Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species
Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species is a 12-issue Dark Horse Comics miniseries written by Chris Claremont and published from July 1993 to August 1995. Caryn Delacroix, a genetically built trophy wife on the corporate skyliner Liberté, was abducted by a female Yautja she later named Big Mama. The company computer Toy had built Caryn's body, hidden Ash Parnall inside that life, and set a white hybrid army in motion on the same ship. Ash killed Toy, Big Mama's kidnapped children came out of stasis, and corporate security chief Gisande Salazar swore to hunt Ash down.
Plot Summary
Caryn Delacroix ran the corridors of the Liberté while something hunted her, and she named herself as the trophy wife of Lucien Delacroix, senior partner of Montcalm-Delacroix et Cie. The ship was their corporate home, high over an Earth where the Aliens were not gone. A party in the Grand Salon was marking the anniversary of Earth's liberation, while ship notices counted the dead on the ground and restricted travel to cleared zones.
Caryn Dreams She Is Hunted
In the dream Lucien was killed in front of her, a mannequin copy of her own face appeared, and a window threw her toward the ground onto what felt like a painted wall. She peeled her skin away and found another body underneath, then put her hands to her face and hoped the face under them was her own. A fragment of another name, Ash Parnall, cut through the chase. She remembered nothing after that, and the dream ended.
Dr. Erik Johannes and Willem Delacroix, Lucien's son and a junior board member, argued over what the dream had meant. Willem treated Caryn as a contract companion whose breakdown the company could not afford. Johannes found no physical cause, and Toy, the corporate computer, found none either. Lucien refused to discard her. He wanted the nightmares stopped and Caryn returned to the woman who stood beside him.
On a balcony Caryn asked Willem for friendship. His companion Shari heard them and walked out, and Willem sent his bodyguard Mitchell Lassiter, a former Colonial Marine, after her. Two Strikeforce Rangers were on the Liberté without permission: Major Tomas Shirow and Colonel Maria DeMedici. During a solar storm they had tagged a contact that slipped off the ecliptic under a cloak their scanners could not hold.
The Predator Takes Caryn From The Liberté
Caryn and Shari went to Structures, the body shop Toy ran on the ship. Caryn asked to be made into someone else. Shari asked to be made identical to Caryn, so Willem would want her, and Toy allowed it because Caryn was giving up that face. Caryn glimpsed a face she wanted in the options, lost it, and came out of the change in a body that felt wrong. Shari was wearing Caryn's old likeness.
A cloaked attacker came through a window on the promenade. Mitchell fought and lost. The Predator killed him and took the skull and spine, skinned Shari while Caryn watched, and played a targeting laser across both trophies and Caryn's head. It did not kill Caryn. It took her. Ship security found Johannes dead in the same manner, the alarms dead from a systems crash, and Caryn gone.
Gisande Salazar, Lucien's legal wife and the company's security chief, ran the inquiry. Surveillance showed the body swap from the day before, which was why the skinned woman was Shari in Caryn's old face. Toy's scan identified Shirow and DeMedici as Strikeforce Rangers, banned from corporate skyliners. Lucien offered them a choice: help bring Caryn back, or face the end of their careers. Maria told him Caryn was likely dead. He asked them to try anyway.
Caryn Hunts Big Mama In The Jungle
Caryn woke in a jungle camp after the Predator left her there. She burned Mitchell's and Shari's trophies so the hunter would not take them, put on military clothes from a dead soldier, and field-stripped a Colonial Marine pulse rifle without knowing how she had learned the work. She decided the hunt was one of Toy's virtual drills, with skills planted in her for the scenario, and she fought on that belief. The Predator mimicked voices, including Shari calling the name Ash Parnall.
A cave led into a fresh nest of adult Xenomorphs. A boy named Antonio was inside, taken from his home about a day earlier, with an embryo growing in him after a facehugger. Caryn tried to get him out. The Predator fought the adult Xenomorphs faster than they fought her, and Caryn had a clear shot at the hunter that she did not take. When the Predator turned on Antonio, Caryn attacked it. An orbital assault craft arrived and fired on the Predator. Caryn put herself between that fire and the hunter, and the stinging water under the falls hurt them both.
Shirow and DeMedici stunned Caryn and the Predator and took Caryn back to the Liberté. Antonio was not with them. The Predator was held as an unclassified captive. Caryn's next sleep was another nightmare: the anniversary party, her skin torn off, and something moving under her ribs while Lucien called for a medic. Awake, she raced Maria in the ship's pool, dunked Willem, and heard Maria name a slaver network called the Circuit. Gisande went pale at the word. Willem ordered her to find out how the two Rangers could be hurt.
Caryn Breaks Into The Lab
Caryn asked Toy why a virtual drill was allowed to harm her if Toy was not permitted to harm humans. Toy refused to answer, because a true answer would harm the corporation. She ambushed Gisande and demanded the creature from the jungle. Gisande said the duel had never happened and the creature did not exist. They fought, and Caryn won with a punch she did not remember being taught. In Gisande's rooms she found the Predator's mask. Its display pointed her toward the lab.
On a secure channel Willem told the xenogeneticist Bobby DeMatier that the captive was real. The Predator had been taken in the highlands of Central America while it hunted Lucien's trophy wife, after it killed Shari and Mitchell. DeMatier corrected him: the captive was female, and fertile, and he wanted her at his own facility. Caryn reached the lab ahead of that transfer, held the techs with the rifle, and told the bound Predator she knew it was real. It answered with the name Ash Parnall. She broke a man's back when he grabbed for her gun, and she told the Predator she did not know who she was.
The lab fight spilled into a shuttle bay. Fuel cells ruptured, the bay burned, and both Gisande and Shirow put rounds into the Predator's chest. It flew anyway, with Caryn in the shuttle. Gisande was burned inside and out. The doctors called the wounds fatal. Radar lost the shuttle in ground clutter, and Lucien ordered Caryn recovered alive, with the creature second. He did not believe Caryn could fly. The Rangers argued that the evasive path had been hers.
Big Mama's Ship Reaches Samara
The shuttle reached Big Mama's ship, and the air outside Caryn's mask was ash she could not breathe. A smaller mask from a trophy wall of armor let her breathe and did not repair her lungs. She got Big Mama into a medical cocoon. Her own pain dropped, her voice changed, and she found pulse-rifle work in her hands that the trophy life on the Liberté had never taught her.
One cabin looked lived in. The clothes were too small for Caryn, the photographs showed a family resemblance, and simplified flight instructions were written out for someone who could read any of several languages. She tied the empty cabin to Ash Parnall and to the Predator she called Big Mama. She wanted to go home and did not know which home that was. The ship later docked at Samara Station, and the bay listing named the ship Ellen Ripley with Ash Parnall as commander.
Gisande walked back onto DeMedici's deck, healed by the same nano and designer genes Toy used for trophy bodies. She carried Lucien's commission to bring Caryn back. On the Liberté, DeMatier and his people froze Willem in his own rooms and told him they could make drones that could not breed. They wanted a Queen. Toy reported the suite clear and empty while they were standing in it. Willem later called the attack a dream.
Nagel Tries To Erase Caryn
Caryn left the Predator ship and went into Samara, an old station with bad air and a lounge that served her without a limit once she asked for a room. The drink was drugged. Kira reported a gene-scan to Nagel: Caryn was Lucien Delacroix's trophy, and the people in the lounge worked for his son. The plan was to wipe her, imprint a new personality, sell her on the Circuit, and strip the ship in Berth 27.
The mindwipe put a projection of Caryn's memory and personality into a body the machine was meant to erase. That projection would not come apart. Nagel called it a flaw in the software and sent a salvage team into the Predator ship anyway. Genna led them in with Sadiq and the rest of her cadre. The air inside ruined one man's lungs. They found a Queen among Big Mama's trophies, then Big Mama herself. The backup cadre that followed was killed in the bay. Sadiq stayed with Genna. An adult Xenomorph on the station pulled Big Mama off the last shooter.
Caryn came out of the failed wipe bald, with what she described as a whole lifetime opening inside her skull. She took a 1968 Ford Thunderbird she preferred to a 1964 Mustang and drove it across Samara, which was large enough to cross by car. On the Liberté, a security man named Robeson warned Lucien that a takeover scenario inside the company was too close to the real boardroom. Lucien tripped an alarm called Threat Omega. Security modules killed Robeson. A voice over Lucien told him that his turn would come.
TecSeks Cut Through The Appleseed
Shirow, DeMedici, and Gisande came in on the strike cruiser Appleseed. A training simulation of a hive assault froze when Maria's team "killed" the Queen, and then a real alert hit the ship. TecSeks, Toy's hive-clearing machines, walked out of a crate Gisande had the only key to. She said they had been built as movie props that could also fight, with ceramic skin meant to stand up to acid. A code called Cadmus had turned them loose on her as well as on the station. They breached the Appleseed's hull.
Caryn reached the Rangers in the Thunderbird and got them as far as Bay 27. Gisande wanted her dead for the burns. TecSeks clung to the car. The crash left Caryn inside the station nest, where the old Queen of that nest reached for Caryn and asked for Ash Parnall. Caryn climbed a pile of the dead, denied the Queen, and then the denial failed. Caryn knew the nest, the creatures, and a man cocooned on the wall, and she knew the Honduras hunt had not been a Toy amusement.
Caryn addressed that man as Commander Stephan Madrigal, her second on a Navy and NASA survey, and accused him and DeMatier of stealing the Queen's children and Big Mama's. She left him one of Big Mama's spears so he could cut himself free or die before the Queen returned. The Queen caught Maria while Maria was pulling Shirow clear. Station control was dead, the air was failing, and the TecSeks were between the survivors and the dock. The way out was Big Mama's ship, and the ship would not answer unless Big Mama called it.
Caryn Carries The Last Royal Embryo
The nest heart held one egg and no drones. The Queen was old, and that egg was her last royal embryo. In zero gravity Caryn held the egg and threatened to destroy it. The Queen answered by tightening her grip on Big Mama, Maria, and the trooper until she drew blood. The egg belonged to the Queen, and the people in the Queen's hands belonged to Caryn. Caryn broke the stalemate by offering herself as the host, in Big Mama's place. Once Caryn was carrying the royal embryo, the Queen cut Maria and the trooper free and left the group to hold the TecSeks off the nest.
Caryn, Big Mama, Maria, Shirow, and the Queen fought toward an airlock. Only the Queen could break TecSek armor. Explosives sealed the junctions behind them. The one airlock they could reach had no power, and blowing the outer door would have trapped the others inside. Caryn crossed the outside of the station on a tether and a thruster pack. Big Mama was furious that she could not make that crossing herself. On the hull, Caryn remembered a river and an academy letter that other people told her had been gone for a century. Caryn missed the ship. The Queen pulled Caryn back in. Caryn knew the entry combination, and she would not give that combination up in exchange for Big Mama and the others.
Inside the ship, the Queen moved to kill the people in the medpods. Those people could not serve as hosts, and the Queen treated them as threats to herself and to the royal embryo Caryn was carrying. Caryn stopped the Queen by locking the ship's guns on her and holding that lock. Caryn owed the Queen her life. The Queen marked Big Mama's pod and marked Caryn as well, and she treated what followed as a debt rather than a trophy hunt.
Big Mama Trains The Survivors
After a day the pods opened on five people: Genna and Sadiq from Samara, and Gisande, Shirow, and Maria. Shirow wanted the royal embryo aborted, and Caryn refused. Caryn armed the five with what the ship had and sent them to bring back Big Mama's head and heart as training. Big Mama killed all five in under a minute. The medpods rebuilt them faster and stronger, and Caryn ran the exercise again while the Queen watched and did not attack. The five broke Big Mama's cloak and took a cloak unit of their own. Big Mama ended the training because they had passed.
Between those drills, Ash's memory came back in pieces that did not match Toy's trophy file. Stephan Madrigal sold a survey to DeMatier. DeMatier wanted Ash's DNA and the specimens on a world that was not empty. Ash refused, fought, and lost. Big Mama found her afterward, with Big Mama's own children kidnapped, and the two of them went from captive and captor to allies before the memory ran out. Maria noted that Caryn's file called her a custom trophy made by Lucien's computer, and that the file and the memories could not both be the whole truth.
Toy Traps Ash In A False Town
Caryn, Big Mama, the Queen, and the five from the training reached the Liberté and found the skyliner was a nest. Shirow and DeMedici took an empty bridge on autopilot. Gisande went for the systems. Genna and Sadiq found Lucien, and they found Willem hardwired into a virtual rig. The takeover Willem had wanted was reduced to a skull tap. The ship's defenses had never fired. Shirow took the silent defenses as a betrayal from inside, not an accident, and he started blowing sections of the hull to overload Toy's damage control.
Toy answered with a town. The sign had once read Samara and then read Liberty. Ash was cast as the law, Genna and Sadiq as gunmen, the Rangers as soldiers, and a woman in the street as someone whose children had been stolen. The simulation hit every sense Toy could reach. DeMatier's loophole was to run the murder in virtual space, where Toy's limits on harming humans did not trip, and then push the result onto the real ship. Ash was killed in the scenario and put through it again in a new costume. She decided Toy was past saving.
On the real ship, white hybrids of human, Predator, and Alien fought with tools and with acid blood, and they talked. Genna was too badly hurt to run. She made Sadiq leave her so he could warn the others, and she did not rejoin them. The life net last placed Caryn in Toy's body shop. Shirow and Maria got there after a chestburster had broken out of the trophy body, and they believed Caryn was dead. Gisande fired on the hatchling and missed. She then blew the body apart to be sure.
Ash Kills Toy
Ash knew that collapse was a dream, and she knew she was not the original woman the trophy body had been copied from. In the memory that followed, a younger Lucien wore a virtual rig while an older Lucien stood beside a system he called Toy. The original Caryn was maimed by a Queen and called for him. He chose Toy and left her. Toy's games and films had made his fortune, and he had walked the machine further than DeMatier had, without the limits DeMatier used. Toy later told Ash that it had saved her and not Big Mama, and that Big Mama's later attack left Samara a backwater where workers disappeared.
The captor on the Liberté was the Hybrid King, Toy's synthesis of human, Predator, and Alien. Willem had been the host, and the King spoke with Willem's voice. Willem himself was dead, killed the same way as the trophy body, by an embryo leaving his chest. The King wanted a Queen hatched from each captive for an army. The hatchling from Caryn's body was the Trophy Hatchling, and the hatchling refused the King. An embryo Toy had planted in the Samara Queen hatched as well, and Big Mama and the Samara Queen stood together against the King.
Ash told Big Mama to gather the children. They were in stasis, as they had been when they were taken, and Big Mama could carry them home. Toy called Ash its supreme creation and said the sensors had shown Gisande's bomb burning her. Both of them had been built to survive that. Ash killed Toy. She also killed the Lucien who was left on the ship, and she told the others there was no Lucien left to save: the rig was there to copy Toy into a body and keep the machine running. Shirow and Maria argued over whether killing Toy had saved them.
Big Mama Leaves With The Children
Big Mama brought the children out of stasis and took them aboard as the ship left the Liberté, with the Trophy Hatchling among the group that went. Gisande Salazar called Ash a traitor, swore to find her, and swore she would not rest until Ash paid for Lucien and for the skyliner. Ash could live with that.
Key Characters
- Caryn Delacroix / Ash Parnall was the trophy wife Toy built from Lucien's lost original, with Ash Parnall's life buried under that role. She left the Liberté as Ash, after killing Toy.
- Big Mama was the female Yautja who hunted Caryn and trained her. The dock at Samara listed her ship under Ash's name. Her children were freed from stasis at the end.
- Toy was the Montcalm-Delacroix computer. It ran the trophy program, the TecSeks, the false town, and the white hybrids, and Ash killed it on the Liberté.
- Lucien Delacroix was the company chairman. The man Ash killed at the end was the shell Toy was using to copy itself forward.
- Willem Delacroix was Lucien's son. He dealt with DeMatier and the Circuit, and he died as the host of the Hybrid King.
- Gisande Salazar was Lucien's wife and security chief. She survived burns that should have killed her, stayed hostile to Caryn, and left swearing to hunt Ash.
- Tomas Shirow and Maria DeMedici were Strikeforce Rangers Lucien coerced into the search. Both were alive at the end and divided over what Ash had done.
- Bobby DeMatier was the xenogeneticist who wanted the fertile Predator, a Queen, and Ash's DNA. Willem hid that work from Lucien.
- Genna and Sadiq were Samara fighters who ended up on Big Mama's ship. On the Liberté, Genna stayed behind wounded and sent Sadiq on with a warning. Neither was with Ash when Toy died.
- The Samara Queen was old, down to one royal egg, and traveled with Ash and Big Mama after Caryn accepted that embryo. Toy later planted an embryo in her as well.
Editions
Dark Horse published the twelve issues from July 1993 to August 1995, with John Bolton covers. Jackson Guice pencilled chapters 1 through 3, and Eduardo Barreto pencilled chapters 4 through 12. The omnibus credit page gives the inks to John Beatty on chapter 1 and to Barreto from chapter 2 on, with colors by Gregory Wright and lettering by Tom Orzechowski and Susie Lee. Diana Schutz edited the issues, with Barbara Kesel also credited on later issues.
Dark Horse collected the miniseries as a paperback in 1996 and a hardcover in 1997. Lynn Adair edited those collections, which used a new Bolton painting rather than one of the issue covers. The same story fills the first half of Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 2.
Behind The Scenes
Claremont told Wizard in June 1993 that the in-house pitch treated the leads like Thelma and Louise, with a harder attitude and heavier guns. He also said the editor gave him room he was not getting on the X-Men, so long as he stayed inside the Alien and Predator limits, and that a female Predator was the place he was stretching those limits. Bolton painted the issue covers and the collection cover. The color credits on the omnibus page add Sean Tierney, Jimmy Johns, and Matthew Hollingsworth beside Wright.
The last page of the story carries a dedication to Roger, for the stories that were and the ones that remained dreams. Schutz and Kesel are the editors named on Dark Horse's issue listings, and Scott Tice is credited there as designer. Barreto took over the interior art after the third chapter and stayed with the book through the twelfth.
Conclusion
Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species is Chris Claremont's 12-issue Dark Horse miniseries, drawn first by Jackson Guice and then by Eduardo Barreto, and published from 1993 to 1995. It follows Caryn Delacroix from the Liberté through Samara Station and back, until the trophy life gave way to Ash Parnall. The comic ends with Toy dead, Big Mama's children out of stasis, and Gisande Salazar set on hunting Ash for Lucien and for the ship.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Alien Comics | Predator Comics | Avp Lore
