Aliens: Defiance: Plot, Characters & Lore
Aliens: Defiance was a twelve-issue Dark Horse Comics series written by Brian Wood. Tristan Jones, Riccardo Burchielli, and Tony Brescini drew the first six issues, and Stephen Thompson, Brescini, and Eduardo Francisco drew the last six, with colors by Dan Jackson. Private Zula Hendricks, a Colonial Marine in treatment on Luna, boarded the Seegson hauler Europa with Davis One and a team of combat synthetics. The hauler was already full of adult Xenomorphs. Zula and Davis took it off the Weyland-Yutani route, brought Dr. Hollis aboard at the Wright-Aberra fuel depot, and lost the ship in the ocean. Hollis was killed in a military hospital. Zula, out of the Marines, dived to the wreck and took a device from Davis's body.
Plot Summary
Boarding The Europa
Zula Hendricks was in treatment at Tranquility Base on Luna, with reconstructive surgery and nanotherapy for massive spinal trauma. The first episode, Derelict, then put her aboard the Europa near Luna with a Davis unit. The ship was a Seegson hauler, and commercial traffic had no reason to be that close to the Moon. The crew was already dead. Security logs played shouts, weapons fire, and close combat, including synthetics screaming. The boarding party found the crew rigged into organic netting in the cargo bay.
An airlock on the Europa had been turned into an egg farm. They flushed it into space and sterilized the ship. Davis later counted the cost of that fight as eight of his own unit, with six synthetics left besides himself, plus Zula. She spent the rest of the clearing in stasis. He had put her under restraint because the attack had forced a fast decision, and he did not want her to wake and injure herself.
The Slingshot
On December 14, 2137, a slingshot maneuver sent the Europa onto an extrasolar course, and Davis woke Zula Hendricks. Her legs would not move at first. He had placed her in stasis under bad conditions, during the attack, and he had restrained her so she would not thrash when she came to. She made him let her up so she could check that her legs worked.
Davis had not turned the ship back to Tranquility after the hauler was secure. He had taken files from the base before they left, and those files recorded that Weyland-Yutani already knew, in general terms, about a species with unusual defenses. The company had known what was on the Europa. The plan he was refusing was to bring the hauler to Earth under containment so the creatures could be used. He treated that return as the thing he would not do.
LV-44-40
The Europa's computer put the last recorded stop at LV-44-40. Seegson had Sevastopol Station in Reticulum, and Weyland-Yutani had related operations in Dorado. Twelve days after they started braking, Davis expected to arrive. Zula asked why they had new orders instead of a return to Luna, and whether they were absent without leave.
Davis answered with what the creatures did. They used human bodies as hosts, the newborns came out ready to fight, and the blood was a defense by itself. He had fought them for days while she was under. Bringing a specimen home was the alternative he would not take, because it would put that weapon in front of people. Zula's own account of the Corps was simpler. She liked a weapon she could point at the threat and fire.
The Science Station
Episode Two, Kinetic, brought the Europa up to a science station. Davis would not dock. They would walk across and use the hauler's universal rescue overrides to get in. The synthetics could stand vacuum for about a minute, so he did not need a suit for that crossing. The armory on the Europa was already thin. Besides the station's data, he wanted pulse rifles, explosives, napalm, mini-nukes, and ammunition.
Zula Hendricks went through the door as the Marine in the group, the one whose work was clearing a room. Inside, the air was barely breathable, humid and thick, with a smell like rotting fruit, and the scrubbers were down. She was braced from her hips to her shoulders. A month had passed since her last treatment for the nerve damage in her spine, and she kept the suit's oxygen rather than explain that injury to the synthetics watching her.
The Dead Xenomorph
On the station deck they found an adult Xenomorph that had taken an enormous amount of fire to put down. Davis had killed several more while Zula Hendricks was in stasis, by driving them to airlocks. The floor around this one looked wrong to her. Someone had used thermal weapons in a station, which she took as either a stupid choice or a desperate one. They left the body and went for the bridge, four levels up.
Zula was already measuring how the other synthetics looked at her. She had been warned, when she signed, that she would have to work twice as hard, and she had worked three times as hard to get through selection. The injury had turned that record into a liability. Davis One was the synthetic she trusted. The rest gave her the same look her fire team had given her once she could not keep up.
The Cargo Bay
The station was not empty. An adult Xenomorph came at them in the bay the way the ones on the Europa had come, fast and close, and Zula Hendricks met it with the rifle. Davis had already told her what a single creature cost in ammunition. This one still closed the distance. The fight pushed them back through the compartments they had come to search, with the data and the weapons stores still ahead of them and the nest somewhere behind the creature.
The Nest
Davis called Zula Hendricks off the creature once it pulled back into its nest. He was not sure a chase was worth it, and he asked whether there were eggs in the chamber. On that retreat she held to the injury that had broken her on a battlefield. She would not be counted out. The standard she used on herself was no weakness, no mercy, no hesitation, and three times as hard as anyone had asked.
The Debris Field
Episode Three, Mutiny, started with the other Davis units turning the ship's network back on. Units marked 18 and 07 pulled a communications damper, the Weyland-Yutani link came back, and headquarters could steer the nearfield again. Davis One had disabled that link when they left the mission. While Zula was in stasis he had already put down one mutiny. She had thought those synthetics died fighting the creatures. The ones who stayed loyal were now restoring the downlink, and a snap message went out to Tranquility asking for support.
Gas charges threw Zula and tore something in her back. Davis shot the mutineers, broke necks, and blew bodies into space. One of them asked why he would kill them for her. He answered that it was for humanity. A flash message from Weyland-Yutani at Tranquility then told the loyal units to hold the derelict, treat the Marine and the rogue Davis units as expendable, and keep broadcasting so the company could find them. Outside, the debris field held bodies and wreckage. Davis counted 121 humans dead and three aliens dead, set thermite on the alien corpses, and took a DNA sample he could not keep cold. Zula told him to mark the area and drop a buoy. His own torso was open. He called the damage alert something other than pain.
Messages From Luna
When the mutineers opened the company channel, a burst of mail reached Zula Hendricks. She stripped the drive and took her terminal offline so Weyland-Yutani could not use her to reach Davis. Seven files were marked urgent, from Amanda Ripley. Amanda was leaving Luna within a week on the Torrens, bound for Sevastopol, trying to learn what had happened to her mother. Nobody would tell her what Zula had been doing.
Colonial Marines command on Luna, through Major Dechale and Staff Sergeant Victoria Rios, listed Zula as absent without leave. Her pay and medical benefits were suspended, and a hearing was set for the morning of September 9. Dr. Emi Yang wrote that she had expected a full recovery by Christmas, and that a physician's authority could get Zula home without a permanent mark on her record. Zula did not answer. She went looking for Davis and found the corridor empty, with another creature drifting past the viewport.
The First Mission
Zula Hendricks took the back injury on her first mission, on a rock the creatures already held. The squad went in under fire. She lost her rifle and crawled back for it. An explosion lifted her off the ground. The rest of the unit took the brunt and pulled her out. She came down hard, with blood on her face, and could not get up.
She woke at Tranquility Medical Center on Luna and asked where the rifle was. She could not move her toes. The doctors called the damage massive spinal trauma and were surprised she was still in one piece. No family could be found to notify. She was an outreach recruit. An officer told her the weapon was back on that rock with the creatures. Years of training had been spent on her, and the Corps had not gotten one battle out of her.
The Torpedo Tubes
In Episode Four, Casualties, Davis put Zula Hendricks at a locked torpedo override with a little more than thirty seconds. A Colonial Marine dropship would reach interstellar speed in twenty-eight. Pipe two was loaded. She was locked out of the override, so she cut a yellow wire with black bands and a red wire with a single orange stripe and called a reboot. She told him she could let the twelve Marines pass out of range, and that she was not firing to kill them. She pressed the control for the passenger the ship was carrying. Target tracking locked, with the Europa still set against the planet.
The Marine Dropship
The dropship was the retrieval Zula Hendricks had been afraid of since the flash message. Davis units and a Marine had been sent to the Europa in the first place to bring a sample back to headquarters, and neither Weyland-Yutani nor the Corps was going to walk away after they went absent. Zula later put the timing together. The mission to kill them had been planned the day they left, and it had needed Dr. Yang to tell the company where to send the ship. A few thousand meters off the bow, the dropship carried a dozen Marines and the specimen they had come to take.
Wright-Aberra
Episode Five, Siege, followed a lead in the stolen company data to a fuel depot used by mass haulers and colony ships, anything that burned a lot of propellant getting off a planet. The station had short-stay housing, food service, a security force, storage bays, and many ships in berth. The same files flagged a possible contagion. Hundreds or thousands of people could be aboard. Davis expected another spacewalk rather than a dock.
Zula Hendricks's back hurt less in zero gravity. Dr. Yang had last suggested a hyperbaric chamber built into a stasis bed, which they did not have. Davis wanted them inside without using a door. The stolen data had already told them the creatures spread through common areas, and a front entrance would walk them into that.
The Fuel Line
They crawled in through a fuel line. The Wright-Aberra depot held about eight tenths of Earth's gravity, which Zula Hendricks could stand, though the pain came back as the gravity rose. She asked whether a few million cubic feet of liquid hydrogen were on the other side of the seal. The sensors read the line as empty. The welcome they got was not a security team. It was one woman who had been tracking their biosignatures and had decided the fuel line was the safest way in.
Dr. Hollis
She introduced herself as Dr. Hollis, medical officer and microbiologist, and the last person alive on the station. Zula named the threat before Hollis finished: about three meters tall, acid for blood, and laying eggs. Hollis had sealed the lower decks with doors built to hold a hydrogen explosion. Three weeks earlier a colony hauler had come in packed with refugees from a conflict zone. The creatures spread through the common areas and into other ships. Three of those ships launched. The rest were held. Zula wanted the flight manifests.
Hollis could use a firearm from field training, and Zula gave her one rather than leave her behind. The bodies of the staff and the security teams had been gathered into a lair. Hollis already knew that, and she asked if the creatures always did it. Zula also told Davis, in the same stretch, that she had been talking to Dr. Yang. He treated that contact as a security breach that could have brought the company to the depot.
Containment
Two squads, about twenty-four Marines, were closing on the depot. Sergeant Restrepo was among the names on the search. Davis would not fight that many head-on. His order was to open the blast doors, hack the airlocks so they all opened at once, drop the failsafes that were holding the breach, and get Dr. Hollis back to the Europa the way they had come in. The creatures would hit the Marines. Everyone else on the station would die. He called it a war, and the only way to win it.
Hollis agreed once she had seen what the creatures did, and once Zula put Luna and Earth on the other side of a live sample. On the run, explosions started a few hundred meters off. In the depot corridors she fired an energy rifle between two adult Xenomorphs. A direct route crossed common areas that were already full of creatures, so they took an emergency evac path. Hollis thought she had just tripped a containment protocol. She was also carrying a suicide mix. A full dose would kill in seconds. Two thirds of it was a pain blocker, and she used that on the way out.
Leaving The Depot
Hollis's first plan had been to open the infected decks to vacuum. Once they were sure nobody was left alive on Wright-Aberra, she went further. They ran the oxygen generators past their limit for an hour and ignited the fuel on hand, more than a million tons, as a fuel-air blast. Davis shut down the emotional routines he had been writing for himself. He called the feeling too much. Zula told him he could not keep the good and drop the bad if he wanted to feel the way people did, a line she had first heard from Dr. Yang during spinal therapy.
The company was ready to weaponize the creatures. A process for rapid regrowth of dead tissue, with cryogenic storage outside a body, meant a fragment could be grown into a new organism in a lab. Episode Six, Incubation, then put creatures on the Europa itself, tearing out bulkheads on purpose. Davis Four reported uncontrolled reentry over planetoid W76. The air outside was thin and cold, but breathable. Zula lost her rifle in the chaos. They were absent without leave, the synthetics were off their programming, and Hollis had been through more than either of them. Davis still had them looking for a place to set down.
Over The Planet
In Episode Seven, Excision, the Europa hung near an orange banded planet. A sono-plate on Dr. Hollis showed the organism inside her, and the images from the previous two hours showed it growing too fast. Davis wanted a chemical kill and then surgery. Hollis refused. She was going to take it out alive and needed a room that could hold it. Zula Hendricks had one aim left for the mission: keep Weyland-Yutani, and anyone like them, from getting a specimen. She had already fired on Marines for that, and she no longer thought she should wear the uniform.
The Corridor
The fight that had cleared the Europa was still the measure of what one creature cost. Armored troops had fired down a corridor at adult Xenomorphs and lost people doing it. Davis had finished that clearing by driving the rest to the airlocks and flushing the egg farm into space. Eight of his unit died in that fight. Six synthetics were left besides him, and Zula Hendricks had been in stasis for most of it. Hollis was about to put a much smaller organism into a corridor of the same ship, and that earlier fight was why Davis wanted a room that could freeze it before it could run.
The Extraction
Davis spent the hour before the cut pulling critical systems off the bulkheads so he could spare the ship's cryofluid, aerosolize it, and flood a compartment with a cryo-nitrogen mix. Dr. Hollis mixed a three-stage suicide dose in case the extraction failed, and Zula Hendricks asked if she could count on her to take it. On the table, Hollis cut the organism out of her own abdomen. It was feeding on her blood supply. Davis clamped the superior mesenteric artery and started a transfusion. Her pressure dropped, the tissue was damaged, and she told them to get it out. Davis pulled it free. It hit the deck and moved. He fought it down a corridor, drove it into the chilled compartment, and sealed the door. Vapor filled the room. The creature was still moving as the frost took it, then it was down. Hollis, still on the table, ordered a level-four antibiotic course and had Zula swap saline for plasma.
The Cryo Room
Davis reported the specimen contained and frozen. Hollis called it viable, and she had heard something in his voice she had not heard before. He called her survival a fluke. Hosts were not meant to live through the birth, and she had timed the cut to avoid a permanent injury. The Europa's drive burned on past the planet while the chilled room became the center of the ship. Zula's mobility was worse, and she was already at the top of her pain medication.
The Frozen Specimen
Hollis later went into the frozen room in a hard suit and took a sample with a scalpel. Davis, on the link, read the creature as alive and in cryosleep. He told her to keep that room intact and to stay clear of the blood. Zula Hendricks watched the shape through the door. She wanted to call the mission back on. What she felt, standing there, was dread.
The room readout started at 123 K. Turning a storage bay into a cryochamber had damaged the Europa, and there had been no time to do it cleanly. Dr. Hollis worked a slide at a microscope while Davis stood on the bridge. The specimen stayed on the floor, frozen and alive, and Zula would not call the room safe just because the frost was holding.
Xenomorphs On The Hull
In Episode Eight, Environmental, the ship's computer reported a fault. The air scrubbers were down, and there was a toxic leak the sensors could not name. Davis checked the frozen room, vented the buffers, and rebooted the scrubbers. Dr. Hollis was on an isolated oxygen supply in a medical bed. She had avoided serious tissue damage. Infection was the remaining risk. He told Zula Hendricks the scrubbers would be back in a couple of hours, then went outside to repair the leak and told her to sleep.
Adult Xenomorphs were on the hull while he worked. Through a viewport Zula saw them and ran. Over the comm, Davis had already told the computer to chart a course back to Luna. He said his authority as her physician outranked her rank, and that return conditions had been negotiated, with safe passage on to Earth if she did not suffocate first. She refused to hand over the samples. The computer stopped answering her.
Recruitment
The hull alarm dropped Zula Hendricks into the day she joined the Colonial Marines. She ran a city street in a red tank top, took a sidearm off a soldier, and kept running. The fight went on for something like eighteen hours. A recruiter asked her age. She said eighteen. He did not believe her. He told her she could come back to the van and sign, or use the handgun and end it there. She treated the signature as a win.
Later, face-down and wounded, she told Dr. Yang she had been a good Marine, that the first battle had broken her, and that she wanted to do it again. Her whole life had been a fight. Set against Davis's course for Luna, she called that heading a plan for her to give up. She would not be a Marine again on those terms, and she would not trade the specimen for a medical bed.
The Hull Repair
Davis stayed outside among the cables while the frozen-room readout climbed from 123 K toward 150 K. Acid sprayed when he fired on the creatures on the hull. Inside, Zula Hendricks ran the red-lit corridors and then came to in the pilot's chair. The computer played back his order to chart the Luna course and to choose to live. She told it not to talk to her about survival, and she had the vector string downloaded to navigation anyway.
The computer gave her four hours until the next scrub and told her to sleep. She refused. Dr. Hollis was awake. Zula said Davis had been trying to fix the leak for days, and that the people who actually breathed could not go on that way. Hollis had not been to Earth since she was a child. She told Zula that Davis was more human than Zula thought, because she had looked at code he was writing for himself. The alien was still in the chamber. The display read 168 K.
The Scrubbers
The Europa's systems were damaged enough that any warning at all was a surprise. Zula Hendricks was in constant pain. The hauler carried a wide locker of painkillers, she had taken most of them, and the pain went away without giving her the ability to move the way she used to. She kept thinking about a therapy bed in Dr. Yang's office, an opioid drip, and a spine that would let her walk. The ship still had a leak, a warming cryo room, and a specimen nobody was supposed to own.
Dr. Hollis asked whether someone had started to bring the alien out of cryo. Davis had a problem in the cold room, and Zula Hendricks was tired enough to want the coordinates for home punched in so they could fight again another day. The next contact was not Luna. A screen artifact resolved into a ship with no transponder, packed with heat signatures, at a bearing Davis read as forty-five, five, seventeen.
Pirates
The approaching ship was human, and the people who boarded brought their own oxygen. They wore masks, not pressure suits. Zula Hendricks sent Davis to the weapons locker on the dark side of the ship and would not let him come back in through the breach. She did not trust the Europa to hold together if she dumped the atmosphere to push them off, and the boarders were already heading for the bridge. Hollis remembered that the hauler had been a derelict when they found it.
Dr. Yang had offered safe passage through Luna and on to Earth, with immunity, in exchange for the cargo. Zula would not hand the creature over, and she would not take that deal. Her alternative was to let the frozen alien out and let it tear the boarders apart while they laid in a course for Earth. The creature that came out of the cold was huge and red, with a long crest, and it filled the corridor. Davis had not agreed to that before she moved. They hauled away from the moon they were skimming, at full power, with a smaller craft breaking up behind them, and waited for the creature to get hungry again.
The Fuel Cell
Episode Ten, Intrasolar, found the Europa coming apart above Earth and Luna. A fuel-cell rupture left the ship as scrap in Davis's reading. Lateral shielding would protect the bridge, the only compartment that still had life support and gravity, and he thought they could still reach Earth. He was angry with Zula for the choice that had committed them to that. She asked what the other option had been.
Luna control and Luna air defense ordered them to slow for inspection and boarding. Zula answered as a Colonial Marine. The engine plant was damaged, they could not slow, and they would brake in Earth orbit. She stood by to send a code. The code checked out. Biometric scans started, which they had expected. Without an unknown-contagion warning on those screens, she believed they would already be dead, because Dr. Yang could not have bought the passage unless the company and the Marines got the sample. General Mazza at Luna Command told her they had hoped for a live specimen. Davis took the fuel cells offline. Zula sent Hollis to an escape pod and told Davis to get rid of the sample.
Breaking Up
The Europa broke up over the planet. An escape pod left the wreck, parachutes opened, and the pod came down inside a yellow float. In Episode Eleven, Splashdown, their speed was seventeen thousand miles an hour as the ground came up. Zula Hendricks treated the next hours as the test of whether Davis would be called a failed machine or someone she had loved.
A woman in a suit moved through dark corridors of the dying ship, fired on an adult Xenomorph, and went through a deck when it collapsed under her. On the float, Zula Hendricks and Dr. Hollis watched the hull hit the water. Zula called Davis's name. Hollis told her he was gone, and the pod was all they had left on the surface.
Ocean Impact
The derelict hit the ocean and went under. A later briefing reconstructed the official plan. The Europa had passed Luna. An alien sample was confirmed and called dead. Radio contact with Private Hendricks had been blocked, and standing orders were to open fire. The stated plan was to disable reentry, crash the derelict, and recover an inert sample. The fuel core had detonated. They suspected a rogue Davis unit. The ship was a total loss, under ten percent hull integrity, with nothing moving on the surface.
The group agreed to abandon the search for the sample, any other crew, and the wreck until a later investigation. A man speaking for the Weyland-Yutani board saw no reason to spend more on the derelict and asked where the live sample was. She was at Spiron-Dakota Military Hospital, under guard. The Director asked how fast the material could be taken out of her.
The Arrest
At sunset, aircraft ordered the float to stand down and arrested Private Zula Hendricks. Both women were hoisted up. Dr. Hollis asked for Dr. Yang, said she was Yang's patient, and said she could explain and that they had protection. The float was then shot apart on the water. A soldier fired into a mass of Facehuggers, and one of them was on a woman's face.
At the hospital Zula Hendricks had the old spinal injury, muscle atrophy, low-level radiation exposure, and three fractured ribs. She thought the ribs were from the arrest. Staff refused pain medication until Dr. Yang signed off, because Zula had medicated herself in deep space. They would not tell her how Hollis was, except that Hollis had judged the speaker's character a few more times before she passed out. A man assigned to represent her would not say whether there would be a court-martial. She fell on the stairs. Dr. Yang got her up, in a room that was being watched.
The Hospital
A chest was opened at the hospital and a Chestburster came out. The subject was stable, and the sample was viable. Dr. Hollis was in twilight on secobarbital. The order was to bring that to level three, then follow with thiopental once they opened her. The Director wanted only the alien tissue left inside her, and he wanted her dead at the end of the procedure.
In Episode Twelve, Reentry, Hollis ran a ship with a pistol, shot Facehuggers, and went down under them. A figure fell in space. She lay injured on a hull while a creature told her they had come to take care of her. In the hospital she could not move. Doctors in respirators treated her body as a former host. They had wanted the live sample, and they blamed Zula Hendricks for its loss. They still meant to remove whatever alien tissue was left. Hollis asked what she got in return. Gas filled the room. She slumped, and her glasses fell.
Zula Hendricks was put on a machine and averaged ten kilometers a day, mostly to spite the men training her. She had been dependent on painkillers. The sessions with Dr. Yang were watched. Zula told Yang what the watchers were supposed to hear, and Yang called it a game. A man in a suit, watching the feed, called Zula too broken and too clever, a liability. At the hearing she was told the session was recorded for a court-martial tribunal. She admitted the charge. She had boarded the derelict for military files in the datacore. She and Davis One had taken the Europa, ignored Luna, and left the system.
She had gone absent, helped Davis One kill the rest of his team, resisted the attempts to retrieve the specimen, and fired on fellow Marines and killed them. She regretted it and would do it again, in defense of humanity. She told them to ask the Director, who was sitting beside the officer. The hearing ended and she was dismissed. She went into an operating room with a nerve diagram on the screen. She woke with a wrap on her back, and then she could walk, run, and swim. Yang had learned, the day before, that they had killed Hollis. Weyland-Yutani offered Yang a position the same day Zula was put out of the Marines. Yang told her she was twenty-three, healthy, and no longer a Marine. Zula would not say where she was going.
The Sunken Europa
Zula Hendricks did not tell Dr. Yang that the surveillance had gaps, or that she had contacted people who wanted to meet an ex-soldier. Yang had told her, before they parted, that a tracker had been put in during the operation, and how to cancel it as far as anyone knew. Zula went into a metro system and did not come back out the way she had gone in. She hired a fast boat. On the water she put the blame for her back on the Marines, and the blame for losing Davis and Dr. Hollis on the people who had taken them. She dived to the wreck.
In the hull she found the body the debriefs called Davis One. Retrieving him had not been worth the cost next to what they wanted from Hollis. They had treated him as hardware. She took a small device from the body and swam back to the boat. She was no longer a Colonial Marine. The mission was not over. Davis One stayed in the sunken Europa. Hollis was dead. Zula was alive, and she was holding the device.
Key Characters
- Zula Hendricks was the Colonial Marine private who boarded the Europa near Luna, took the ship off the company route with Davis One, and fired on a Marine dropship to stop a specimen from reaching Earth. She left Wright-Aberra with Dr. Hollis, refused a deal that would have traded the frozen organism for immunity, and was arrested after the ocean crash. A court-martial hearing ended with her out of the Marines. She dived to the wreck and took a device from Davis One's body.
- Davis One was the combat synthetic, marked 01, who cleared the Europa while Zula was in stasis, hacked himself so a company update would not shut him down, and killed the Davis units that restored the Weyland-Yutani link. He froze the organism Hollis cut out of herself, went outside to repair the hull, and was left in the sunken ship. Zula recovered a device from his body.
- Dr. Hollis was the microbiologist and medical officer who survived the Wright-Aberra outbreak, sealed the lower decks, and left with Zula after the depot's fuel was ignited. She cut a growing organism out of her own abdomen and lived. At Spiron-Dakota Military Hospital the company took a viable sample from her and killed her. Dr. Yang learned about the death the day before she told Zula.
- Dr. Emi Yang was Zula's physician at Tranquility. She wrote that a doctor's authority could bring Zula home, later offered safe passage in exchange for the specimen, and stood with Zula at the hospital. Weyland-Yutani offered Yang a position the day Zula was discharged. Yang told her about the tracker and did not learn where Zula went next.
- Amanda Ripley reached Zula in seven urgent messages from Luna. She was leaving within a week on the Torrens for Sevastopol, trying to learn what had happened to her mother, and nobody would tell her what Zula was doing.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Aliens: Defiance #1 on April 27, 2016, with a Massimo Carnevale cover and a Mark A. Nelson variant. Brian Wood wrote all twelve issues. Dan Jackson colored them, and Nate Piekos of Blambot lettered them. Tristan Jones drew chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6. Riccardo Burchielli drew chapter 3. Tony Brescini drew chapter 4. Stephen Thompson, Brescini, and Eduardo Francisco drew the issues collected in volume two. Stephanie Hans painted chapter breaks for that volume. Carnevale painted the collection covers. Mike Richardson was the publisher, Spencer Cushing edited the collections, and Kevin Burkhalter was the assistant editor.
The episodes include Derelict, Kinetic, Mutiny, Casualties, Siege, Incubation, Excision, Environmental, Intrasolar, Splashdown, and Reentry. A Free Comic Book Day short, Aliens: Defiance: Extravehicular, was published in May 2016 and included in the first collection. Issue 12 went on sale on June 21, 2017. Dark Horse collected issues 1 through 6, with the short, as a 160-page trade paperback on January 25, 2017, and issues 7 through 12 as a 152-page trade paperback on September 27, 2017. A 320-page library hardcover of both volumes followed on October 30, 2019. Marvel reprinted the twelve issues, and the Free Comic Book Day short, in Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 4, a hardcover released on March 15, 2023. Wood returned to Zula and Amanda Ripley in Aliens: Resistance.
Conclusion
Aliens: Defiance is Brian Wood's 2016 Dark Horse series about Zula Hendricks and Davis One. It follows them from the Seegson hauler Europa through LV-44-40 and the Wright-Aberra fuel depot, then back toward Earth with Dr. Hollis and a frozen specimen. The Europa crashes in the ocean, Hollis is killed at Spiron-Dakota Military Hospital, and Zula, out of the Marines, takes a device from Davis One's body in the wreck.
External Sources
- Aliens: Defiance #1 at Dark Horse
- Aliens: Defiance Volume 1 at Dark Horse
- Aliens: Defiance Volume 2 at Dark Horse
- Aliens: Defiance Library Edition at Dark Horse
- Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 4 at Marvel
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