Aliens: Fire and Stone (2014): Plot, Characters & Lore
Aliens: Fire and Stone is a four-issue Dark Horse miniseries written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Patric Reynolds, with colors by Dave Stewart and painted covers by David Palumbo. The issues reached shops from September to December 2014 as the Aliens branch of Dark Horse's Fire and Stone crossover. After Xenomorphs overran Hadley's Hope on July 3, 2179, terraforming engineer Derrick Russell led survivors onto the mining vessel Onager and crashed on neighboring LV-223, a moon the company had listed as lifeless. The story takes place before Prometheus: Fire and Stone.
Plot Summary
The Fall Of Hadley's Hope
On the morning of July 3, 2179, Xenomorphs tore through Hadley's Hope on LV-426, also called Acheron, one of the known moons of Calpamos in Zeta 2 Reticuli. Derrick Russell, a terraforming engineer who had run the Acheron operation for four years, recorded the disaster as the colony fell. He found Genevieve Dione, the greenhouse supervisor who also taught the children of Hadley's Hope, among the survivors in the corridors. Russell told her he had a plan to get them off the rock. The pair pushed through the overrun halls toward the hangar as more colonists joined them.
The colony had no faster-than-light ship. Russell aimed for the Onager, a vessel built to drill ore and ferry cargo into low orbit rather than carry people between stars. Nolan Cale, a surveyor and wildcatter, judged that they had no choice but to try. Rain hammered the hangar as Xenomorphs closed in on the boarding party. Acid blood burned one shooter, and another colonist died to an inner jaw. Survivors scrambled aboard while the attack continued around the gantries.
Escape On The Onager
Russell asked Ramona to fly the ship even though she was not really rated on the equipment, and he promised he would not tell Weyland-Yutani if she would not. Cale went into the umbilicus to close the hatches between the Onager and the dock. While he worked, he saw Xenomorphs slip into one of the cargo holds. He told Russell that everything was good anyway. A hard takeoff knocked Cale unconscious as the overloaded ship left Acheron behind.
The Onager had never been meant to ferry about three dozen people. It came in hot toward the neighboring moon with barely enough fuel for a controlled descent. Company records had described LV-223 as a lifeless rock with no breathable atmosphere. The moon that rose beneath them was lush and green, and the air was already breathable when they approached. Cale remained unconscious through the fall, and the rest of the passengers suffered cuts and scrapes as the ship burned toward the surface.
Crash On LV-223
The Onager slammed into LV-223 and burned in a jungle that should not have existed. Thirty-eight people were onboard when the ship set down. Cale came around after the impact, still silent about what he had seen in the cargo hold. The survivors treated wounds and tried to understand how a moon listed as dead could hold air, plants, and water. Russell recorded that they had escaped one nightmare only to land in another.
Survivors inventoried what they had and argued over the next step. The wreck still held supplies, a medical kit, and the transceiver they would need if anyone were to hear them. Company files had given them no reason to expect life on LV-223, yet the air was sweet and the forest pressed close around the hull. Cale said nothing about the cargo holds. Russell and the others treated the wounded and tried to take stock of who had lived through the descent.
Stowaways Unleashed
They opened a cargo hold in search of a medical kit and unleashed the stowaways Cale had kept secret. Xenomorphs tore through the wreck within minutes. At least six people died in the first ten minutes, and others were dragged away into the trees. The remaining survivors fled toward high ground while the burning ship emptied behind them. Some of the dead were left inside the hold, and some vanished into the undergrowth before anyone could reach them.
The group found a hidden clearing they could try to fortify, far enough from the crash to breathe and close enough that they still hoped to return for the transceiver. They had escaped Hadley's Hope only to deliver the same creatures onto a new world. Russell wrote that they had brought the monsters with them. The jungle around the wreck was already alive with sounds that did not belong to a lifeless rock. What had looked like rescue from Acheron now looked like the start of a longer siege.
The Prometheus Probe
By July 10, 2179, Russell was tracking an old company probe through the jungle and using it as a companion he called Rover. The machine's memory showed that it had belonged to the USCSS Prometheus, which had mapped LV-223 decades earlier during the expedition seen in Prometheus. A hologram still reported that the ship was mapping the moon. Russell realized that he and the other refugees were not the first humans on LV-223, and not even the first company employees to walk there.
The old scans had shown a dry and lifeless rock. After just over eighty years, the same moon was teeming with plants and animals, a burst of growth that looked like millions of years of evolution packed into less than ninety years of surveying. Russell guessed that something had terraformed LV-223 on a scale humanity had only dreamt of. The previous visitors had found something on the moon, and then they were gone. He kept Rover on a leash and began to use the probe as a journal of what he found.
The Camp Divides
The hidden camp on high ground split over what to do next. Cale wanted to hit the aliens, recover supplies from the Onager, and retrieve the emergency beacon. Dione wanted the group to entrench, build defenses, and wait, because a raid on the wreck would be suicide. The argument had gone on since the landing. Edible plants and animals kept them alive, yet the jungle also hid a weird, oily black sludge that twisted and mutated whatever it touched.
Mutated monkeys tasted worse than they smelled, and the lakes held strange fish. The group kept watch along a wooden palisade while the debate between raid and defense refused to die. Russell spent more time away from camp with Rover, following the probe toward structures that did not look human. He still hoped the transceiver on the Onager could call for rescue, but he also wanted to understand how the moon had come alive so quickly. The split in the camp grew sharper each time someone failed to come back from the trees.
Lost To The Jungle
Xenomorphs kept testing the survivors as they moved through the trees. During one chase Cale shouted for Carl to run, and Carl did not make it back. Almost a third of the group was gone before the season turned. On September 12, 2179, Luiz was grabbed from the water while he fished and was hauled away screaming. The attacks left the camp smaller, hungrier, and more willing to listen to whoever promised a way off the moon.
Food grew stranger the longer they stayed. Creatures warped by the black sludge moved through the canopy, and the survivors learned which paths to avoid after dark. Each loss made Cale more eager to retake the Onager and made Dione more determined to hold the clearing. Russell wrote that the jungle itself seemed to be changing around them, as if the moon were still being rewritten. He kept following Rover farther from the palisade, toward the valley that held older ruins than any colonial prefab.
The Engineer Ship
Deeper in the valley Russell found the remains of a vast Engineer complex, including a monumental head and what he took to be a terraforming array. An intact hull nearby held an operational hypersleep chamber with a sleeper still inside. He pointed Rover at the chamber and recorded that he had not known the half of it. The builders had left machinery meant to seed a world with air and genetic material, work on a scale far beyond the colony he had run on Acheron.
He found no eggs of the kind recovered on Acheron. Scavenged parts and notes went into a cave that overlooked the valley, a hiding place he did not share with the camp. Rover stayed on a leash as he used the probe to store a running journal of what he saw. The array alone did not account for how quickly the moon had filled with life, and the mountain that rose over the complex continued to grow. Russell began to treat the valley as a puzzle he intended to solve even if the others never left the palisade.
Luiz Returns
On October 30, 2179, the black goo near camp made the nearby growth look wrong, and flying things moved through air that had grown harder to trust. Someone asked whether a figure at the edge of the trees was Ramona and what was wrong with her. Then Luiz came back. He was no longer only a man. His body had fused with a Xenomorph, and the hybrid smashed through the palisade as the camp tried to understand what they were seeing.
Cale put the hybrid down before it could kill anyone else at the wall. The shock of seeing Luiz returned in that form broke whatever calm the palisade still had. People who had watched friends vanish into the jungle now had proof that the stolen colonists were not simply dead. The black goo, the warped animals, and the stowaways from the Onager no longer felt like separate problems. Russell watched from the edge of the crisis and kept the location of his cave to himself.
Cale's Confession
After the attack Cale told the camp the truth. He had seen Xenomorphs climb into a cargo hold while he sealed the umbilicus on Acheron, and he had reported that the ship was clear so the others would not dump the containers and abandon him. The admission landed hard among people who had already buried friends on two moons. Survivors who had argued with him about a raid now stared at him as the reason the wreck was waiting to become a nest. The trust he had used to push for a return to the Onager collapsed in a single confession.
Anger in the clearing did not stop Cale from repeating his plan. He still meant to storm the Onager for supplies and a transmitter, and he asked who would go with him. Some of the remaining colonists answered that they were in. Russell stayed behind. He trusted the valley more than he trusted a run at the wreck, and he still had questions about the growing mountain and the machinery beneath it. The split that had started as a debate about defense became a parting of the group.
Raid On The Onager
Cale's party reached the crash site and found that the stowaways had turned the wreck into a hive. A Xenomorph Queen dominated the flooded interior, and eggs lined the spaces the colonists had once hoped to loot. The raiders fought through the nest as they hunted for the transmitter that could call for help. Several of them died in the assault. The Queen and her brood had claimed the only ship the refugees still had.
Cale reached the transmitter. In the fight that followed, black goo splashed across his face. The rest of the raid team did not make it out. He staggered away from the hive changed by more than the battle, carrying the device he had come for and a contamination he did not yet understand. Back at the hidden camp, Dione told the others they were safe enough to sleep. She did not know what was walking home toward her tent.
Return To Camp
On the night of October 31, 2179, a mutated Cale came back to the clearing. He found Dione and said he was sorry before he attacked her. The camp that had argued about walls and raids died in the dark as Xenomorphs followed the thing he had become. Cries carried across the valley to the cave where Russell had hidden with Rover. From that overlook he understood what had become of Cale and of the people he had left behind the palisade.
The attackers did not know where Russell's cave was. He stayed quiet while the slaughter ran its course below him. By the time the sounds faded, the hidden clearing was no longer a refuge. Russell was alone on LV-223 with Rover, the growing mountain, and the knowledge that his silence about the cave had saved him. The people who had escaped Hadley's Hope with him were gone, and the wreck that had carried them there now belonged entirely to the hive. He kept recording what he saw, because the journal was the only witness he had left.
Another Earth Ship
On November 9, 2179, Russell found the wreckage of another Earth ship and recognized it as the source of Rover and the old mapping survey. Salvage around the broken hull confirmed that the Prometheus had reached LV-223 long before Hadley's Hope was built. He took what he could use and refined his idea of the black goo, which he now saw as an accelerant that had driven the jungle's unnatural growth. The earlier visitors had not simply mapped a dead rock. They had left wreckage and a transformed world behind them.
He also found a diary that Standish had dropped while she ran from the aliens. Mutated Cale hunted him through the valley, yet near the mountain the Xenomorphs chased Cale rather than Russell. Luiz had been fused with a Xenomorph. Cale had turned into something like them, and the two kinds did not get along. Russell started to believe that the rising mountain offered a kind of protection, even as it kept getting larger above the Engineer works.
The Sleeping Engineers
Russell returned to the intact Engineer ship and stood again before the sleeper in the hypersleep chamber. He tried to wake the occupants to ask what the black goo was for and how it could be used without destroying the person who touched it. No answer came from the chamber. He theorized that filtering the substance through something with a similar morphology, perhaps a construct or an android, might let it be used medically instead of turning a person into what Cale had become.
The effort left him with headaches and thoughts that were harder to keep in focus. He wondered whether he had taken in some trace of the goo as dust or particulate, even though he had not been splashed as Cale had. On December 4, 2179, he wrote that his mind no longer felt entirely his own. He kept working anyway, because the sleepers, the mountain, and the wreck of the Prometheus were the only clues he still had. The journal became less a report for rescue and more a record for whoever might find Rover after him.
Signal Under The Mountain
On December 13, 2179, Russell had Rover scan his own body. He saw something in his head and asked whether it was a tumor. A reading that followed picked up a signal of human origin from beneath the growing mountain. Russell asked whether the mountain had eaten somebody, and whether it would eat him as well. Later stories in the Fire and Stone crossover treated that rising formation as the Deacon that grew on LV-223 after the Prometheus expedition.
He kept Rover close as he weighed what the reading meant. If something human was already inside the mountain, then the peak was not only a landmark or a shield. It was a grave or a prison growing over a person. The thought did not stop him from using the mountain's shelter when Cale or the Xenomorphs came too near. He had survived by staying out of sight, and the scan gave him one more reason to fear that the valley was not done changing him.
The Graveyard
On December 19, 2179, Russell tended a graveyard for Genevieve, marking the dead as she would have wanted. Mutated Cale found him there. Russell asked whether anything of the man he had known was still left, then drove a wooden marker through him. He told Cale he was sorry, that Cale had deserved better, and that they all had. He asked his old companion to rest in peace beside the graves of the people who had fled Acheron with them.
The fight left Russell too far from the mountain's protection. Xenomorphs closed in as he stumbled toward a pool of black goo and recited the notes he had gathered about the substance. Wounded, he called for Rover, for the mountain, for anybody. He recognized the pool and wondered whether the goo would change him enough to survive, as it had changed Cale, and whether he would even remember if it did. He reached toward the black surface as a Xenomorph came down on him, and the record of his time on LV-223 ended there.
Key Characters
- Derrick Russell was a terraforming engineer who had run the Acheron operation for four years. He led survivors to the Onager, recorded the months on LV-223 through the probe he called Rover, and was last heard reaching for a pool of black goo as a Xenomorph closed in.
- Genevieve Dione was the greenhouse supervisor who also taught the colony's children. She argued for fortifying the hidden camp, told the others they were safe on the night of October 31, and was attacked when mutated Cale returned.
- Nolan Cale was a surveyor and wildcatter who sealed the Onager's hatches, hid the fact that Xenomorphs had boarded, led the raid on the wreck, and mutated after black goo splashed his face. Russell killed him in the graveyard.
- Ramona flew the Onager off Acheron even though she was not rated on the ship. Later, someone at the camp asked whether a wrong-looking figure at the trees was her.
- Luiz was taken by a Xenomorph while fishing on September 12, 2179, and returned fused with one of the creatures. Cale killed the hybrid at the palisade.
- Carl was a survivor who died in the jungle after Cale shouted for him to run.
- J.R. was among the colonists who boarded the Onager during the escape from Hadley's Hope.
- Rover was an old Weyland-Yutani probe from the Prometheus mapping survey. Russell used it as a companion, a journal, and a scanner until the record ended.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Aliens: Fire and Stone as four issues from September to December 2014, with issue #1 on sale September 24, 2014. Chris Roberson wrote the miniseries, Patric Reynolds drew it, Dave Stewart colored it, and Nate Piekos lettered it, with David Palumbo on the main covers and Fiona Staples on a variant for issue #1. Philip R. Simon edited the series, with Roxy Polk as assistant editor, under publisher Mike Richardson. Issue #3 reached shops on November 26. The story opens on the fall of Hadley's Hope on July 3, 2179, and follows the Onager survivors through December of that year.
Dark Horse collected the miniseries in Aliens: Fire and Stone, a 104-page trade paperback released on May 13, 2015. The four issues later appeared in the Prometheus: The Complete Fire and Stone hardcover in October 2015 and in the Aliens/Predator/Prometheus/AVP: Fire and Stone trade in April 2018, alongside Joshua Williamson and Christopher Mooneyham's Predator: Fire and Stone and Christopher Sebela's Alien vs. Predator: Fire and Stone. Each floppy carried the Fire and Stone event branding. Dark Horse returned to the same moon in 2016 with Aliens: Life and Death. The opening text places the story before Prometheus: Fire and Stone.
Behind The Scenes
Chris Roberson wrote Aliens: Fire and Stone as the Aliens branch of Dark Horse's 2014 Fire and Stone line, a shared publishing event that also sent other creative teams to the same moon. Patric Reynolds drew the interiors in a heavy, rain-soaked style, Dave Stewart handled the colors, and David Palumbo painted the main covers, including the hexagonal window image used on issue #1. The miniseries opens on the fall of Hadley's Hope, the colony overrun in Aliens, then moves the refugees to the moon explored in Prometheus. Fiona Staples contributed the variant cover for the first issue.
The comic presents Russell's account as a survivor's journal stored on a recovered company probe, and it ends without showing whether he used the black goo or was taken by a Xenomorph. Later Fire and Stone stories return to LV-223, to the growing mountain above the Engineer works, and to questions about what the black goo does to human bodies. Russell's hope that the substance might be filtered through a construct or an android is the question he leaves unanswered. The series does not resolve his fate beyond that last reach toward the pool.
Conclusion
Aliens: Fire and Stone follows the Hadley's Hope survivors who escaped the colony only to deliver Xenomorphs and themselves onto LV-223. Derrick Russell, Genevieve Dione, Nolan Cale, and the rest of the Onager's thirty-eight passengers spent months in a jungle accelerated by black goo, until a raid on the wreck and Cale's mutation destroyed the camp. Russell survived long enough to find the Prometheus wreckage, an Engineer sleeper, and a human signal under the growing mountain, then vanished from his own record as the goo and a Xenomorph closed in. The miniseries leaves his final choice unresolved and turns toward the rest of Fire and Stone on that moon.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Alien Comics
