Aliens: More Than Human: Plot, Characters & Lore
Aliens: More Than Human is a four-issue comic series published by Dark Horse Comics from May to December 2009, written by John Arcudi and drawn by Zach Howard. It was first released simply as Aliens and took its subtitle when it was collected in 2010. It follows cultural biologist David Sereda, whose science team was murdered by prospectors on the planet Chione, and who answered a survivor's call from a vast alien necropolis overrun by Xenomorphs.
Plot Summary
Studying Earth's Invaders
In the basements of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, cultural biologist David Sereda was writing a paper on whether non-human creatures could be said to have cultures. His notes turned to the Xenomorphs, a species that had appeared on Earth not long before and spread so far that many people believed humanity would become extinct. Sereda compared the creatures to termites and leafcutter ants, insects that built mounds and farmed fungus, and to chimpanzees that stripped twigs into tools. He also noted that Xenomorphs had cut electrical systems on more than one occasion, leaving people in the dark and open to attack.
Sereda argued that limited data was not enough to judge whether the creatures could reason, and that nobody would breed Xenomorphs simply to satisfy curiosity. His colleagues Tom and Terese then came down to Basement C, where a mounted Xenomorph hung from the ceiling above his desk, and joked about how anyone could work under it. They told him there was no phone reception in the sub-basements and that his presence was needed upstairs within the hour. The academic consortium they belonged to had won the right to study a site far from Earth, and Sereda was going with them.
Traveling To Chione
The science team traveled aboard the Vidar, a transport that entered the Chione system after a long hypersleep. The pilots reported that the ship's auto-com had been sending out the usual prompts for a week without any reply from the surface, and Sereda had tried the planet too with no answer. In the mess, Terese had already mapped the terrain and the lone road to the site, which held what looked like buildings built by something other than humans. Crew member Frederick reminded the scientists of the stories told about earlier finds, none of which had been proven.
Sereda explained that the planet had been claimed by Howito Enterprises, a wildcat outfit that hunted for habitable worlds and filed claims on them for a fee. The prospectors had stumbled on the ancient structures and sold the excavation rights to the highest bidder, and the consortium had won. The Vidar met heavy ion density on approach, and the crew strapped in for an early entry rather than wait for another orbit. After a rough descent through the atmosphere, the team stepped out onto a hot, rust-colored plain where two men were already waiting for them.
Meeting The Prospectors
A bearded prospector welcomed the team to Chione and told them to call him Red. Terese introduced herself as the leader of the expedition and said they had lost radio contact with the colony on the way in. Red explained that the prospectors had expected a bigger greeting party and asked to see the team's paperwork. He led them toward the settlement with the older Gary, while the colonists watched from a distance. Sereda asked why the prospectors had built a road out to the site, and Red said they had come across it when they first landed.
The talk soon turned to ownership. Red called the dig site his own and grew annoyed when the scientists reminded him that the excavation rights now belonged to their consortium. On the way through the camp, the team found a bulldozer cutting a long trench beside the road. Red said they were doing a little construction and told Terese that the hole was there because of the smell. Before the scientists understood what he meant, the prospectors raised their rifles.
Burying The Science Team
Red and his people opened fire on the whole science team, killing Terese and the Vidar crew beside the trench. Gary shot Sereda several times in the head and chest, and the bulldozer pushed the bodies into the pit and covered them with earth. Red told Gary they were free now and spoke of the city, the spires and what he called the blessings. He said that a woman named Katherine was coming, and that her team had gone out to hide the blessings before the scientists' ship arrived.
Red and Gary drove into the canyon country in a blue rover to meet a man named Ethan at the first camp. Among towering pale spires and banks of glowing blue spheres, Red told Gary that everything they had been given was safe and that they were alone with it now. Gary admitted that he still could not raise Katherine on the radio. Red told him not to worry, calling their work an important mission and saying the worst thing that could happen had already been dealt with.
Rising From The Grave
That night, a hand pushed up through the dirt of the mass grave, and David Sereda dug himself out. The bullets had torn away part of his face, exposing metal beneath the skin around one eye, and revealed that he was a synthetic. He walked back to the Vidar, where his systems located files for the ship's engine activation sequence, launch procedure and shield engagement procedure. Each download took only minutes, and he began to learn what he needed to fly the ship himself.
Aboard the ship, Sereda repaired what he could and covered his damaged eye with a patch while internal readouts measured his remaining functions. His memories of the shooting were fragmented, and he could not account for why he had survived the burial. Sereda then took the controls and called the tower for clearance, using a software flight instructor that refused to deviate from its program. With the Vidar running, he lifted off from the colony to look for the people who had murdered his team.
Answering Andrea's Call
While scanning frequencies on four-six-niner-four, Sereda reached a terrified young woman named Andrea Keats, who said she had come to Chione with Howito. She told him that Red and Gary were dead and begged for help, saying that people were going to kill her. Sereda realized she was hiding from the same prospectors who had attacked the Vidar party. When he asked where she was, Andrea said she was in Canyon City, and when he asked who wanted to kill her, she said the monsters.
Sereda went to the crew lockers, picked up a rifle, grenades, magazines and a knife, and took a jacket that belonged to a crewman named T. Fante. He added a green poncho and a flight helmet before leaving the ship for the canyon. Andrea warned him to be careful, and while they talked she mentioned her brother and the prospectors she had once lived among. She explained that their scouts had found the canyon soon after landing, and that the settlers had changed after they went inside it.
Fighting Through The Canyon
Sereda set down near the canyon and followed Andrea's signal into a maze of giant spires and caverns lined with glowing blue spheres. He soon met Xenomorphs unlike any recorded on Earth and noted that they were physiognomically discrete from known populations, perhaps a sub-species or phenotype. The creatures were reddish brown and carried tusks along their jaws. Sereda shot his way past them with his rifle while Andrea, hiding in a crevice, stayed on the radio.
The creatures tried to outflank him, and when his rifle ran empty Sereda threw a grenade that blew one of them apart. Another pinned him down, and he killed it by firing a pistol into its mouth. Sereda then heard a human voice and found survivors trapped in a cave, warning them to keep clear of the creatures' acid blood. A rockfall had buried him during the fight, and the survivors, led by Red, levered the stones off him without knowing who he was.
Revealing The Android
As he was pulled free, a fault in Sereda's systems overrode his behavioral inhibitors and filled his mind with a repeating command to kill. He recognized Red as one of the men who had gunned down his team, and Red, stunned to see him alive, collapsed in shock while another survivor vomited. Sereda told them he was an android, explaining that his conductor fluid was made with high iron and copper hydration so that it looked red, like blood. The survivors realized the man they had buried had come back for them.
Donna, one of the surviving women, wept and said the place had driven them all crazy. She defended Red as a good man who had saved nearly forty of them. Red begged Sereda to kill him, and Sereda answered that androids could not hurt humans, though he admitted his programming had become less predictable and that he was having anomalous thoughts. Before anything more was decided, Xenomorphs attacked the cave. Sereda gave Red a gun, sent the others back into the cave and fought the creatures off beside him.
Learning The City's Secret
In the fight, a survivor named Rashard held off two of the creatures with a pulse rifle before one of them killed him, leaving a woman to mourn over his body. Red admitted he had run out of ammunition days earlier, and Sereda gave him fresh magazines for his weapon. As the group moved deeper toward Andrea, one of the women told Sereda how the colony had fallen. Once the prospectors reached Canyon City, she said, everything outside it left their heads and the city became everything to them.
Deep in the canyon, the colonists found leathery eggs, which they believed were gifts from the city and called the blessings. They carried the eggs back to their camp and gathered around them, until a man began coughing and a chestburster broke out of him. The colony scattered in panic, and its people lost their friendships and their reasons for living. Sereda noted that these creatures looked different from the Xenomorphs on Earth and appeared to infect their hosts more quickly.
Parting Ways With Red
Tension in the group turned into an armed standoff. Gary, who had survived after all, pointed a pistol at Red and argued against letting anyone walk off alone. Red called Sereda a broken-down synth and asked why they were following him to their deaths, but the others pointed out that Sereda had saved them. Red's memory of the killings at the trench had begun to return, and he asked who Terese was and whether they had killed her. Unable to face it, he walked away alone toward the heart of the city.
Red climbed for hours up a wall of stone ribs beside a colossal structure studded with glowing blue spheres, muttering about finding his way out and calling Sereda a haywire tour guide. Exhausted, he collapsed on a ledge high above the floor of the maze. Below, Sereda led Gary, Donna and the others along a rocky path toward Andrea's signal, which he said was very strong. Xenomorphs gathered in the shadows above them as they went.
Making A Last Stand
The creatures attacked in force on the rocks. The survivors formed a line and fired in every direction, and Sereda remarked that it was lucky the Xenomorphs were not sneaky. One of the creatures drove its inner jaws through Sereda's neck, and his voice broke into binary as he went down. A survivor killed it at point-blank range, and the group held the ledge with gunfire and an explosion that threw back the swarm. Gary shouted that nobody was dying that day.
In the chaos, Gary was splashed with acid blood that burned away much of his face. A woman named Leah knelt over him, crying that she had not meant it, and he told her not to blame herself before he died. The survivors reached a cliff edge overlooking the depths of the city. Far above them, Red reached a chamber of white light, where he apologized to the presence he had once listened to, admitted he had stopped listening and said he could hear it all again.
Leaving Chione
In a vision of the city, Red walked toward a vast, horned shape bathed in light and dissolved into it. Later, one of the women stitched the wounds on Sereda's back, and the group walked back through the maze past the walls of glowing spheres. When they reached Andrea, she was already dead among the rocks, her chest torn open by a chestburster. Sereda admitted that he would have left all of them on the planet to die, but Andrea's voice over the ship's radio had not let him, and he told her body he was sorry.
The survivors returned to the Vidar under an orange sky and boarded through its cargo ramp. The ship reached escape velocity and set course for Sol III, the destination logged for a journey of more than a year, with the survivors in hypersleep. Sereda flew the ship away from Chione through a purple and blue nebula. His story continued in Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War, where he fought beside the Colonial Marines.
Key Characters
- David Sereda was a cultural biologist from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry who was revealed as a synthetic after surviving his own burial. He crossed Canyon City to answer Andrea's call and left Chione aboard the Vidar.
- Andrea Keats was a young Howito colonist hiding in Canyon City. Her radio calls drew Sereda into the maze, but he found her dead from a chestburster.
- Red was the bearded leader of the prospectors. He ordered the massacre of the science team, later begged Sereda to kill him and vanished into the light at the heart of the city.
- Gary was Red's older companion who shot Sereda at the trench. He later turned on Red, fought beside Sereda and was killed by acid blood during the last stand.
- Terese was the leader of the science expedition and Sereda's colleague at the museum. She was killed with the rest of the team when the prospectors opened fire.
- Donna and Leah were surviving colonists who joined Sereda in the maze. Donna defended Red as the man who had saved nearly forty of them.
- Rashard was a colonist who held off the creatures with a pulse rifle before being killed in the cave fight.
Collected Editions
Dark Horse Comics released the four issues every two months from May to December 2009 under the plain title Aliens, with covers by Zach Howard and Brad Anderson on the first two issues and Raymond Swanland on the last two. The fourth issue arrived a month late. The series was the first new Aliens miniseries from Dark Horse in a decade and part of a relaunch that also produced John Arcudi's Predator: Prey to the Heavens. A short prologue by the same team first ran in the Free Comic Book Day 2009 Aliens/Predator flip-book.
The trade paperback Aliens: More Than Human was released in April 2010, collecting the four issues with the prologue and reusing Swanland's cover from the fourth issue. Dark Horse Digital released the issues on October 12, 2012. After Marvel took over the license, the story was reprinted as Aliens (2009) #1 to #4 with the Free Comic Book Day prologue in Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 3, a 1,008-page hardcover released on November 22, 2022 alongside stories such as Aliens: Xenogenesis and Aliens: Alchemy.
Behind The Scenes
Editor Chris Warner chose John Arcudi in 2008 as the lead writer for the relaunch of the Aliens, Predator and Aliens vs. Predator lines. Arcudi had already written Aliens: Genocide and several other Aliens and Predator comics. He wrote More Than Human and Prey to the Heavens but could not write the follow-up crossover, which went to Randy Stradley. The prologue placed the story during or after the events of Genocide, as Earth recovered from the Xenomorph invasion.
The series introduced the tusked Xenomorphs of Chione, which Sereda described as a distinct sub-species or phenotype. The same breed returned in Three World War, which also brought back Sereda as a main character. Dark Horse next returned to the line with the graphic novella Aliens: Fast Track to Heaven. The back cover credited Zach Howard and Mark Irwin alongside Arcudi, and quoted Fangoria calling Dark Horse's Aliens back on top of the genre.
Conclusion
Aliens: More Than Human is John Arcudi and Zach Howard's 2009 Dark Horse series about a science team murdered by prospectors on Chione and the synthetic biologist who dug his way out of their grave. Sereda crossed a vast necropolis full of tusked Xenomorphs to answer Andrea Keats's call, lost her and most of the survivors, and left the planet with two women aboard the Vidar, setting up his role in Three World War.
External Sources
- Aliens #1 preview at Dark Horse
- Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 3 at Marvel
- Omnibus Vol. 3 announcement at AvP Galaxy
Tag Categories: Alien Comics
