Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War

Published: 2010
Writer: Randy Stradley
Pencils: Rick Leonardi
Inks: Mark Pennington
Colors: Wes Dzioba
Lettering: Blambot
Cover: Raymond Swanland
Editor: Chris Warner
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Format: Six issues, trade paperback June 2011
Setting: Caparis VII and Ryushi
ISBN: 978-1-59582-702-9

Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War is a six-issue Dark Horse Comics series written by Randy Stradley, with pencils by Rick Leonardi and inks by Mark Pennington. The issues ran in 2010, and Dark Horse Books collected them in June 2011. Machiko Noguchi, years after she had hunted with a Yautja clan, was pulled back in when Killers used Xenomorphs against Chigusa Corporation's bauxite mine on Caparis VII. She helped Colonial Marines make a truce with the Hunters, and the fight ended with the blooding mark cut from her forehead.

Plot Summary

The Mining Claim

Some months before the fleets moved, Killers hit Chigusa Corporation's Bauxite Mine #42 on Caparis VII, out past Alpha Centauri. The workers were between shifts in the dust, talking about clogged filters and grit in the food, when a hunter ship came over the site. They took the attackers for claim-jumpers, broke rifles out of an armory, and tried to hold the buildings. A supervisor in a hard hat ordered them to open fire. The Xenomorphs did not stop for the gunfire. Rounds broke the creatures open, acid sprayed the men in the open, and a hunter shot the supervisor down as he shouted for the crew to fire.

When the buildings were overrun, Killers stood over the dead while Xenomorphs moved among the bodies. One hunter set a camera on the wreckage and let it record his face until the picture broke into static. That recording survived the raid. Colonial Marines carried it to Machiko Noguchi, and it was the first hard evidence they could put in front of her that a hunter clan was using tusked Xenomorphs as attack hounds instead of hunting them.

The Preserve

Colonial Marines found Machiko Noguchi on a hunting preserve, sighting a rifle on horned game with a guide team in the rocks. A radio call ordered her back to the cabin. Colonel Rast came in with the squad. Ellis put a man named Zane in the kitchen with Primo and held the rest of the camp quiet. She refused before Rast finished asking. She had built a guide business for herself and her crew, and she would not go to war against the clan she had hunted with.

Her account started on Ryushi, a colony built in the middle of a hunting ground, where Broken Tusk marked her before he died, and it ran through a year with the clan that ended at Bunda in Aliens vs. Predator: War. Ten years had passed since Bunda. The military had held her for four months of interrogation after that fight and had intimidated the people around her. Before she would look at what Rast had brought, she pulled a grenade pin that a thorn had jammed in the mechanism and seated it again. The Marine wearing that harness would have taken the blast if the grenade armed.

She watched the recording from the mine, and it matched old stories about renegade clans the Hunters called Killers. In that code a kill was the result, and the requirement was to face an opponent on equal terms, so a clan that put Xenomorphs in the field beside its own hunters had given the code up. She knew that life from the inside, because she had fought in the earlier war, killed humans while she ran with the clan, and met Ellis after he and his people came out of their own fight with Xenomorphs. Bunda had exposed the covert operations, and the recording was what made her leave the preserve.

The Mackabee

Colonial Marines from the USS Tarawa stand for a briefing

The briefing also covered a ship called the Mackabee. The Mackabee massed eighty thousand metric tons, with ninety men aboard, and reached orbit. After that, contact was lost. Talk of a rescue was shut down until the Marines knew what they would be flying into. What they had in hand was a statement from a man named Thorpe. Two years earlier he had been reported killed in Eastern Africa, and thirteen days later he walked into Cadiz, California, with a report that hunters had taken him.

Thorpe's squad had gone in against an enemy they could not see, because the hunters wore cloaks, and Xenomorphs pulled men off the ropes in the dark. For most of that time he was locked in a cell. The Marines dug the statement out when they were deciding what had happened to the Mackabee, and they put it next to the recording from Caparis VII. Between the lost ship, the cloaked hunters, and the mine footage, Machiko Noguchi stopped treating the Killers as a legend and left with the squad.

Return to Ryushi

Three months before the landing, Machiko Noguchi had not expected to set foot on Ryushi again. Sensors found a mass of about forty thousand tons in the southern hemisphere, and the people on the bridge took it for the hunter ship. Corporal Garman and Ellis had no way to raise the Hunters by voice. They fired a few of the ship's nightbreaker flares in a dispersal pattern at dawn, a visual signal aimed at wherever the hunters were, because an unannounced approach would have drawn fire.

She went in alone, in armor, so the Hunters would have a reason to talk. Ellis did not want her walking into that ground without him. She made him promise to stay with the ship unless she called, because a Marine at her shoulder would look like weakness, and weakness would make him a target if the approach failed. If it failed, he was to get the others home. Colonel Rast was with them when they started. She fought the hunters to prove she had standing with the clan, and blood from that fight hit her shoulder. Cloaked hunters were in the rocks around the Marines while the clan decided whether to talk or to kill the party.

The Queen

Hunters hold a Xenomorph Queen with cables in a rocky cleft

The Hunters wanted a Xenomorph Queen alive, and the fight for her moved into a canyon. Ellis broke the promise and brought the squad in after a call for help, even though Machiko Noguchi had ordered them to stay with the ship no matter what. Johnson had no order he recognized. Ambrose and the smart guns opened fire as Xenomorphs came through the rocks, and the canyon turned into a gunfight before anyone had a clean shot at the Queen.

Rowdy and the other Marines moved to shoot the Queen, and Machiko stopped them. The hunters had come for her, and her eggs were how the clan stocked later hunts. They got cables on her and held the Queen in a rocky cleft while Xenomorphs closed in around the ropes. Marines and hunters hauled on the same lines, and one of the creatures hit the group while the ropes were taut. Machiko later decided that Queen might be a survivor of the Prosperity Wells outbreak she had been part of ten years before.

The Truce

Seven weeks passed between the capture and the attack, and the Marines and the Hunters spent them as uneasy allies. A Marine warned Machiko Noguchi that this enemy was larger and tougher than the Xenomorph fights she had heard about, and that overconfidence would get someone killed before the pulse rifles were in play. Another man answered that Sereda had gone in against that enemy and come out the other side. That argument was when the squad learned Sereda was a synthetic.

Both sides agreed the Killer ship was to be taken intact. The Hunters wanted it whole so they could follow it to the planet where the Killer clan had set up again, and they treated the mission as eradication, while the Marines wanted the ship itself. Machiko was the only translator between them. While the landing craft were loaded she passed orders from one side to the other, and she did not have time to work out what an eradication hunt and a capture mission would cost the people who had to carry both.

The Fleets

Hunter ships and the USS Tarawa gathered above a planet

Machiko Noguchi parted from Ellis as the ships formed up, and the USS Tarawa went with the other Colonial Marine ships, alongside the hunter ships. Near the world, Garman lost his navigation fix. Comms, radar, and targeting fell away to white noise on both fleets at once. The jamming hit hunter ships and Marine ships the same way, so neither side had a working picture of the ground when the ships went in.

The Killers destroyed a hunter ship on the way in. A Marine general ordered the rail guns to miss on purpose, a hundredth of a degree south of a direct hit, and to put fire under the Killer ship's tail so it would run. He wanted that ship driven off, because a ship that fled could be followed home. Before the landing, fifty-five missiles fitted with guidance from Ellis were set to hang in orbit and home on their targets the moment the enemy turned the jamming on.

The Beachhead

Colonial Marines and Hunters fire into a mass of Xenomorphs

The landing came down on Caparis VII, the same world as the Chigusa mine, where the Killers were waiting on ground they knew. Ramps opened into a fight, and the Tarawa Marines and Hunters came out together against Xenomorphs and Killer armor. The ground was open dirt and shallow water, and the Killers had the range on troops coming off the ramps. Sereda pushed a line forward and called the Marines in behind him. Hunters came through the water under energy shields, with spears and wrist blades against Xenomorphs that had gotten in among the squads.

Cans and Johnson worked the scramble to get wounded people back aboard under that fire. Dropships made missile runs low over the fight, close enough that the crews were taking fire while the missiles were away. A hunter ship loaded with nuclear weapons then turned toward the Killer position while Machiko Noguchi was on the ground, and the Marines were ordered to get the troops off. The blasts broke the Killer command, and the Marines used that break.

The Hatchery

Sereda got a set of Killer gauntlets off the field, then reached a chamber of eggs. There were hundreds of them, possibly thousands, stockpiled and waiting for hosts, and there was no queen in that room. His sensors read a mix of two synthetic pheromones the Killers used, a relaxant and a sedative, and each mix worked as an order the Xenomorphs would follow. The fleet could not make more of that gas on board. A real queen's own pheromones would override the synthetic mix and turn the Xenomorph army on the Killers, which was why he needed the Queen taken on Ryushi.

They loaded that Queen as the package for the battle and brought her onto Caparis VII so her pheromones would take the Xenomorphs out of Killer control. Ellis watched the fight from kilometers off with Primo, the cook, while command held the orbital strike. Primo wanted the base destroyed from orbit. The people in command wanted Killer ships and equipment more than they wanted the men on the ground alive, and that was why the strike was held. After the fighting, Machiko Noguchi reported to Colonel Rast that Sereda's find also meant the Killers had another base, and that they were raising another army there.

The Blooding Mark

Machiko Noguchi was ready to leave with the Marines and did not take that step. The hunting captain treated leaving as a denial of the glory the Hunters expected from the fight, and he cut the blooding mark Broken Tusk had put on her forehead with a heated blade. She took the cut as the clan's punishment for choosing humanity, and as the reason they let her leave alive. As the dropships left, the Hunters did not count her worthy of the glory they reserved for the clan.

The USS Tarawa carried her team home. The military held her responsible for hunter technology lost in the attack, so the return was not treated as a celebration. The Hunters treated the fight as a finished mission and did not mean to deal with humans as equals again. She was no longer marked as one of them, the clan did not count her in the glory of the fight, and the other Killer base, the one raising a second army, was left for a later hunt.

Key Characters

Machiko Noguchi had hunted with Broken Tusk's clan after Ryushi and walked away from that life after Bunda. The Marines brought her a record of the Killers, she went back to Ryushi in armor, and she was the only translator when the fleets moved. She chose humanity at the end, and a hunting captain cut the blooding mark off her forehead.
Ellis traveled with Colonel Rast from the preserve to Ryushi. Machiko made him promise to stay with the ship unless she called, and he broke that promise in the canyon when he thought she needed help. His guidance gear was on the fifty-five missiles that waited in orbit, and she parted from him when the fleets formed up.
Rowdy was with the Marines on Ryushi when they found the Queen. He was sent for cable after Machiko stopped the squad from shooting her, and the hunters held the Queen down for her eggs.
Sereda was a synthetic, which the squad learned in an argument aboard ship. He brought the Killer gauntlets off the battlefield, found a chamber of eggs with no queen, and read the two pheromones the Killers used as orders. That was why the Queen from Ryushi was brought to Caparis VII, and the same find was how the Marines learned the Killers were raising another army at a second base.
Colonel Rast came to the preserve to recruit Machiko and was with her on Ryushi when the approach started. After Caparis VII he took her report on Sereda's second Killer base. The military held her responsible for hunter technology lost in the attack and did not treat the ride home as a win.
The hunting captain stood with Machiko while she relayed orders between the Hunters and the Marines. When she would not leave with the clan's idea of glory, he cut Broken Tusk's mark from her forehead with a heated blade and let her live.

Editions

Dark Horse Comics published Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War as six issues in 2010. Randy Stradley wrote the series. Rick Leonardi pencilled it, Mark Pennington inked it, and Wes Dzioba colored it. Lettering is credited to Blambot. Raymond Swanland painted the cover. Chris Warner edited the book, Samantha Robertson was the associate editor, and Kat Larson designed it. Mike Richardson was the publisher.

Dark Horse Books collected issues one through six as a trade paperback on June 1, 2011. The book runs 144 pages. The indicia calls it a first edition and says it was printed by Midas Printing International in Huizhou, China. Dark Horse announced on September 1, 2011 that the first printing had sold through and that a second printing was coming.

Behind The Scenes

The series brings Machiko Noguchi back on the comic line that runs through Aliens vs. Predator: War. Before she agreed to leave the hunting preserve with the Marines, she named Ryushi, where Broken Tusk marked her, and Bunda, the jungle world where she broke with the clan. Randy Stradley had written the earlier Aliens vs. Predator comics she came from, and the trade paperback cover calls him the original AvP writer. Raymond Swanland's cover painting is the one used on that book, with Leonardi and Pennington credited under the title.

That account does not match every book with her name on it. In Hunter's Planet, David Bischoff's 1994 sequel to Prey, she hunted for two years with a Yautja pack and broke with them on Gordian. She killed the short hunter she called Shorty on the safari world Blior. War never uses that story. She stayed with Topknot for a year aboard the ship she called the Shell, and she killed Shorty on Bunda. Three World War follows the War version, ten years after Bunda, and the Killers she leaves the preserve to fight are Bad Blood Predators.

Conclusion

Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War is Randy Stradley's 2010 Dark Horse series, drawn by Rick Leonardi and Mark Pennington. It follows Machiko Noguchi from the loss of Chigusa's bauxite mine on Caparis VII to a hunting preserve, back to Ryushi for a Xenomorph Queen, then into a joint attack with the USS Tarawa on that same world. The series ends with the blooding mark cut from her forehead, a ride home the military did not celebrate, and another Killer base left for someone else.