Aliens Omnibus: Volume 6 by Diane Carey & John Shirley

Author:Diane Carey & John Shirley [Carey, Diane & Shirley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2018-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

BOOK 2

STEEL EGG

JOHN SHIRLEY

For Julian.

Special thanks to Martha Millard, Micky Shirley… and to Jim Baldwin for the IN-fo

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In the first Alien film—a film distinguished by a remarkable convergence of talent: e.g., Ridley Scott, Ron Schusett, Giger, Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and a very talented cast of actors—we get the definite impression that “The Company” already knew about the aliens, and had diverted the starship specifically so that more could be found out about them, and so they could possibly be used for The Company’s sinister purposes. We have the impression, too, that these corporate overlords knew something about the destructive nature of this alien species, with its potential military applications. So far as I know, or can recollect, this foreknowledge has never been explained (unless possibly it was explored in Aliens comics, or in other “tiein” novels). I attempt to explain, here, how knowledge of the aliens first came to the people of Earth, later to be collated by savants at The Company with the discovery of the crashed ship teeming with alien eggs, as seen in the first film.

Another thing that has never been explained, so far as I can find out, is how the adult alien grows from a creature of small mass, a chest-burster, to the full-sized xenomorph, without apparently eating—and in a remarkably short time. Many have expressed puzzlement over this. My guess, mentioned in this work, is that the chest-burster and young xenomorph is indeed consuming materials of various kinds, scavenged food stolen from storage, human flesh— even metal, softened by acids—but that consumption wasn’t documented in the other Alien adventures because the people involved were too busy just trying to stay alive to do an inventory of the ship’s stores or see how much human flesh might be missing from the corpses of the creature’s victims. (Sometimes the aliens will kill people and not eat any part of them—they only eat victims if they need the materials to grow.) Had the crew of those other ships done that inventory or weighed those bodies, they would have deduced how the creatures are getting the mass.

As to how they are growing from infant to adult in a single day, that’s just one of the wonders of their alien biology—it’s a radical evolutionary adaptation, using the large amounts of material they have ingested in the process. Being primarily biological machines for killing and reproducing, obtaining information from the DNA of those they destroy, they have no need of a long youth, an extended period of development.

In poring over the one Alien “bible” (as the industry term has it) that I have come across, and dipping a bit into other publications based on the Alien films, I find a good deal of contradictory information—or at least apparently contradictory information. It isn’t possible for me to incorporate every story development, revelation, and term used in every printed Alien story, in this book. And since they’re at least somewhat contradictory, at times, I’m loath to use them as a source.

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