Aliens vs. Predator: Duel
Aliens vs. Predator: Duel is a two-issue Dark Horse Comics series written by Randy Stradley, with pencils by Javier Saltares and inks by Jimmy Palmiotti. The issues shipped in March and April 1995. Colonial Marines from the combat ship Brilliant answered a non-human distress call on Ryushi, the ranch world where Machiko Noguchi had survived the slaughter at Prosperity Wells. They found a chained Xenomorph Queen and a living Yautja hunter, and Captain Glass ended the mission beside the hunter Light-Stepper after the two of them killed a Predalien.
Plot Summary
The Distress Call
Lesser had the computer at 82 percent sure the signal was a distress call, and Captain Glass did not want that label on the open bridge. Murphy took the Brilliant in over Ryushi. Lesser was pulling the Corps files on the planet while they closed, and the news in those files was bad enough that he warned Glass before he read them out. On the approach the computer changed its own number. It was 99.7 percent sure the signal was not human. The marines had a short name for that kind of call. They logged it as an XT.
On The Ground
In the bay, Glass gave the platoon the drill before they rolled. If anyone on Ryushi was alive, the work was insertion, recon, and rescue. If the settlement was empty, it was recovery and salvage, and he wanted it done by the book with every marine alert. Bowen complained about the heat on the drive. Glass told him it was 86 degrees and to stop complaining. The same ride carried the creature brief. After the Acheron disaster at Hadley's Hope, and a few incidents after it, the Corps had forced Weyland-Yutani to say what it knew about the bugs. The company did not like giving that up. It wanted marine protection for its colonies, and the reconstructions in the computer were detailed enough that the platoon was expected to recognize a creature on sight.
France drove the all-terrain vehicle up to the front door of a cabin the files tied to Machiko Noguchi. The house had been empty for a long time. Glass called her a write-off and said he would send a report to the Chigusa Corporation when they got back to the Brilliant, in case the company wanted next of kin notified. He turned the platoon toward the signal. What they found in the rocks was not the crescent derelict the Acheron brief had taught them to expect. A Yautja ship lay in the canyon, marked and weathered, with the truck small beside it. Glass had them pair up, safeties off, and go in by the book.
The Predator Ship
Something moved in the dark of the ship and the marines fired. Glass shut the shooting down. The only thing they had hit was a briar wolf, an animal native to Ryushi, and the screen on a marine's reader named it once the body was in the light. Glass sent it off as a false alarm. If bugs had been in that corridor, Bowen would likely have been dead from the way the squad had been shooting. He split the search. Lesser took one tunnel with a few marines. Lieutenant Sali took the other. Reed stayed with Glass.
Lesser found a live survivor where the hull had caved in and the corridors ended. The hunter was ragged and breathing hard, with dreadlocks down his back and no broken bones Lesser could find. The marines got a litter under him and started him toward the transport. One of them wanted to know why the briar wolf had left him alive. Glass had no answer for that. A marine called him deeper into the ship before he could stand over the hunter for long.
Carlson found the Xenomorph Queen hung in chains and took her for dead. He treated the restraints as proof that whoever owned the ship could hold a queen. Glass ordered him away from it. Sali was supposed to inspect the creature from a distance. The queen was not dead. She took Carlson, and the marines shot her down where she hung. They lifted the hunter and pulled out. Glass judged the platoon unequipped for what was in that hull. On the way through the tunnel he took the bugs' refusal to eat the hunter as the reason the briar wolf had left him too.
Outside The Ship
The bugs were waiting outside the hull. Facehuggers came over the rocks, and adult Xenomorphs hit the squad in the open. A hunter in a cloak was in the same fight, and pulse rifle fire mixed with a plasma blast the marines could not place at first. Light-Stepper was one of the hunters who lost a limb. He cut through the creatures with a spear, and the marines took the clash as a fight they had walked into, not as help. It was not a rescue they could trust. The same fight killed Cogeletti on that spear and killed the sergeant. A marine who had expected gratitude from a first meeting with an intelligent species got another monster instead.
Glass pulled what was left of the platoon back. He put about ten kilometers between them and the Yautja ship, because he would not guess how many creatures were in that hull or how fast they could cross open ground. They meant to get the rescued hunter into air conditioning on the truck. France was helping move him when the body convulsed. A Chestburster tore out of the hunter's chest. What landed on the ground was not a thin pale burster. It had the hunter's build and a mane of dreadlocks, the DNA reflex writing the host onto the creature as it came free. The marines dropped the body.
Glass called Murphy and told the platoon to get in the vehicle because the ship was coming. Murphy's landing zone was not secure. A hunter put a heavy plasma cannon on the field antenna and then on the shuttle, and the boat was destroyed over the road while the truck raced under the blast. Reed wanted to stay and fight. Glass understood that. The creatures had killed marines, and the destroyed shuttle had stranded the platoon, but he would not spend the rest of them in a stand he did not choose. He drove for Prosperity Wells on the truck's map. A creature ran close under the wheels on that road. He wanted the monsters to come to a place he picked.
Prosperity Wells
Prosperity Wells was a junkyard where a colony had been. The computer did not tell the platoon what had wrecked it, so Glass used the ruins as a wall. He put that wall at their backs, a motion detector about fifty yards out, and a line of mines behind the detector, on the theory that the creatures could only come from the open side. By the end of the long Ryushi day they had a flag up. Sali wanted Meggyesi and France to sleep first, then himself and Reed. Glass would not sleep. He wanted his hand on the detonator when the detector went off, because he was done with surprises.
The Predalien came from behind them, inside the position they had built against an attack from the desert. Glass took it for a hybrid of a bug and the hunter they had carried off the ship, and he took the pursuit the same way. The creatures had chased the platoon because the marines had let that thing be born. It caught Reed at the wall and killed him. The others fired, and it broke away through the ruins. Glass wanted the hybrid dead after it killed Reed, and he did not think they could let it live.
The motion detector sounded while hunters crossed the open ground. Glass could not see them. He told Meggyesi to get down and set the mines off anyway. The blast caught two of the clan in the open. He sent France away from the position, because the younger marine could not stay in that fire. In the ruins the Predalien killed another hunter. After that, Glass was the last marine in the fight, with Light-Stepper on one side of him and the hybrid on the other.
The Duel
Light-Stepper took his helmet off for the last clash. Glass was out of ammunition and went at the Predalien with the rifle as a club. The hunter met it with his blades. Between them they tore the creature open. Glass did not have a clean reason he could name for joining that fight, beyond Reed and the fact that the hybrid would have killed him if he had stood aside.
When it was over, neither of them had another fight left. Glass and Light-Stepper had killed an enemy that would have killed them both, and that was as far as the understanding went. They knelt on the ridge under the Ryushi sky and waited. A ship from the Brilliant might reach them first, or a hunter ship might. They were too spent to decide the question with another duel.
Key Characters
- Captain Glass commanded the platoon from the Brilliant. He treated Noguchi's empty house as a write-off, pulled the squad off the Yautja ship after the Queen killed Carlson, and chose Prosperity Wells for a stand once the shuttle was gone. He was the last marine left, and he clubbed the Predalien with an empty rifle beside Light-Stepper.
- France drove the truck to Noguchi's cabin and was with Glass on the ridge when the ammunition ran out. Glass sent him away from the mines before the last clash with the Predalien.
- Light-Stepper was the one-armed hunter in the fight outside the ship. He killed creatures with a spear in the same clash that killed Cogeletti, lived through the mines, and took his helmet off for the Predalien. He knelt with Glass afterward and did not start a second fight.
- The rescued hunter was alive in the caved-in hull, and the Queen in that ship had not fed on him. The marines carried him out on a litter. A Chestburster with a hunter's dreadlocks came out of him before they could get him into shelter, and that birth was the Predalien.
- Reed stayed with Glass in the ship and wanted to stand and fight after the shuttle was destroyed. The Predalien killed him at the wall in Prosperity Wells, and Glass set the mines off in the fight that followed.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Aliens vs. Predator: Duel as two full-color issues. Issue 1 is dated March 1, 1995, and issue 2 is dated April 1, 1995. Randy Stradley wrote both. Javier Saltares pencilled them, Jimmy Palmiotti inked them, and James Sinclair colored them. Steve Dutro lettered them. Chris Warner painted the covers. Edward Martin III and Ryder Windham edited the issues, and Scott Fuentes designed them.
Dark Horse Digital released the complete comic on January 30, 2013, using Chris Warner's cover from issue 1. The story was later reprinted in Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 1.
Behind The Scenes
Randy Stradley had written the earlier Aliens vs. Predator series set on Ryushi, and Duel returns to that ranch world after Prosperity Wells is a ruin. Machiko Noguchi is the name in the Corps file and the empty cabin. She is not in the story. The Predalien that comes out of the rescued hunter is the first of those hybrids in the comics. Light-Stepper had come through a blooding as a young blood before this hunt, and the missing arm was from that earlier fight.
The first pages are the ridge, with Glass and France low on ammunition, and the mission aboard the Brilliant comes after that chase. Chris Warner, who had drawn the original Aliens vs. Predator comic with Phil Norwood, painted the covers for both issues of Duel. Javier Saltares and Jimmy Palmiotti handled the interior art, with James Sinclair on color. Dark Horse credits Edward Martin III and Ryder Windham as the editors, and Scott Fuentes as the designer.
Conclusion
Aliens vs. Predator: Duel is Randy Stradley's 1995 Dark Horse series, drawn by Javier Saltares and Jimmy Palmiotti. It follows Captain Glass and the Brilliant's platoon from a non-human distress call on Ryushi through a Yautja ship, a chained Queen, and the loss of their shuttle. The series ends on the ridge at Prosperity Wells, with the Predalien dead and Glass and Light-Stepper waiting to see which of their peoples arrives first.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Avp Comics
