Alien: Enemy of My Enemy: Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: March 14, 2023
Author: Mary SanGiovanni
Publisher: Titan Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 416
ISBN: 978-1-80336-098-0
Series: Titan Alien novels
Setting: BG-791 / LV-846, 2187

Alien: Enemy of My Enemy is a 2023 novel by Mary SanGiovanni, published by Titan Books on 14 March 2023 in the United States. It followed Weyland-Yutani researcher Dr. Martin Fowler, Seegson botanist Dr. Siobhan McCormick, and Colonial Marines first sergeant Alec Brand through an outbreak on the dying moon BG-791 in 2187. Fowler's gestation serum loosed adult Xenomorphs at the Menhit lab. On LV-846 the survivors used a Queen against engineered biodrones at a peace summit.

Plot Summary

The novel follows three groups in 2187 as moon BG-791 came apart in orbit around the gas giant Hephaestus. Fowler ran a Weyland-Yutani bioweapons lab at Menhit. Siobhan worked the last Seegson plant lab at Hygieia Colony. Brand's demoted Marine squad was there as security, with orders to move on to a UA, UPP, and ICSC summit on LV-846.

Menhit

At the Menhit Biowarfare Science Facility, Fowler and his assistant Stan Watkins watched three bound hosts in medical pods. Fowler's serum was meant to stretch the time from implant to birth from less than two hours to as long as three weeks. It also made the newborns more aggressive and made them grow faster after they left the host. He told Watkins to mark three weeks, then ordered the ceiling laser on.

Three Chestbursters tore out of the hosts. The laser cut the first two down. Their blood was fluorescent yellow with hints of green, and it ate the floor until it hit an alloy Fowler said was based on Xenomorph chitin. The third newborn, larger than the others, dodged the beam, cracked the observation glass, and hid under a pod. Fowler hit lockdown. Watkins took pistols and armor jackets, then ran when Fowler screamed.

The escaped Chestburster matured in the ducts far faster than the hour or two Fowler had claimed. It webbed hosts in specimen storage beside stored eggs, opened metal so the eggs could sense people, and killed staff through the building. There was no Queen on site. Instinct drove the adult Xenomorph to guard those eggs. The lab synthetic William sent a damaged help video: an accident, samples loose, and at least twenty-three dead.

Hygieia And The Marines

Hygieia was the last terraformed oasis on BG-791, with native vurfur, deer-like animals with antlers and sharp teeth, and storms that wrecked positioning gear. The United Americas had promised to lift fourteen people and the Seegson synthetic Camilla the next day, then send them to the LV-846 summit on pathogen bombs and a peace treaty. Assistant Commandant General Vaughn had also ordered Brand's squad there as extra security.

Camilla and Siobhan picked up William's terrestrial distress call. Brand took the M577 APC west with Siobhan and Camilla. Lance corporal Kenny Elkins drove, with private first class Eddie "Roots" Rutiani, private Anita Compton, and private Danny McGowan in the back. Menhit was dark, the door clawed open, and most of the dead were gone from the halls. Alec named the species XX121. A drone dropped from the ceiling, burned Compton's face with acid, tore off her gun arm, and carried her into a vent. The same adult Xenomorph later speared McGowan through the gut in the medbay. Siobhan shot it in the back as it took him, and acid burned Roots's foot.

They found Fowler and an unconscious research volunteer, Cora Lanning, beside a shed Facehugger skin. Fowler said a Facehugger finished an implant in two to eight hours, a natural burst came in under two hours, and his shot could hold the embryo up to three weeks. Camilla read the hidden failure rate at fifteen percent. Alec counted nine egg bases and one egg left. Cora woke and described staff locking themselves in the "safe" storage nest with the drone and the eggs. Five or six creatures had been in there. She was the only one who had not burst.

They left through the living quarters. Watkins's badge and severed fingers lay in a hall. Outside, PMC Wesley Lombardo was dead at the generators. A vurfur-gestated Xenomorph, two or three times drone size, with fur at the shoulders and bony antlers, chased the APC. Elkins shook it into a moon fissure. The last view of it was the fall into the fissure.

Seegson Outbreak

They quarantined Fowler and Cora at the Seegson lab. Cora burst in the hallway. The Chestburster bit Roots's cheek and vanished into the vents. The serum had failed on her. Fowler then admitted that, once outside a host, the altered Xenomorphs grew faster and killed from rage, not only to defend a nest.

Siobhan made the group check the last seven residents. An adult Xenomorph was in the housing basements. It killed Victoria Hernandez, dragged her husband Hank into a vent, and left Shannon Lee, Bill Maloney, director Arthur Benton, and Benton's partner Leo dead. Alec later blasted that drone in the lobby. Hank's granddaughter Kira survived that night.

Camilla, under a remote Seegson update she could not refuse, told the UA Office of Interplanetary Resettlement that the colony had a Xenomorph infection. Rebecca Mueller cancelled the UA ship. Camilla then fought a Xenomorph in the basement, took heavy damage, wandered toward Menhit, and later boarded the company hull. The group did not see her leave.

With the UA lift gone, Siobhan put a gun on Fowler and made him call Weyland-Yutani. He was to claim the problem was contained and get them all onto the company ship, with no samples. He agreed while hiding a pocket vial of serum, incomplete data sent to San Francisco, and a Queen embryo in his own chest.

Astraeus And The Demeter

Rockfall blocked the surface path to the pad, so they used Fowler's quakeproof tunnels, with only two M240 incinerators found. More than five adult Xenomorphs chased them. Siobhan burned one off Alec. Fowler ran ahead and slammed a hatch, but they still reached the Weyland-Yutani evacuation ship Astraeus. Drones hit the ramp during takeoff. Icarus Flight navigator Sam Urban used the ship's lasers, and the last adult Xenomorph was rolled off the canopy. BG-791 was left to break up.

Pilots Gavin Broadwell and Sam were Icarus Flight contractors, not Weyland-Yutani employees. They agreed to fly to LV-846 after Gavin learned Elkins and Roots had served on the UA outpost Kepler-2801. The run was four or five days, with no need for hypersleep. Fowler tried to reach Weyland-Yutani through a voice named Stan Bloom. Siobhan punched him. About fifty-six hours out he drugged the pilots' coffee, and Weyland-Yutani took remote control of the ship. Elkins cut that link, and Fowler was locked down.

The automated recon hull USCSS Demeter, at least twice Astraeus's size and without a human crew, grappled them with a retraction arm and opened with lasers. Alec and Siobhan spacewalked to unclamp the arm. Elkins and Kira flew them clear. Navigation, fuel, and steering were damaged. By LV-846 they had less than a quarter of their fuel left and had to land in a storm.

LV-846 And The Biodrones

The Pushan Conference Center looked empty. The Marine transport USS Alexiares sat crashed beside it, the door torn outward. The dead inside had been slashed, not chestburst. Captain Angela Forrester's log, dated 5 to 8 July 2187, said Vaughn had assigned the ship summit security plus cargo. She later wrote that the cargo was biodrones, dozens of them, and that the synthetic Gene appeared to have let them out. Forrester counted 2,103 Marines, planned to crash the ship, and was sure Vaughn had known.

Fowler, in labor pain, told them about Project Life Force, an earlier Weyland-Yutani weapons program under Dr. N.L. Babak. Alec said only a Queen could answer drones. Fowler then admitted he had put a Queen embryo in himself before the Menhit outbreak, used daily survival to keep Weyland-Yutani funding, blocked William's distress call, and restarted it after he found Cora so he and the incubator could be extracted. The three weeks were almost up.

Alec almost shot him. Fowler ran into Pushan and argued that killing him would still leave them a Queen, and that they needed her against the biodrones. Siobhan agreed to confirm the biodrones first, then let Queen and biodrones fight. Fowler burst in a side room. The newborn Queen climbed off his ruined chest and fled.

Pushan had no living staff. Biodrone kills were slashes and missing limbs, with no chestbursts, which matched Fowler's claim that the design was meant to kill without harvesting hosts. In the hub the biodrones killed one of their own and used its acid to melt the doors. The group split. Biodrones killed Sam and Gavin. Alec was speared in the ribs, forearm, and knee. A biodrone dropped on Elkins. Kira lunged at it, and Roots later reported that it had killed them both.

The Queen

Siobhan sent wounded Alec and Roots back to Astraeus, then hunted the growing Queen so it would meet the remaining biodrones. The serum made the Queen grow and rage fast. In a vent she found dying Joint Chief Stephanie Koslowski, who handed her a drive naming Vaughn, the Engineers, the shadow group Deep Void, and the signatures of the pathogen bombs. Koslowski died after that.

The central chamber held the dead of the summit: Joint Chiefs, UA, UPP, and ICSC delegates, aides, and press. Marines along one wall had burst chests. Someone, possibly Koslowski, had sealed the room to hold the swarm, and that seal had failed. Siobhan uploaded the drive as pathogen-bomb signature information and sent a distress to UA military, the UPP, and other governments, naming Vaughn and the Alexiares. About twenty-four biodrones filled the room. A fully grown Queen, about three times the size of the BG-791 drones, threw a biodrone off Siobhan and butchered the swarm. Acid did not eat the Queen's tail shell.

Siobhan crawled out of the burning hub and led the Queen toward the Alexiares wreck. On Astraeus, Alec and Roots found Camilla in the cargo hold, leaking white fluid and shutting down. A Xenomorph had wrecked her in the Seegson basement, and Roots had also shot her in the dark. She could not be repaired. She gave Alec her wrist sensor and asked him to take care of Siobhan and the others, then she shut down.

Lightning sheared a metal spike from the wreckage. Siobhan grabbed a long rod. Alec and Roots came out to bait the Queen. Guns barely hurt her. She snapped Alec's bad leg, then speared Roots through the chest and dashed him on the ground three times. Siobhan drove the spike through the Queen's back and out the chest. Lightning hit the metal, and the current cooked the Queen. An ICSC ship, the Soteria, then lifted Siobhan and Alec.

Epilogue

Six months later the public story of LV-846 was a lightning fire. New Joint Chiefs, the last of them General John Urban, opened an investigation into Vaughn's bio-warfare attack on the summit. All three governments had Siobhan's files: Vaughn, Weyland-Yutani scientists, Deep Void, and replicated Plagiarus praepotens from an Engineer ship. The UA, UPP, and ICSC signed an armistice. Officially Siobhan was a ghost who had vanished with the original drive.

She and Alec hid on the beach moon LM-490, in orbit around the uninhabited world Naraka. Alec's limp remained, and both of them flinched at fire. Meteors they first took for debris were pathogen bombs hitting Naraka. They went inside and watched. Vaughn and Deep Void remained free.

Biodrones And Project Life Force

Project Life Force was a Weyland-Yutani bio-weapons program from before Menhit. Babak, the lead Xenomorphologist, treated Xenomorphs as something a greater intelligence had engineered, and he wanted to recreate and control them. The plan was to hold maturation, stop reproduction, and limit a soldier to about six days of life. Fowler's serum grew out of that work.

The biodrones, tagged XX121B, were smaller and faster than a natural drone, a little weaker, and meant to be just as fatal. Fowler said the improvements were neither reliable nor consistent. They did not die in six days. An ovomorphing reflex bypassed the reproductive and maturation limits. They were hostile to natural Xenomorphs, so the samples had to be kept apart. The hoped-for use was to remove a target without leaving an infestation, and that failed. Remaining samples were sold off. When asked who bought them, Fowler looked at Pushan.

Siobhan used Fowler's Queen as the enemy of the biodrones. The Queen killed the conference-center swarm, then died in the storm after Siobhan put a metal spike through her. Siobhan and Alec left without knowing whether every biodrone on LV-846 was dead.

Confirmed Kills

Chestbursters killed the three unnamed Menhit hosts. Fowler's ceiling laser killed two of those newborns. An adult Xenomorph then killed Menhit staff including Sarah Shirring, pregnant Ana Thayer, assistants George Miller and Lena Forster, Lombardo, and William. The same outbreak killed Compton and McGowan. Watkins was found only as parts. Cora's Chestburster killed Cora. Fowler's Queen killed Fowler.

At Hygieia an adult Xenomorph killed Victoria, Hank, Shannon, Bill, Arthur, and Leo. Alec blasted the lobby drone. Marines and Siobhan burned or shot several more XX121s in the Menhit hall, the escape tunnels, and on the Astraeus pad. Sam's lasers took at least one on the pad. The antlered vurfur-host was last seen falling into a fissure, not confirmed dead.

Biodrones killed Sam, Gavin, Elkins, Kira, Koslowski, and the summit dead, including generals Gifford Michael Hadley, Edgar B. Fordham, Samuel Matthew Canon, and Broaddus J. French. Forrester's log put 2,103 Marines on the Alexiares. The Queen killed Roots and many biodrones. Siobhan and the lightning strike killed the Queen. Camilla was left shutting down after a Xenomorph and a mistaken shot from Roots.

Key Characters

Siobhan McCormick - Seegson botanist, 38. Sent the summit files. Alive on LM-490 with Alec.
Alec Brand - First sergeant, USCMC. Childhood survivor of a Weyland-Yutani test moon. Knee ruined. Alive on LM-490.
Martin Fowler - Weyland-Yutani Menhit director. Incubated a Queen. Dead at Pushan.
Stan Watkins - Fowler's assistant. Dead at Menhit.
Cora Lanning - Facehugged volunteer. Dead at Seegson when the serum failed.
Camilla - Seegson 226-B/2 synthetic. Reported the outbreak. Shutting down on Astraeus.
Anita Compton and Danny McGowan - Marines. Dead at Menhit.
Kenny Elkins - APC driver. Dead at Pushan.
Eddie "Roots" Rutiani - Marine. Dead buying time against the Queen.
Kira Hernandez - Child. Dead at Pushan after she lunged at the biodrone that killed Elkins.
Gavin Broadwell and Sam Urban - Icarus Flight crew. Dead at Pushan.
Angela Forrester - Alexiares captain. Presumed dead in the crash.
Stephanie Koslowski - Joint Chief. Gave Siobhan the Deep Void drive. Dead.
Vaughn - Assistant Commandant General. Ordered the Alexiares cargo. Not captured.
John Urban - New Joint Chief in the epilogue. Alive.
N.L. Babak - Project Life Force Xenomorphologist. Not in the present action.

Place In The Titan Line

Titan's first Alien novel wave was the 2014 trio, Lebbon's Out of the Shadows, James A. Moore's Sea of Sorrows, and Christopher Golden's River of Pain. Alex White's The Cold Forge and Into Charybdis later set a Company-and-colony frame that David Barnett's Alien: Colony War and Philippa Ballantine's Alien: Inferno's Fall carried into the 2180s. SanGiovanni's book followed those two in 2023 as a standalone story that closed political threads from that loose run. It was her first Alien novel.

Amanda Ripley and Zula Hendricks had pulled Brand off a Weyland-Yutani test moon as a child after the colony ship Gaspar was hijacked. In 2187 he was an adult Marine with that history, not a returning Ripley or Zula viewpoint.

Continuity

SanGiovanni set the story in 2187, about eight years after Alien 3 and about a year after Inferno's Fall. Hadley's Hope and Fiorina 161 appear only as family history on dead generals' files, not as places in the present action. The pathogen bombs and the three-government talks sit in the same political war Into Charybdis, Colony War, and Inferno's Fall had opened.

Fowler's files and Koslowski's drive treat the bombs as replicated Plagiarus praepotens taken from an Engineer ship, with Deep Void as the group moving that material. The novel never names the Midsummer species or the Rage War. There are no Yautja in this book. The paperback also binds the Alien RPG scenario Trojan Horse, a separate Alexiares one-act that is not part of the novel plot.

Editions

Titan Books released the first paperback in the United Kingdom on 21 February 2023 and in the United States on 14 March 2023. Titan's catalog gives 416 pages. That count includes the bound-in Free League scenario. The cover is a painted biodrone, not a film still. The story does not continue in a numbered sequel.

Behind The Scenes

In a March 2023 interview with Paul Semel, SanGiovanni treated the book as a horror thriller and as the close of a loose run that began with Colony War and Inferno's Fall. She said David Barnett, Philippa Ballantine, Alex White, Titan, and 20th Century Studios gave her notes and manuscripts so the politics would stay in continuity. The Seegson crew, cut off on a moon that was coming apart, were written as outliers. The military lead was Brand, already present in the comics.

She wrote the Queen-and-biodrone fight as the last set-piece of that run. A Free League scenario based on an event in the book shipped in the same volume. The acknowledgements thank family, Brian Keene, Steve Savile, Clara Carija, Ballantine, White, Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, Nicole Spiegel, and others. The book is dedicated in part to Wes Southard and Mike Lombardo, fans she asked what they had never seen in an Alien story.

Conclusion

Alien: Enemy of My Enemy is Mary SanGiovanni's 2023 Titan novel. It covers the 2187 outbreak on dying moon BG-791 and the biodrone massacre at the LV-846 summit. The book ends with Fowler's Queen dead, Siobhan and Alec hidden on LM-490, an armistice between the three governments, and pathogen bombs still falling.