Alien: Covenant Origins: Novel Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: September 26, 2017
Author: Alan Dean Foster
Publisher: Titan Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-1-78565-476-3
Series: Official prequel to Alien: Covenant
Setting: Earth / Covenant orbit, 2103–2104

Alien: Covenant Origins is a 2017 novel by Alan Dean Foster, published by Titan Books as the official prequel to Alien: Covenant. It is set on Earth and aboard the USCSS Covenant while the colony ship waits in orbit, after the Weyland-Yutani merger and before the flight to Origae-6. The book follows captain Jacob Brandon, supercargo Daniels, security chief Lopé, and company chair Hideo Yutani as a cult called the Earthsavers tries to stop the launch.

Plot Summary

The story stays on the ground and in Earth orbit. London in the book is hot, dirty, and crowded, and Tokyo's Yutani tower stood one floor taller than the old Weyland building at the Docks. Colonists signed up to leave that world for Origae-6, and the company treated the ship as a make-or-break investment after the loss of the Prometheus mission.

No Xenomorph or Neomorph appears on the page. The opening chapter shows a city slaughter, with people torn apart in the streets. That killing turned out to be a dream belonging to Duncan Fields, a Hampshire man whose followers treated those nightmares as proof that crewed ships would draw killers back to Earth. Their motto is OTBD, Out There Be Demons. Early chapters cover loading and the last open security post on the ship. Later chapters move between London, Tokyo, and the Hampshire farm as the cult tries to stop departure.

Cargo Bay Sabotage

Company watchers Indri Mithun and Lykke Kajsa were aboard to evaluate the crew and the hull before launch. Captain Jacob Brandon held command. Some leftover Weyland board members called him too casual for the job. His wife Daniels, the supercargo, was the officer they trusted, in charge of stores, terraforming gear, and the colony inventory. The assigned synthetic was late. After Prometheus was listed as lost, the company held Walter back until every department signed off.

Sergeant Hallet then reported a technician in the main cargo bay. Eric Sasaki, a twelve-year Yutani employee, had planted excavation charge CT-12 on the bay door and taken installer Cara Prestowicz as a hostage. He wanted a worldwide halt to Origae-6 and a chance to read a manifesto. Daniels had pilot Tennessee flood the bay with a targeted jamming pulse so the detonator in Sasaki's boot could not fire. The security team went in cabled and suited. Sasaki's pistol was folded paper, hard enough to scare Prestowicz and soft enough to miss a weapons scan. When the charges failed, he locked himself in a personnel airlock and blew the outer door.

The ship computer Mother later listed him as a clean, ordinary tech. Hallet doubled the watch on anything that could be used as a bomb. Mithun promised a motive report before deepsleep. Kajsa filed a reprimand that cancelled the same commendation, so the company record showed no net change.

Lopé In London

Sergeant Lopé was on Earth to fill the last security slot before he could leave for orbit. He and Hallet were partners. Once the colony stood up, Lopé expected to run planetary security. The last interviews ran in a windowless room inside an eighty-story Weyland-Yutani tower. Hundreds of vetted names had been cut down to one hire.

Applicant Meryem Tadik sat the last interview, then ran when the desk flagged a lie. In the stairwell she fired plastic shells that scans would miss. In the atrium a man in work clothes raised a sonic impeller, a construction tool that could take a head off, and blew a hole in the outer wall. Tadik went out through the glass. A late arrival, Sarah Rosenthal, took the impeller man down on the marble and left him alive for questioning. Medical staff removed him, and company security later reported him dead. Lopé gave Rosenthal the last security seat on the spot.

Jenny Yutani Kidnapped

In Tokyo, Hideo Yutani sat at the head of a seven-seat board, four from Yutani and three leftover Weyland seats. His daughter Jenny was there when black-clad raiders came up a hollow support column on a portable graphene lift. They killed four bodyguards, gassed the room, bound Jenny, and took her out in a marked service van. The demand was not ransom. They wanted the Covenant mission cancelled for good, and they claimed the cargo-bay job and the London attack as their own.

Jenny forced a rear door and rolled onto the road. Trackers in her shoe heels brought police to her. She lived with road rash, torn earlobes, and a sprained knee. The van dropped into a riverside garage, three abductors switched vehicles, and the empty service van went off a roof into the water. The two men in front drowned. The company's first guess pointed at Chinese rival Jutou Combine and its head, Zhang. Jenny argued that a third party might want Weyland-Yutani and Jutou at each other's throats. The two drowned drivers were Weyland men, not Yutani, which undercut the simple merger-revenge story.

The Earthsavers

Duncan Fields lived on a Hampshire farm and slept badly. The same city-killing dream kept coming back. Nurses recorded the nights and used the footage to recruit. Fields did not plan the attacks. A six-person council, one seat for each inhabited continent, ran the work and kept him away from the methods. They called themselves Earthsavers and treated colonization as a beacon that would bring the things in those dreams to Earth.

Sasaki's cargo-bay attempt, the London attack on Lopé, and Jenny's kidnapping had not stopped the Covenant. The Earthsavers council then tried the Yutani family again. They wanted Hideo out of the way so the company would have to cancel the launch. Security around him after Tokyo was too tight for a second kidnapping.

The council voted to hire the Neoyakuza, seize him alive, and plant a medical implant that could release a toxin if he refused. Yukiko was chosen to open those talks. Yakuza boss Tatsuya Himura took the contract, then sat down with Hideo as a friend instead of carrying it out. His cane hid a wooden poison dart that scans would miss. He left it unused, and Hideo asked him to look for the people behind the attacks.

Hazelton And The Prophet

Lopé and Rosenthal traced Tadik to a London club after a collagen wrap came off. She was Glynis Hazelton, a teacher who took extra work on the side and had used the Tadik name to try for Covenant security. In a service alley she twisted a charge in her boot heel and burned herself to bone. Before that she spoke of a prophet and of OTBD. Lopé stopped treating the case as corporate sabotage and started looking for that prophet.

Hideo later hired fixer Yoji Ngata as a second line beside British security chief Kyuka Bevridge. On a Calshot beach the Earthsavers council admitted they could not reach the ship, the Yutanis, or a missile base. Pavel pushed a last idea: get inside the company and wreck departure from there.

The Hampshire Farm

Bevridge's team hit the farm with Lopé and Rosenthal in the convoy. The defenders used jumping mines, automatic guns, and livestock with charges in them. Goats, cattle, chickens, and ducks went off among the trucks. Bevridge later put his own dead at a dozen or more. A hovercraft tried to lift out of a barn with a clamshell roof. Company drones swarmed its intakes and put it into the ground. Four council members came out of the wreck, including Baron Josiah Ingleton. Ingleton had already stabbed the South American seat in the farm house for objecting to a last run that would kill children on the ship. They called themselves a religious group and then named the Earthsavers when Bevridge asked.

The farm chaos was cover. Fields and Yukiko tried to ride out inside two mesyn Percherons, part horse and part machine, slit along the belly for a hidden operator. Ngata had been watching the tree line on his own and pulled Fields off one of them. The second mesyn fired from its mouth until Lopé and Rosenthal shot out its eyes and knees. Yukiko crawled out and ran, and Rosenthal dropped her. Bevridge took the prophet and the council into the city. The captives stayed calm, which left Lopé uneasy as he boarded a shuttle at the Wash for the Covenant.

Lander Two

A USCSS Covenant lander on a planetary surface

That calm had a reason. At the Ouarzazate spaceport in Morocco, two Earthsaver pilots replaced the scheduled cargo-shuttle crew with forged orders. They drove a loaded cargo shuttle onto a collision course with the Covenant. The colony ship could not move in time, and it could not light the main drive without wrecking the mission on its own. Lopé's lockers held rifles, not ship-to-ship guns.

Daniels wanted Lander Two sent out as a ram. Mother refused. An intercept would destroy colony property, and the AI would not do that without a Weyland-Yutani board order. Tennessee left the bridge, cut the lander's links by hand, and programmed the intercept himself. The lander and the shuttle met head-on and mostly vaporized. One large fragment punched supply hold number eight. Emergency doors sealed the breach. Mother said the hole could be patched in a couple of days. Communications officer Ricks caught a last transmission from the shuttle: OTBD. Lopé understood it and did not explain it to the others.

Walter Comes Aboard

Ground control saw the detonation and went on alert until Ricks and Upworth talked them down. The next passenger shuttle then brought the delayed synthetic. Daniels walked Walter to his quarters and refused a welcome party. She treated him as crew, not as boxed stores. He had linked with Mother before she showed him around. He asked about the recent attacks. She told him a group on the surface had tried to stop the mission, and that not every human ran on logic. He said he would never let her down.

The Covenant Crew

The USCSS Covenant crew assembled on the bridge

Jacob Brandon was the human captain, with Mother running the ship in transit. Chris Oram was his second, not Daniels, a point Brandon had to repeat to company men who kept pairing the married couple as joint command. Daniels was supercargo and terraforming lead, the officer who knew every crate in the holds. Tennessee and Faris flew the ship. Hallet held security on board until Lopé returned with Rosenthal, and Ledward, Ankor, and Cole were on the roster.

Those people spent the book on loading, interviews, and the last colonists going into deepsleep. Karine Oram helped settle that last batch. The film later killed most of this crew on Planet 4. Origins leaves them alive and bound for Origae-6.

Weyland-Yutani After The Merger

After Prometheus was declared lost, insurers paid out and other firms bid for Weyland's plants, staff, colonization work, and the David patents. Origins names Jutou Combine as the strongest loser. Hideo Yutani took the company, kept a low public profile, and put the Weyland name first because Peter Weyland was a global brand. Synthetics were not a Yutani specialty. London engineer Loess Steinmetz held Walter at the old English lab until the ethics package was finished. Co-supervisors Elena Harbison and Gilead could not override him, and Harbison gave him a day to sign the unit through.

Company men on the ship, Mithun and Kajsa, watched for anything that might scare the board. On the ground, Bevridge ran British security and Ngata worked the edges for Hideo. Mother would not spend colony hardware without a board order, even when a shuttle was about to hit the hull. That was the company the Earthsavers tried to stop, and the company the crew had to work around.

The Earthsavers Cult

After the cargo-bay job and Jenny's kidnapping, Weyland-Yutani first blamed Jutou Combine, the Chinese firm that had lost the bid for Weyland. The Earthsavers were not Jutou agents. They were Fields's converts, run by a quiet council that looked like ordinary professionals. Sasaki, Hazelton, the London impeller man, Jenny's kidnappers, and the Ouarzazate pilots all worked from the same dream recordings and the same OTBD line. Members died for the cause, and the group wanted a stopped ship even if people aboard died with it.

Fields himself was small, tired, and kept in a padded bed so he could not break his own bones at night. He wanted the dreams to end. When Ngata held a gun to his neck in the trees, Fields told him he had only described the dreams, and that the others had chosen the rest. Bevridge's raid broke the council. The cargo-shuttle run showed that some cells kept moving after the farm fell.

Key Characters

Jacob Brandon - Human captain of the Covenant, called Branson in the film, who stayed in command through the cargo-bay job and the shuttle intercept.
Daniels - Supercargo and terraforming officer who jammed Sasaki's detonator and ordered the use of Lander Two.
Sgt. Lopé - Ship security chief who hired Rosenthal in London, helped take the Hampshire farm, and came back aboard before launch.
Sarah Rosenthal - Last security hire, who stopped the London impeller attack, dropped Yukiko, and left Earth with Lopé.
Hideo Yutani - Chair of Weyland-Yutani after the merger, who kept the Covenant on the schedule after his daughter's kidnapping.
Jenny Yutani - Hideo's daughter, taken from the Tokyo boardroom, who rolled out of the van and lived.
Duncan Fields - Earthsavers prophet whose repeated slaughter dreams drove the cult, captured at the Hampshire farm.
Eric Sasaki - Yutani technician who mined the cargo-bay door and killed himself in an airlock when the charges failed.
Walter - Late-boarding synthetic who linked with Mother and told Daniels he would not let her down.
Tennessee Faris - Pilot who programmed Lander Two by hand after Mother refused the intercept.

Differences From Alien: Covenant

Foster misspelled the captain as Jacob Brandon all the way through. The film and later site pages use the correct name, Jacob Branson. Lopé's given name slips in the book as well, Carl in the London lobby and Daniel during the farm fight, against the film's Dan Lopé. Origins fills in how Sarah Rosenthal got the last security seat. In the film she is already on the crew, and a Neomorph later takes her head in David's city.

The largest story addition is the missing lander. Alien: Covenant shows the ship with working landers. Origins spends Lander Two on the suicide shuttle, which is why later summaries of the Covenant list one lander gone before Planet 4. Walter also boards later here than a reader of the film might expect, held on Earth for ethics work after Prometheus. Hideo, Jenny, Jutou, Fields, and the Earthsavers are original to this book. The film never mentions the launch fight.

Place In Foster's Covenant Books

Foster had novelized Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3, then left the line after the third book. Titan and Fox brought him back for the Alien: Covenant novelization, published on 23 May 2017, and for this prequel on 26 September 2017. Origins is his first original Alien novel rather than a screenplay adaptation. The novelization was turned in before Origins was written, so the film book does not mention the Earthsavers or the lost lander.

Editions And Adaptations

Titan's mass-market paperback landed on 26 September 2017 at 304 pages. An ebook went out the same day. Blackstone Publishing released an unabridged audiobook with the print edition, read by Tom Taylorson in 8 hours and 31 minutes. There is no audio-drama version of the kind Dirk Maggs later did for other Titan Alien novels.

Behind The Scenes

Steve Burg concept art of the USCSS Covenant

In a 2017 Den of Geek interview, Foster said Titan and Fox discussed several plots before they locked this one, including work that would have followed Shaw and David to the Engineer world. The story they asked him to write was the launch fight. He used the extra space on Lopé, whom he saw as a competent officer the film had no time to unpack, and on a Yutani family the movies had left as a logo. A Xenomorph appearance was discussed and dropped.

Foster also said a novelization has to add character thought, fix science where the studio allows it, and spend money the film cannot. Origins was the other way around: an original plot inside a franchise that limited where he could go. He had more freedom inside that brief than the later Covenant films would suggest, and he could not point the novelization back at this book because the adaptation was finished first.

Conclusion

Alien: Covenant Origins is Alan Dean Foster's 2017 Titan prequel to Alien: Covenant. It covers the Earthside fight over the colony ship, from Sasaki's cargo-bay attempt through Jenny Yutani's kidnapping, the Hampshire raid, and the loss of Lander Two. The book ends with Walter aboard and the Covenant bound for Origae-6. It is often treated as one of the weaker Alien novels, and it does not contain any Xenomorphs.