times before, as if everything they went through in Aliens was for naught. A thought whose
response can only be encapsulated by:

So it is with some glee that I note that the plot of Earth Hive kicks off with the Coast Guard (no nationality
specified) about to nuke a derelict spaceship that's been orbiting the Earth for 60 years. The Coast
Guard ship sends a probe inside, which finds a high level of radioactivity, some regulatory
message-written-in-blood-on-the-walls, and a mummified corpse (we'll come back to that later). No
sooner is the atomic charge planted and the ship's blackbox retrieved, than the probe's telemetry goes
dead. Skilfully remote-piloting the probe back to the Coast Guard ship, the crew see that the probe's
only got an Alien clinging to the back of it! The Alien accesses the Coast Guard ship, kills some people
and then both ships are wiped out by that atomic charge. Unharmed, the derelict's blackbox floats
away...

Forget about Ripley's attempt to hit the self-destruct and abandon ship in the first film - a plan which cost
the lives of Parker and Dallas, and caused undue stress to Mr Jones - because it was all for naught. The
absolute worst thing that could have happened was that the Nostromo made it back to Earth with the
Alien on board and then spent 60-odd years in a decaying orbit before the Coast Guard nuked it.

Ponder the lives of the salvage crew who were so disappointed when they lost the salvage rights of the
measly little escape shuttle when they rescued Ripley in deep space. It's weird to think that they must
have passed this derelict spacecraft on their way to find needles in haystacks in the dark void and
decided it wasn't commercially viable.

But most of all, think that all of Ripley's efforts to stop the Alien getting to Earth were all for naught, as
there was one orbiting the planet for sixty years. And nobody cared, about it or about a spaceship that
suddenly turned up with all its crew dead. Dodgy to say the least.

Meanwhile... that blackbox floats into the hands of the shadowy Dr Orona, who spooks for the Terran
Intelligence Agency. They're like the CIA, but in the future. From it, he works out where the derelict
spacecraft came from and discovers the location of the Aliens' homeworld. He decides that he'd like a
working Alien or two to make into a weapon. Why, we're never told. There doesn't seem to be any
interstellar wars going on, and a Terran organisation being involved seems to suggest that these
weapons aren't for the benefit of one or more nations, so we're never too sure of the motivation other than
'want!'.

Orona decides that the best people to head this mission would be the Colonial Marines (no nationality
specified). He puts Colonel Stephens of Military Intelligence (he's very rules and regulations, think of an
older Gorman) in overall charge, and wants Wilks as squad leader due to his experience with fighting
Aliens.

Wilks never really got past his experiences fighting Aliens on Planet Rim twelve years ago. His military
career since then is testament to the forgiving nature of the Colonial Marines: 9 arrests for stoned and
disorderly, 3 for assault, 2 for damage to property, 1 for attempted homicide. He has nightmares (awww!)
and has turned to self-medication. Gentleman, this man is a chemhound! But also vitally important just
in case they ever need to fight Aliens ever again, so he stays a Colonial Marine.
Wilks isn't exactly happy about being invited on a suicide mission, but Orona plays his trump card.
"Remember Billie, that girl you rescued on Rim?" he says. "She's right here on Earth. In a mental
asylum. We wiped her mind and put her there, and now she has nightmares and is drugged up to the
eyeballs. And we can do the same to you."

This doesn't seem too different to Wilks day-to-day life, and the change from brig to mental asylum might
well be a positive, but he volunteers regardless and goes to see Billie, the only person who might feel like
he does.

Now, Billie... She was ten when Planet Rim's Alien invasion happened, which would make her 22 now.
I had to keep reminding myself of that because she comes across as much younger. Like Wilks, hers
hasn't been a happy lot in life as she's been in a mental institution for a decade, which might explain the
age thing.

Billie's very happy to see Wilks as it proves that her nightmares have some basis in reality and so she's
mostly sane, mostly. There's no reflection on what this entails: the imaginary monsters she's so terrified
of exist; her family and friends died terrible deaths. In what are to be the first signs of a remarkable
degree of self-centredness, Billie is simply glad that she's not crazy.

Things progress. Wilks meets the Colonial Marine squad he's to command, and they're all fairly
interchangeable marines with little to distinguish them. His plans to engage the Aliens with superior
firepower are wrecked when Colonel Stephens nixes the consignment of plasma rifles Wilks has ordered,
in another Gorman-like moment.

Orona's been busy as well. In my favourite part of the novel we're provided of a script he's written for an
audio-visual presentation of the Alien. This is gold - top secret project in its infancy and they commission
a sales video for it. It's all speculation - they don't even have a live Alien let alone been to their
homeworld - but as the latter part of the book bears out, this is all stunningly accurate. My favourite part:

V.O. (CONT.)
The young alien chews its way forth, where there may be a battle for dominance with other
newly born aliens. We can only speculate at this point.
A GROUP OF BABY ALIENS
rip and tear at each other.

Mental! This info-dump serves as a beginner’s guide to the Aliens, so any readers not familiar with the
filmiverse will be up to scratch with the monsters. But I'd say it's vital to see the films beforehand,
because of the way the Aliens are described. It's difficult to feel the necessary degree of terror when the
Aliens are 'monsters, with teeth and big heads like bananas.' Later on we find an embryonic
chestburster described as 'a kidney bean with teeth' and we're not sure whether the author is having a
joke or embarking on a whole new literary style, salad noir perhaps.

Wilks, his face like a scarred potato, finds out that Billie's doctors have grown bored of the whole
treatment thing and decided to wipe her brain. Billie is not too happy about it either, forgetting the fact
that this already happened to her at the age of ten, she's convinced that it'll turn her into a zombie.

Wilks decides to break her out of the asylum. He does this by using an amped up stunner (we'll come
back to this) and a fake name which just happens to be out of some of Steve Perry's other novels.
Nothing like a bit of self-promotion!

The rescue is a success, and Wilks smuggles her aboard the ship in a hypersleep capsule. There's just
time to fill Billie in - we're on a rocket ship to face our worst nightmares, again - and then our protagonists
are on their way to the Alien homeworld...

-------------------
Diagnoster: Murder

Wilks and Billie are on a rocketship to hell, but what have they left behind?

Unknown to the TIA and the military (no nation specified), a corporation is already in possession of an
Alien. This is Bionational, who are Weylan(d) Yutani in the Wilks-&-Billie-verse.

They've recovered a facehugger from one of their cargo ships, attached to an unfortunate crew member.
Where they picked this up is never specified (and surely they'd know through the ship's blackbox?) but it
seems there are a lot of Aliens out there - two colony planets and an Alien homeworld and now wherever
the cargo ship returned from. What's very interesting is that the facehugger has put the crewmember -
Likowski - under some xenological form of hypersleep so that Bionational have a fresh specimen. We'll
come back to that later.

Rather than use the cargo ship as a sealed lab, and flouting that pesky ICC quarantine thing the
filmiverse had, Likowski ends up at Bionational's Houston site (why not stick a scary Alien in a major
population centre?). He's put under a piece of medical kit called, I kid you not, a Diagnoster. Two
Bionational VPs are on hand to make things very unpleasant for Likowski during his extensively long
gestation period. For example, they decide that the kidney bean with teeth inside Likowski might feel
more at home in the presence of various chemicals released if Likowski was scared witless, so they let
him know what's happening.

Likowski has a dream sequence where he escapes from Bionational, the main purpose of which is to
inject an action sequence into an otherwise passive part of the novel. The only problem is that any
sympathy we have for him is negated by the casual loss of life he inflicts for a fairly futile purpose.

That idea to terrify Likowski comes back to haunt them. The chestburster tears its way out of Likowski
and immediately buries itself in one of the VPs, in what I feel is the first indication of Freudian theories
being applicable to Aliens. The poor thing is terrified of the big open world and seeks to regress back
into the womb.

This is bad news for the VP in question, as his colleague then shoots him in the head. Although both the
TIA/Military and Bionational want the Alien for the same purpose, a lot of effort is made into portraying
Bionational as the villains of the piece. Most of its VPs are stoked to the eyeballs on a variety of
narcotics. While this doesn't really differentiate them from Wilks and Billie (and we sadly never get to
see Wilks high), theirs is a purely hedonistic pursuit. Some of the drugs are a bit weird as well: the
orgy-inhaler provides a series of orgasms to the user, which sounds like it could cause quite a bit of mess
in the underwear department.

But mostly Bionational employees have a fairly casual disregard to the lives of others when it might
undercut their profit margin. This is demonstrated by the sociopathic Massey, who's the antagonist of
the story. Massey's an ex-Colonial Marine, very decorated and very dedicated. His fall from military
grace occurs when he assaults his CO and collaterally damages eighty-five civilians. Tellingly, he's
court-martialled for the assault rather than the massacre. Recognising talent when they see it,
Bionational buys out the inquiry (and that's even more telling!) and hires him as their Executive Assistant
of Security.

We are not supposed to like Massey. At one point some Bionational admin-slave sends unencrypted
info about the Alien to Massey's home computer, which his wife and kid see. So he kills them. The fact
that he had this family despite a complete lack of emotional attachment to them is explained away by
saying that they were his 'cover'. But Massey's not a spy, and it's difficult to know what having a family
would be cover from.

Truth be told, I actually grew rather fond of Massey when its disclosed that he simply despatched the
admin-slave rather than vengeance-killed him (and I think this is a bit harsh on the admin-slave given
Massey's own piss poor computer security at home). Massey is a sociopath rather than a sadist:
whether you live or die is immaterial to him, but he wouldn't want you to suffer either way. And he's very
cautious - there's a passage where we're told Bionational have hedged their bets and stuck a microbomb
in his head, so he clandestinely removes it and sticks it in the head of the employee tasked with tailing
him.

Bionational find out that the TIA/Military are about to send Wilks to the Alien homeworld to gather
specimens, thus undercutting the profitability of Project Alien, so they send Massey out in a spacecraft of
their own to nix that possibility.

Exchanging one population centre for a much larger one, and ensuring that as many staff as possible
know of its clandestine plans, Bionational ships that VP's corpse and its traumatised chestburster to
another lab in Lima. Here the Alien grows up, causing undue psychic distress to the more telepathically or
precognitively sensitive people in a 50km radius, and transforms into a Queen. And it's also here a
particularly barking character called Salvaje turns up.

Salvage has somehow found out about Bionational's Project Alien, and gets a temp job at their lab in
Lima to acquire footage of the beast. He then transmits it in pirate broadcasts over the 'net with the help
of a technician called Pindar as some form of recruitment video. Salvaje, for reasons never mentioned,
believes the Alien to be the messiah, rather than a very naughty xenomorph. He fronts the Church of the
Immaculate Incubation, and looks and behaves exactly like you'd expect a cult leader to.

At one point Billie almost sees one of Salvaje and Pindar's transmissions when a friend and fellow patient
is flipping channels in the nuthouse, and this does raise some queries about the novel's timeline which
we'll skirt over in much the same way as Perry did. Also watching are Orona and the TIA, who seize
Pindar and find out that Bionational have their own Alien specimen. On Earth.

But this information comes too late as Salvaje and hundreds of his followers assault Bionational's Lima
lab. Using a combination of suicide bombs and cannon fodder, they manage to make it to the silo where
a dozen of them, including Salvaje, manage to get themselves facehugged. Other cultists drag them
away and make their escape at high speed before Bionational nukes the lab.

But, really, how believable is all this? I can take Salvaje's endorsement of the Alien as 'a good thing' -
the guy's a nutjob, and while I'd have liked some explanation of why he feels this way beyond just calling
it the Messiah I can probably live without it. But the hundreds of other followers? That's a lot of nutjobs
who've all come together. And how do they manage to join Salvaje's Church (and, incidentally, donate
funds to it as some of Salvaje's wealth comes from his followers) without the TIA being able to do the
same thing and infiltrate the movement? All they managed to get was Pindar, after all.

Salvaje has womb-envy problems by way of explanation as to his psychological state. He's very into
having something living growing in his body, and pays a pregnant hooker to describe the experience as a
way of getting his rocks off. But it strikes me that this probably doesn't apply to many of his followers, as
women would probably go the more natural route, and the men could always ingest a tapeworm or two as
a much safer alternative. Basically it boils down to: how can you look at the image of an Alien, and think
it's a God? Surely having a rival corporation - maybe even WY - trying to steal the specimen only to let it
escape would be more believable?

Revisiting that wreckage lying on a beach in the arse end of space, and I can't help but think that Alien 3
had a much better go on the whole religion front. Firstly the prisoners already had a religion, which they
then incorporated the Alien into. Secondly, Dillon and Golic both viewed the Alien as an agent of their
redemption and consequent salvation, although in entirely different ways that originated from their
respective personalities - it didn't just mindwipe them into interchangeable cannon fodder suicide
bombers. And thirdly, it wasn't used as a piss poor excuse to get a bunch of people to do something
really, really stupid.

But no need to dwell on this, because not only have we got Aliens on Earth, but we're also about to get to
see the Alien Homeworld!

----------------------------------------
Nearing the Alien homeworld, Wilks and Billie wake up on board the Government ship Benedict. There
are some breaks with the filmiverse here, the first being that the Benedict has a crew - it's not automated
like the Sulaco in Aliens, and there doesn't seem to be any good reason for this. Hypersleep is what you
do when the ship's in hypershift - it's no longer a means of saving on resources during long voyages (or at
least, we're told that due to an improved gravity drive they can spend less time in hypersleep). And I'm
starting to think that Earth is controlled by a world government - there are Colonial Marines, but not US
Colonial Marines, and 'government' but no nationality.

Colonel Stephens finds out about the stowaway, although not who she is other than Wilks description of
her as a civilian advisor on Aliens. It may just be macho posturing from the two of them, but Stephens
mentions that any change in the mass of the ship may cause it to go off course by a parsec or so while in
hypershift. Wilks replies that he's thought of it and offloaded 50 kilos of food - I mean, who needs to eat,
right? - but it seems strange that a ship, especially a military one which might well be lighter on its return
journey, wouldn't have the means to calculate its own mass. We'll come back to that later.

One of Wilks' marines - Easley - is patrolling the corridors (gotta find something to do when you've been
kicked out of hypersleep) when he hears someone making a covert broadcast to another ship in the cargo
area. That someone then winds Easley, knocks him out, sticks him in a spacesuit, drags him to the
airlock, and ejects him out of the ship with a timed AP grenade for company, all without being picked up
on the surveillance monitors. Easley dies. We'll come back to some of this later.

Easley's death is dismissed as a very complex suicide as a result of depression. At least, this is Colonel
Stephens assessment of it, which Easley's squad apparently buys. At least, nobody's going around
looking for a murderer, and Easley is immediately forgotten.

Billie meets Mitch Bueller, one of Easley's squad mates, and they hit it off together. He takes her down
to the armoury so she can get her hands on his weapon, in a literal sense. He puts his hand on her in a
friendly sort of way, and she snaps back with "Don't touch me!" Perhaps a bit surprised at her own
reaction, Billie explains her history on the psycho ward. Mitch says that he understands, that he's spent
a lot of time in hospitals as well. This is clearly a lead-in, a 'let's talk about me a bit' conversational
gambit, but because it could also lead to a conversation not about Billie, Billie drops it.

So Mitch has to show her the weapons, and it's here we find just how stunningly ineffective that mindwipe
she received twelve years ago was. She's got near perfect recall of how to operate an older model of
the pulse rifle, which is easily transplanted to the new model. Billie checks and dry-fires it, and shows off
with a line about the gun having a bit of creep. Now, I'm no expert but I'm not sure you can tell whatever
'creep' is by dry-firing, but we'll let that go even though it makes Billie sound so much younger than her
years.

Mitch tries some more conversational gambits, such as his lack of parents and family, which Billie's
completely uninterested in. What she really wants to know is why Mitch grabbed another marine
half-an-hour ago. Yes, it turns out he was fighting over her, pissed off when it was intimated that she
and Wilks were an item. This is really all Billie wants to know, and they go off so she can handle Mitch's
weapon in a more figurative sense.

Back to that beach. That EEV wreckage. Again. Some people could never get their heads around why
Ripley shagged Clemens. It was too quick for us, they say, she barely knew him (not like Hicks!), and
we weren't paying attention to the fact she was clearly trying to deflect Clemens' questioning. Yet I
calculate that Ripley knew Clemens at the very least four times longer than Billie knew Mitch. I calculate
that Ripley hadn't spent ten years with orderlies ejaculating over her body while she's strapped to a
hospital bed (thanks for the imagery, Steve Perry!). I'm even pretty sure Ripley hadn't got the personal
space problem Billie has, and if she had I doubt she would've forgotten it as quickly. But there you go.
Single mums aren't allowed boyfriends except in the platonic, name-swapping sense.
So Mitch and Billie shag, and then they proclaim their love for each other. Slow down, kids, this is all
happening way too fast! Mitch, maybe taking my advice, maybe launching into one last attempt at trying
to tell Billie something about himself, tries to say something to her, but she's far more interested in
another shag and nothing gets said.

It's at this point that Massey chooses to make his appearance. He's been trailing the Benedict in his own
ship, the K-014, with a crew of combat androids. These are referred to as expendables, but don't let any
visions of muscle-bound pensioners being paraded out to cater for my generation's desire for nostalgia as
it reaches it's mid-life crisis point confuse you. Basically they're synthetics with very limited warranties,
who might be slightly stronger than your average android, and with such a poor paint job so that they're
so far down in the uncanny valley that they won't trip any empathy switches in the readership if they get
slaughtered, which they clearly will be.

They've also managed to get out of being Asimoved up so that they can kill real live people. Wilks lets
us know that the First Law has been altered - synthetics can now no longer kill people or allow people to
be killed by their own inaction, instead of the old harm thing. Wilks explains this by citing an android
surgeon - you've got to hurt people a little in order to help them - but the immediate image in my own
mind was that of android torturers. Not good. Harm seemed a hell of a lot safer, to be honest.

So Massey's ship docks with the Benedict, and this is all down to Colonel Stephens being a traitor,
Easley's murderer and in with Massey's crowd. This seems a very odd thing for the Colonel to be, as
he's been very by-the-book, rules-and-regulations up until now. If we expect to be told what's caused
Stephens to drop his presumably long career for momentary financial gain we'd be disappointed, because
Massey simply shoots him dead as soon as they meet. 'Never trust a traitor' is the reasoning here, and
it's a pretty shrewd judgement, but I can't help feeling that maybe Stephens death is a tad premature.

Mitch leaves Billie to join the Marines and fight the expendable boarding party, only to find that Stephens
has only gone and stolen a vital component out of all the pulse rifles, rendering them useless. So they
surrender. Wilks is taken captive by Massey, but not killed, because he might be useful. Not as useful
as Stephens might have been, I'd wager, demonstrated when the expendables come back with news
about a stowaway Wilks refuses to tell them about Billie.

And this is really where Massey falls apart. All that stuff we'd been told about how cautious and ruthless
he was, that's just goes as soon as he takes a major role in the narrative. Massey's goal is to prevent
the TIA/Military from getting hold of an Alien. He gets bonus points if he can return any more specimens,
or any information to help Project Alien along its merry way. Just to make it really easy for him to score
them, these are the TIA/Military's objectives as well.

So why he chooses to board the Benedict now is a mystery. Why not wait for the Colonial Marines to do
all the tricky thinking and fighting stuff on Planet Alien? If they're unsuccessful, and you've got Stephens
onboard to let you know, you need never reveal yourself. If they are, you just board the ship after
Stephens scuppers the weapons.

But no. Massey has a convoluted plan to send the crew and the Colonial Marines down to the hives on
Planet Alien, where they'll be impregnated. Then his expendables will go into the hives and rescue them.
Seems like an awful lot of work and bother to me, but down they all go in the Benedict's dropships (or
APCs as Earth Hive calls them).

Billie works out something's wrong, and armed with a rolling pin and a potato peeler heads to the armoury
to get some real firepower. Once again illustrating the full-on crapness of the mindwipe, she finds the
guns have the feed ramp missing, but takes one anyway.

Then she makes it to Stephens' room. There she encounters an expendable, and we find out just how
shit they are when Billie shivs it with a peeler in the eye, and it falls down dead. What kind of design is
that where a terribly vital component is placed in an all too vulnerable soft spot? No wonder they have
limited warranties.

Anyway, Stephens has neatly lined up all the missing feed ramps on his bed, which Billie then replaces.
Needless to say, I have a problem or two with this. The first is minor: Billie knows how to do this how?
She might've been taught 12 years ago on an older model, and then mindwiped, but surely it would've
been simpler to show Mitch teaching her how to strip the gun in the 'put your hands on my weapon' scene
above? The second is just annoying: if Stephens' room was that secure, why did he go down to the
cargo hold to make his super-secret transmission, the one that got Easley killed? Other than to get
someone killed, that is. We need a steady body count just in case the readership gets bored, I suspect,
a bit like Likowski's dream.

What's Billie's mental state like through this? Well, it's pretty scary. Imagine if you met a girl, and a
couple of hours after your first date she rang you and started saying things like 'if you died, nothing would
matter to me anymore'? Forget about the dreams, I'm starting to realise why she'd been locked up in a
looneybin for a decade.

But let's go down to Planet Alien and see how Mitch and his friends are doing...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What does Planet Alien look like?

Disappointing.

Forget any ideas of a biomechanoid planetary hive, Planet Alien is desolate and barren, the monotony of
the landscape only reinforced by its sparse and uninteresting vegetation. It's peculiarly uninhabited as
well. This seems odd for an ecosystem that produced the Alien, a species that can only reproduce by
parasitising other lifeforms, and I might've expected much more in the way of megafauna, rapidly
breeding to prevent going extinct due to the Aliens' attritional form of breeding. The one remarkable
thing is that Orona's infomercial was bang on. How lucky was that?

Mitch's squad dropship down to the surface, where they are harried towards a hive by Massey's
expendables touting plasma rifles and riding on air pods. Air pods are like Dalek transsolar discs, which
is probably a bad reference.

It's not looking good for Mitch's squad as they near the hive entrance. But just then, Massey - following
the proceedings aboard the Benedict with the captured Wilks - sees that some flying blips have appeared
on Doppler, and are heading towards his expendables' air pods. What's Doppler, you might ask? Well,
I've no idea, but a paragraph later we're told that the blips don't show up on radar, sonar or Doppler so we
don't need to know. Clearly some more editorial intervention would've helped there.

The blips turn out to be flying aliens, not Alien-type aliens, just another species. They've lucked out on
the description stakes because they get elongated heads, rather than being toothed radishes or airborne
carrots. They tear in to the air pods, killing lots of expendables in the process, and evening up the odds
for Mitch's squad.

Our Colonial Marines manage to swipe a plasma rifle from some crashed expendables, and start shooting
down the air pods from the relative safety of the hive entrance. They have the edge on the expendables,
as Massey's androids weren't trained for formal combat scenarios. A bit short-sighted, I would think, and
clearly something that should be rectified in Version 2. Clearing the area, Mitch's squad decide to make it
back to the dropship.

Massey, watching all this, isn't happy and decides to call it quits. Well, just before that he asks Wilks to
tell the Colonial Marines to surrender, but Wilks is like all uncooperative. Stephens would have done it
happily, so there's a lesson to be learned about not shooting people on sight there, especially the helpful
ones. Massey sets a timebomb on the dropships stationed on Planet Alien (why? just blow them up
immediately, for God's sake!) and decides to off Wilks. Of course, by then he's told Wilks all about
Bionational, and the Alien on Earth, and the entire reason why he's hijacking government ships. What
Bionational, or myself, saw in this guy I'll never know. It's just mistake after mistake with Massey as
soon as he enters the narrative.

Who should turn up then but Billie with a pulse rifle? There's a bit of a Mexican standoff before Massy
grabs Billie and, about to shoot her, is then attacked by Wilks. This allows Billie to shoot Massey to
death, which she does. Massey dies in a mess of his own contradictions and stupidity-induced failures.

Like, why set a timebomb on the dropships and not on the Benedict? That'd be a far better failsafe, and
add a bit more drama to the situation. As it is, Wilks tries to stop the timebomb on the dropship but fails
just as Mitch's squad reach it, and it kills another Marine.

The expendables aboard the Benedict live up to their name as Billie and Wilks kill them all without any
fuss or bother. We find out that Wilks managed to smuggle a hellaton of nukes aboard the Benedict -
those plasma rifles were just a ruse to keep Stephens occupied - and intends to initiate Operation Hell
Fuck Charnelhouse and wipe out Planet Alien. But not before he rescues his troops. It's here we find
that Wilks is a master of all trades, as he programs the remaining dropships and the Benedict and the
Bionational ship to do stuff. Remember that crew the Benedict had? Total waste of personnel and
resources.

So Wilks and Billie dropship down to the surface to rescue Mitch's men. But Mitch has other ideas,
having just picked up a distress call from another group of troops or crew that Massey sent down to the
Hives as Alien bait. Mitch, following something deeper than a sense of duty, takes his remaining
Marines down into a Hive to rescue them.

Which they do. Well, one of them, at least, inexplicably unhuggered and cocooned next to a closed Egg.
Most of Mitch's platoon dies during the attempt, leaving only Mitch and Blake, a female marine. In
another break from the filmiverse, the Aliens show up on IR during the Hive sequence, but I mention this
only incidentally, much as I'll say that the interior of the Hive is as disappointing as Planet Alien itself.

Mitch, Blake and the survivor make it out of the Hive, and there's Wilks and Billie in a dropship waiting for
them. But the tearful reunion of Billie and Mitch - who have been apart almost as long as they've been
together, maybe a whole four hours - is sullied when an Alien comes out of nowhere and rips Mitch in two,
Bishop-style. It's even more Bishop-style than you might think, because Mitch is a goddamned droid!
DUN-DUN-DAAAAH!

It turns out that the whole of Mitch's squad were experimental androids designed for missions like the one
they're on. They eat and sleep and fall in love and suffer depression and have lots of other human
weaknesses that a military grade combat droid wouldn't be expected to, because it makes it easier for
people to work with them. I'm not sure I buy that (it's a bit like designing a voice-automated system with
a sense of insecurity and a need to shut down every sixteen hours to replicate sleep) and I think Alien
Defecation's autons were a lot more believable - and it's not often I'd concede that Whedon got something
right! But that's the reason why Mitch had to head down into the Hive and get nearly all his squadmates
killed - they're still constrained by the First Law.

(Going back to Easley's death: Stephens winds him. So androids breathe as well. They don't just
imitate breathing to make their fellow humans feel more at ease, they have a physical need to breathe.
Design flaw.)

Billie is not happy about her new boyfriend being categorically non-human at all. No. She's pretty
pissed off with Wilks for not telling her - although he didn't really have much of a chance to - and she's
really angry for Mitch for the same reasons. Jesus Christ, Billie! In the four fucking of femtoseconds
you were with him, did he not try on four occasions to tell you something about himself? Did you care?
Did you even ask him anything about himself? No.
So Billie's in a megasulk and everybody's in the dropship including the bisected Mitch. The Benedict's
gonna rain automated atomic death on the planet in a matter of hours (see, that's how you do it, Massey!),
so they've got to take off. But there's a problem - there are too many Aliens clinging to the hull for them
to make escape velocity, and aerial acrobatics won't shake them off. And they're starting to tear their
way in.

Wilks will have to go out and shoot them off. He's aware it's a suicide mission, and asks Blake to shoot
him in the head if the Aliens get him. But Blake's all 'Sorry, First Law, sucker!' and won't do it. Wilks
takes a grenade as a suicide device, and goes out towards the hatch and certain death, but Blake has
conveniently managed to deprogram that second bit of the First law away. Y'know, the bit that says '...or
by inaction, allow a human being to be killed.' Well, Blake's being pretty inactive here as Wilks goes off
to get himself killed.

Anyway, the situation is grim. The only person happy about it is Billie, who views death as far more
enjoyable than having to set eyes on Mitch again. I think her parents got out easy when they died awful
deaths as chestbursters ripped out of them, because Billie as a teenager must have been a far worse
nightmare to deal with. But it looks like they're all about to die.

You know that bit at the end of Jurassic Park, where our protagonists are surrounded by velociraptors and
the only thing that could possibly save them would be if a T rex came along and attacked the
velociraptors, and then a T rex comes along and attacks the velociraptors? Same thing happens here.
Out of the blue, a Space Jockey - a real live living one - turns up and zaps the Aliens off the dropship.

Two things then happen to Billie. The first is that she has an explanatory flashback - mindwipe be
damned! - to an event so uncannily similar to Newt's, even down to her father being called Russ, that
we're back to Orwell's point about 'care and imagination' when retconning and the fractal nature of the
Wilks-&-Billie-verse. So she remembers a dead Space Jockey, in a derelict ship, where her family found
the Eggs that started the Alien Invasion of Planet Rim.

The second is that the Space Jockey chooses her to telepathically signal it's motivations to her, and thus
through her to us readers. Essentially: it hates Aliens. Not enough to wipe out their planet or anything,
just in the sort of casual way a T rex might attack a velociraptor thus saving a bunch of humans it doesn't
really care about. Billie manages to pick up that previous Jockeys have been collecting Aliens then
getting killed by them, confirming just how spectacularly accurate Orona's infomercial was. But then it
picks up Billie thinking about the impending nuclear onslaught, and floats back to its own ship. And flies
off. Which is what Wilks and co does as well.

Then the nukes fall. Their detonations cause volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes, and tidal waves, all in
one vast act of planetary murder. Billions of organisms are killed for no other reason that they shared
the planet with the Aliens. It's an act so staggeringly criminal that its probably worth quoting:

The aliens were hardy; they could survive in conditions that would kill most forms of life, but
even they had to eat. Food was
going to be scarce here for a long, long time.

Wilks watched on the monitors, the cams shielded by filters, as the aliens’ planet spasmed and
died. And he felt real good about it, too. He hoped they all lived long enough to starve. Slowly.

He didn’t think he would be bothered much anymore by the nightmares he had lived with for so
many years. He had struck back against the hellish things, and his punch had been a lot bigger
than any they could throw. He had destroyed them. The last laugh was his.
Scary stuff. Made scarier by the minor problem that, despite the remorseless and gleeful Wilks' fervent
hopes, the Aliens aren't going to be starving to death any time soon. The Alien we met on the derelict
ship orbiting the Earth had been there for sixty years and had never bothered to eat the dead crewmates.
The Eggs onboard the derelict Space Jockey ship that Billie had remembered had been there for a long
time. The facehugger the Bionational people found hadn't just gone into suspended animation for itself,
but managed to do the same to the crewman it was connected to. The Aliens aren't going to starve for a
long, long time, and Wilks has become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, for naught but the prospect of a
good night's sleep.

Maybe Billie will offer some hope for the human species. Nope, she's still sulking about Mitch 'lying' to
her. She doesn't care about anything else, especially not Mitch's massive wounding. No one seems
concerned that the unnamed survivor might be impregnated. Wilks explains that the trip back to Earth
will be faster than the trip to Planet Alien, which seems strange and would also be a good point to note
that without the mass of the dropships and nearly all of the crew and marines, they should be going off
course by parsec or so if Stephens and Wilks are to be believed. Even Massey's ship is forgotten.

Billie makes up with Mitch and they fly home.

Back on Earth, and the Aliens have launched their own Operation Hell Fuck Charnelhouse and are busy
overrunning the joint. At least when the Aliens kill they are doing so to create new life, albeit of an
xenological form. I'm starting to side with the Aliens.

For a novel entitled Earth Hive, I would've expected this to be the main focus (and maybe even get to see
the titular earth Hive itself!) but this is skimmed over in maybe three pages. Maybe it has to be glossed
over in order to work - I really don't see how the human race can fare so badly with all its air support,
plasma rifles, androids and ruddy great bombs. But they do.

Orona is feeling very bad about not being able to stop the Aliens. Holed up in one of the last strongholds,
he reflects on how it all came to end so badly. There's an interesting part about how the Aliens are
getting smarter, and how humans are responsible for this (presumably by fighting them). Whilst the
average Alien is allegedly about as intelligent as a dog, they find a Queen who tests to 'nearly 175 on the
Irwin-Schlatler scale... smarter than most of the humans ever born.'

I do not see it that way. I think the human beings were outclassed right from the very beginning. The
facehugger that decided not to impregnate Likowski but to put him in some kind of hypersleep until they
arrived at somewhere more populated. The chestburster that emerged and then dove into the body of
the VP to ease its own transportation by Bionational. The Queen who sat there, radiating psychic
thoughts, manipulating people into forming a religion that existed only to ensure the dissemination of her
young. There's a very patient intelligence there that's far in advance of what we've seen of humanity's.

Maybe Orona finally worked it out. His last words are about man's stupidity, and then he blows his
brains out.

Wilks and Billie arrive on Earth, followed by the Space Jockey's ship which stays orbiting the Earth.

They're met by an officer who wants their ship. The military are going for a tactical retreat, the Earth's
been lost, only about half-a-billion human beings are left (and they will be left by the military). Even with
the Benedict they don't have room for our survivors, so they'll have to stay on Earth. Oh, and the base
they're standing in is set to be nuked in a few hours time.

Wilks gets a bit uppity about this so the officer points a gun at him. This causes Blake to revert to her
First Law programming, and rather than go all commando-style at it, she simply walks slowly up to our
officer soaking up the bullets as she goes. It's kind of weird that Blake doesn't do the same to Wilks as
he kills the officer and another random marine, but we've already seen her selectivity when it comes to
the Asimov shit anyway. Regardless, Blake dies as a result of being a bullet catcher and our unnamed
crewman survivor (whose name turns out to be Parks) runs away.

We're back to that fractal self-similar universe again as the Colonial Marine, the girl he saved, and half an
android attempt to flee the Aliens and a nuclear blast.

Wilks has a plan to hitch a ride on one of the automated supply ships in the docks, nicknamed The
American, destination unknown. In order to do this he needs to shoot his way through four guards.
Remember that amped-up stunner Wilks had, to minimise the loss of life when he broke Billie out of the
nuthouse? Well, Wilks has. He tells Mitch he's just going to wound them, to prevent any First Law
conflicts, then shoots them in the head. It's not in self-defence or anything, we're told the guards have
their weapons slung and haven't noticed Wilks. I guess when you've murdered a planet the lives of four
paltry guards are pretty meaningless.

Any hope of Mitch stepping up is killed off by the statement 'once they were dead, his responsibility
ended.' And its there that we see Mitch exposed: he's just wiring, a philosophical zombie. The sort of
guy who'd let a serial killer go if they promised not to kill anyone else, and would feel no remorse when
the serial killer chalked up a few more victims because, now they're dead, his responsibility has ended.
Maybe he'll make a perfect match for Billie then.

Our trio rapidly fit the supply ship with some basic life support and lift off. Escaping the doomed Earth,
they see the Space Jockey's ship, and Billie has another psychic insight that the Space Jockey is
overjoyed with the downfall of the human race. It wants the Earth for itself. It'll let the Aliens win, then
let the humans retake the planet, then kill the humans. Where it has such a faith in humanity is a
mystery, given their inability to defend their own planet.

And so our protagonists climb into their hypersleep chambers and go to sleep. Billie, untroubled by the
fact that all her friends in the nuthouse are either dead or wishing they were along with everybody else left
on Earth, thinks about how absolutely swell it is that she and Mitch are back together again, closes her
eyes and smiles.

I'm siding with the Aliens from here on in.