Alien vs. Predator: 2004 Novelization Plot & Lore
Alien vs. Predator is a 2004 novel by Marc Cerasini, published by HarperEntertainment on 29 June 2004, weeks before the 2004 film opened. It followed guide Alexa Woods on Charles Bishop Weyland's drill into a pyramid under the ice of Bouvetoya, where five Young Bloods came to blood themselves on Xenomorph prey. Cerasini worked from earlier drafts, so the book kept a 2000 B.C. Cambodia hunt, a 1904 whaling massacre, and two extra hunters the film cut. Lex and the hunter she named Scar chained the Queen into the harbor, Scar died on the ice, and his corpse twitched on the voyage home.
Plot Summary
Weyland Industries found a heat bloom under Antarctic ice and paid a mixed team of drillers, mercenaries, and archaeologists to reach it before another satellite did. The pyramid was a hunt machine that used humans as hosts and brought hunters back on a hundred-year cycle. Lex was the ice guide. Sebastian De Rosa read the walls. Dying company founder Charles Bishop Weyland went down the shaft so he would not die in a cabin.
Cambodia, 2000 B.C.
Hunt chief Funan and his men stalked a wild pig too close to a stone pyramid they treated as sacred, a place entered only at sacrifice time. Twin brothers Fan Shih and Pol Shih carried obsidian-tipped spears. The giant Jawa flanked the pig. The jungle went silent, a black tail dragged Fan into the brush, and Pol was hauled after him screaming.
An adult Xenomorph dropped from a tree and killed Jawa. A second one peeled off a trunk and cornered Funan, acid drool burning his cheek. A cloaked hunter hit the creature in the throat, looked at the fallen man, and judged him not worth killing. Funan lived while the two fought.
Bouvetoya, 1904
The whaling ship Emma worked a season for the Nyberg Brothers Oil Company of Oslo. Skipper Sven Nyberg was on his first and last voyage as a whaler, and planned to sell the firm when he got home. First mate Karl Johanssen had twenty-seven seasons on the ice and a five-percent share. After lights, explosions, and a red glow over Olav Peak, Karl's party found a giant metal coffin in a crater.
Karl wanted the coffin left in the ice. Nyberg overruled him for profit, and five men and fifteen dogs dragged it to the oil warehouse. Hours later the box was empty, four men were torn apart with heads and spines taken, and a cloaked hunter hit the bunkhouse. Karl hid on the whalebone beach, then crawled back into camp half frozen and backed into a Xenomorph in the mess before a masked hunter threw him aside and fought the creature.
Sector 14
Technician Francis "Fin" Ullbeck moved Weyland satellite PS12 over Antarctica from a New Mexico tracking station. Day supervisor Dr. Langer treated Sector 14 as empty. Thermal cameras found interlocking squares too regular to be natural. Langer ordered Fin to wake everybody.
Everest And Teotihuacan
Alexa Woods was twenty-eight, an environmental technician and ice guide, hanging on a solo climb of the Khumbu Icefall when Maxwell Stafford called from Weyland Industries. He offered a full year of funding for her Foundation of Environmental Scientists if she met Weyland the next day. A week off the mountain was a problem for her. Stafford was on the ice shelf in a waiting helicopter.
In Mexico, professor Sebastian De Rosa was at the end of an eighteen-month permit at the Temple of the Sun in Teotihuacan, hunting a link between Nile and Mesoamerican pyramids. Assistant minister Olga Arenas wanted the land for tourism. The team's big find was a rusty 1950s Pepsi bottle cap, and Interior minister Juan Ramirez shut the dig. Stafford arrived at Sebastian's tent with a personal check from Charles Weyland.
Piper Maru
A Westland Sea King, Weyland 14, put Lex on the icebreaker Piper Maru, 278,000 tons, under Captain Leighton. The hold was packed with Hagglunds, drill platforms, and prefabricated camp. Chemical engineer Graham Miller documented the trip for his sons. The mercenaries included Adele Rousseau, Verheiden, Boris, Mikkel, Sven, and Klaus. Roughneck boss Quinn had lost an Alaska oil fight to Lex's foundation and treated her as the enemy on the deck.
Weyland was dying of advanced bronchogenic carcinoma, about forty days left, and used a nine iron as a cane. He had bought nanotech, robotics, pharma, and a genetics firm in Kiyodo behind a playboy front. The heat bloom sat 2,000 feet under Bouvetoya ice. Quinn wanted seven days to drill. Lex wanted three more weeks of training. Weyland refused because other satellites would see the site, and Lex stayed so a greener guide named Gerald Murdoch was not sent in her place.
Five Hunters
A kilometer-long manta-shaped ship dropped out of hyperspace past the Moon and ran toward Earth. Five hunters came out of fluid tanks into a tropical-air pool, took spears, shuriken, and masks, and left the plasma cannons on the racks for a primitive hunt. One took a wrist net gun. They knelt in a ritual chamber before a stone thunderbolt warrior that the book compared to an extraterrestrial Odin.
The ship decloaked over the Bouvetoya station and punched five metal drop-pods into the ice, then cloaked and left. Five hunters joined at the shaft with a holo-map of the pyramid and a pulse in the center. They cloaked and went down.
Under The Ice
A katabatic storm closed over the Bouvetoya whaling station after the underground team had gone down the shaft. Quinn checked the Hagglunds and the red apple tent over the pit. The hardwired radiophone to the cavern got no answer.
In the mess, a cloaked hunter speared Mikkel while he worked the ICOM, then cut Boris's arms and throat. Sven hurled a pot of boiling water that shorted the cloak long enough for him to see his own face in the hunter's mask. The hunter killed him before Quinn, coming back from the vehicles, opened the door on the bodies. A spear came through the wood and gouged Quinn's left arm, and he slammed the door and ran.
Klaus hung from the eaves by the ankles, his head gone, and Reichel, Klapp, Tinker, and the other surface men hung the same way in the storm. Quinn found Klaus's Desert Eagle, put a green hole in one hunter's chest, then was kicked down the two-thousand-foot shaft. He woke frozen to the grotto floor. Two hunters passed him toward the pyramid, and a third drove wrist blades through his brain.
The Sacrifice Chamber
Deep in the pyramid, barbed chains hauled a Queen from a pool of ice-cold vapor. Tubes and hooks held her as a slave egg layer, and eggs slid onto a conveyor toward the sacrifice room.
That room held a six-foot mound of skulls and freeze-dried mummies in ritual headpieces, each with a hole below the rib cage. Thomas treated it as the place where chosen ones were offered to the gods. When the pyramid shifted, Adele Rousseau stood in a doorway, and Thomas pulled her clear of a descending stone door. A second door sealed the other exit, and an aluminum case crushed under the slab. They were trapped with Professor Joshi, Dr. Cannon, and two other archaeologists.
Seven slab bowls received eggs as if the depressions were cut for them. Adele fired a split second late, so the facehugger hit her face and the tail closed on her neck. Her Desert Eagle hit the floor and was later found with one round left. Facehuggers then took Thomas, Joshi, Cannon, and the two assistants.
The Labyrinth
The pyramid reconfigured every ten minutes. Sebastian tied that clock to a metric Aztec calendar. Taking hunter weapons from a sarcophagus tipped the hunt. Walls isolated Connors. A wire noose snapped Stone's spine. A spear pinned Bass to a wall. A chestburster came out of Connors in the hive. Verheiden fell through a trap and was last seen slack in a cocoon with a hugger on him. Miller killed one leaping hugger with Verheiden's gun, then faced dozens of opening eggs.
A hunter netted Stafford and speared him through the heart into the floor. Weyland stayed on the stairs as a delay. The hunter read him as sick prey and turned away, so Weyland vented oxygen and lit a flare. The hunter walked out of the fire, gut-stabbed him, and dumped the body. Sebastian was found cocooned later and begged Lex to kill him.
Scar
Lex and Sebastian watched a hunter decapitate an adult Xenomorph, cut off a double-thumbed finger, etch a thunderbolt on his mask with acid blood, and brand his own forehead. Sebastian read it as a blooding. They named him Scar. After more fights he stripped damaged armor and armed Lex with a spear, then later an Alien-plate shield and a tail-tip spear. His voice box replayed her English. She braced his spear and let an adult Xenomorph jump onto the point.
Lex used Adele's last pistol round on Sebastian. The chestburster came out, and Scar snapped its neck. Lex's father, an Air Force researcher, had spent twenty years on an unexplained 1979 nuclear blast on Bouvetoya that no nation claimed, with isotopes that did not match Earth uranium. Hieroglyphs showed a hunter with a raised wrist and a green mushroom cloud if the gods lost. Scar armed a wrist self-destruct, and Lex threw it through a grate into the pyramid heart.
The Queen And The Ice
On the stairs an unmasked hunter collapsed and a newborn Alien started out of his chest. Scar lit a shoulder plasma gun and burned host and newborn together. They winched out of the wrecked grotto past Quinn's frozen body. Scar branded Lex's forehead with a severed Alien digit, the same thunderbolt he wore. The Queen climbed the ice shaft with the hive, a net-scarred pack leader riding her back. Scar's disk cut her throat. Her tail batted him through a shack. Lex drove the spear into that wound, and they chained the Queen to a three-ton oil separator.
The ice under the vat cracked and held. The Queen got up and almost reached Lex before the frozen sheet gave way and the separator pulled her into the harbor as an anchor. She was sunk, not checked for a corpse. Scar died in Lex's arms after they traded "enemy of my enemy" for "is my friend."
Hunter's Moon
A hunt ship crackled into view over the crater and hung above Lex and Scar's body. A dozen hunters appeared on a low ice shelf, then more pressed in around her. They bowed to Scar, lifted his corpse, and carried him up a ramp from the ship's belly. Lex had lost her club and held a fighting stance until a tall Elder in jewel-studded armor traced the thunderbolt on her forehead and pointed to the same brand on his mask. The honor guard wore that mark too. He put his spear in her hands, and the hunters bowed before they cloaked and walked back to the ship.
The ramp closed and the hull vanished in a blast of snow. Lex was soaked in human, Alien, and Predator blood. She touched the brand on her forehead, took Sebastian's rusty Pepsi cap from her pocket, and looked at a full moon through a break in the clouds. She named it Hunter's Moon. On the ship they laid Scar at the thunder-god statue with his mask off and the brand dark on his forehead. After the funeral the clan filed into cryostasis tubes for the long voyage back to their home world. Alone in a chamber of incense, Scar's chest bulged under his dead heart.
The Yautja
The book never uses the word Yautja. The hunters are Predators, gods, or humanoids. Five unnamed Young Bloods came down, not the film's three. An old mural on the pyramid peak showed three figures. They left plasma aboard, then Scar had a shoulder gun later with no explanation on the page.
Sebastian treated the acid thunderbolt on mask and forehead as the hunter becoming a man. Lex later received the same mark on the ice. The Elder and the honor guard wore that brand as well.
The hunters passed over sick or unworthy prey. They discarded Weyland and accepted Lex after she fought beside Scar. The recovery party that arrived after the Queen fight was a dozen hunters, then more. It was not the five Young Bloods who had dropped.
The Xenomorphs
The walls called the creatures Great Serpents, Aliens, or the hive. The Queen was a chained egg engine before the humans arrived. Facehuggers came in sevens for the sacrifice slabs. A net-scarred pack leader later rode the Queen up the ice shaft.
Facehuggers put embryos in two of the five hunters. Scar burned one of those hosts and the chestburster on the stairs. The book never showed Scar being facehugged, then used his corpse for the last twitch. That newborn is not named a Predalien. The Queen was pulled under the harbor and left there.
Confirmed Kills
In Cambodia the Xenomorphs killed Fan Shih, Pol Shih, and Jawa. The hunter-versus-Xenomorph finish was not closed. In 1904 the Predators took four warehouse men and the bunkhouse crew as skull-and-spine trophies, plus a headless man in the greenhouse. Karl Johanssen was last seen with broken ribs on the mess floor.
On the 2004 surface the hunters killed Mikkel, Boris, Sven, Klaus, Reichel, Klapp, Tinker, and Quinn. Underground they killed Stone, Bass, Stafford, and Weyland. Facehuggers took Adele, Thomas, Joshi, Cannon, and two assistants. A chestburster killed Connors. Verheiden and Miller were last seen in the hive. Lex shot Sebastian, and Scar killed that larva.
Lex killed one adult Xenomorph with Scar's spear and helped sink the Queen. Scar decapitated his blooding kill, burned the implanted hunter and newborn, and cut the Queen's throat. The Queen wrecked Scar with wounds that killed him after she went under the harbor. Dane and Peters vanished from the page after camp orders. Captain Leighton was last seen alive on Piper Maru.
Key Characters
- Alexa Woods was a twenty-eight-year-old ice guide pulled off Everest by Weyland money. She killed one adult Xenomorph, shot Sebastian on his request, helped sink the Queen, took Scar's thunderbolt, and left the ice with the Elder's spear.
- Scar was the human name Lex and Sebastian gave the hunter who blooded himself on an adult Xenomorph. He armed Lex, burned another hunter's chestburster, died on the ice, and twitched in the cryo chapel.
- Charles Bishop Weyland was the dying founder of Weyland Industries. The hunter scored him as sick prey, he burned that hunter with an oxygen flare, and he died on the stairs.
- Maxwell Stafford was Weyland's fixer and security chief. He recruited Lex and Sebastian, then died speared through a tightening net.
- Sebastian De Rosa was an Italian archaeologist shut down at Teotihuacan over a Pepsi cap. He read the pyramid, was implanted off-page, and died when Lex shot him.
- Graham Miller was a chemical engineer from Cleveland with two sons. He dated the pyramid stones, killed one facehugger, and was last seen cocooned above opening eggs.
- Adele Rousseau was a blond mercenary who carried a Desert Eagle. A facehugger took her in the sacrifice room.
- Quinn ran the roughnecks, wounded one hunter, and died in the ice grotto with blades through his brain.
- Verheiden was the biggest mercenary. He was facehugged in the hive and not seen bursting.
- Funan was a Cambodian hunt chief who lived after a cloaked Predator pulled an adult Xenomorph off his throat.
- Karl Johanssen was first mate of the Emma in 1904. He found the metal coffin and was last seen broken on the mess floor while a hunter and a Xenomorph fought.
Place In The Books
The novel is the fourth of the seven core Alien vs. Predator novels, after Prey, Hunter's Planet, and War, and ahead of Ultimate Prey, Armageddon, and Rift War. It is a film novelization, not a Dark Horse comic book and not a Machiko Noguchi sequel. The company is Weyland Industries, and the man is Charles Bishop Weyland.
Scar's twitching chest is the hook for Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Cerasini was asked to write that sequel novel and turned it down on schedule. Requiem never received a novelization. Hunter's Moon is Lex repeating Sebastian at the end, not a crossover to Hunter's Planet.
Editions
HarperEntertainment released the first edition as a mass-market paperback on 29 June 2004. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists 276 pages. The cover is the film's silver-mask art under an AVP logo, with novelization credit to Cerasini and screenplay credit to Paul W. S. Anderson and Shane Salerno.
The Science Fiction Book Club issued a hardcover in October 2004. Panini published a German paperback, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, on 18 October 2004, translated by Jan Dinter, at 314 pages. There is no later English omnibus of this text with Prey, Hunter's Planet, and War.
Behind The Scenes
Marc Cerasini was sent an early draft that kept the Cambodia teaser, five Predators, and a Sebastian who was not Italian, plus confusion over whether the drill sat at the North or South Pole. A later script he was told was the shooting draft kept the five hunters, cut Cambodia for the 1904 camp, made Sebastian Italian, and set Miller in Cleveland rather than Scotland. He was told not to write the whaling massacre because it had been filmed and would be cut. He kept both teasers.
The film cut the hunter count to three and named them Scar, Celtic, and Chopper. Cerasini's Scar blooded himself with a dead Warrior's finger, not a facehugger, then burned a chestburster from another hunter on the stairs. He branded Lex's forehead with a thunderbolt, the same mark Dachande cut into Machiko in the comics, instead of the Xenomorph brand the film puts on her cheek. When the Queen was chained to the separator, the ice held long enough for her to rise and almost kill Lex before the vat went through.
Weyland was in his forties in the book, not the age Lance Henriksen played on screen, and carried the golf club as a cane when his lungs failed. A later script Cerasini never received ended with a recovered Predator weapon going to Weyland-Yutani executives. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem ends the same way, with a recovered plasma caster in Ms. Yutani's hands. His published epilogue stops on Scar's chest.
Conclusion
Alien vs. Predator is Marc Cerasini's 2004 HarperEntertainment novel of the film. It covers Alexa Woods from Everest to Bouvetoya under Charles Bishop Weyland's dying expedition, with five hunters instead of three. The book ends with Scar dead on the ice, the Queen under the harbor, Lex blooded and alone, and Scar's corpse stirring on the voyage home.
External Sources
- Alien vs. Predator at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Marc Cerasini interview at AvP Galaxy
Tag Categories: Avp Lore | Alien Merchandise | Predator Merchandise
