Ash Parnall was the life under Caryn Delacroix, the trophy wife the computer Toy built for Lucien Delacroix on the skyliner Liberté, in Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species. In the Structures body shop, Toy put her in a different body and gave her old face to Shari. On Samara a mindwipe failed to erase her, and she came out bald as Ash's memories opened up. Toy also ran her through a jungle drill and a false town on the Liberté. She killed Toy and left with Big Mama.
Biography
Trophy Wife Of Lucien Delacroix
Caryn was presented as the trophy wife of Lucien Delacroix, senior partner of Montcalm-Delacroix et Cie. The Liberté was their corporate home, high over an Earth where the Aliens were not gone. A party in the Grand Salon marked the anniversary of Earth's liberation, while ship notices counted the dead on the ground and restricted travel to cleared zones. Willem Delacroix, Lucien's son, treated her as a contract the company could not afford to lose. Lucien refused to discard her. He wanted the nightmares stopped and Caryn returned to the woman who stood beside him.
Nightmares Of Big Mama
In one of the nightmares Lucien was killed in front of her, a copy of her own face appeared, and she peeled her skin away and found another body underneath. A fragment of another name, Ash Parnall, cut through the chase. Dr. Erik Johannes found no physical cause, and Toy, the company computer, found none either. Caryn and Shari, Willem's companion, then 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 came out of the change in a different body. Shari was wearing the old likeness.
A cloaked hunter came through a window on the promenade. Mitchell Lassiter, Willem's bodyguard and a former Colonial Marine, fought and lost. The hunter killed him, took the skull and spine, skinned Shari while Caryn watched, and played a targeting laser across the trophies and across Caryn's head. It did not kill Caryn. It took her. Ship security found Johannes dead in the same manner, the alarms dead, and Caryn gone. Gisande Salazar, the company's security chief, ran the inquiry and saw the body swap, which was why the skinned woman was Shari in Caryn's old face.
The Jungle Drill
Caryn woke in a jungle camp after the hunter left her there. She burned Mitchell's and Shari's trophies, put on clothes from a dead soldier, and field-stripped a 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 hunter 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 about a day earlier, with an embryo growing in him after a facehugger.
Caryn tried to get Antonio out. The hunter fought the adult Xenomorphs faster than they fought her, and Caryn had a clear shot she did not take. When the hunter turned on the boy, Caryn attacked it. An orbital assault craft fired on the hunter. Caryn put herself between that fire and the hunter. Major Tomas Shirow and Colonel Maria DeMedici, Strikeforce Rangers Lucien had coerced into the search, stunned them both and took Caryn back to the Liberté. Antonio was not with them. The hunter was held as an unclassified captive. The xenogeneticist Bobby DeMatier told Willem the captive was real, a female Yautja, and fertile.
The Liberté Laboratory
Back on the Liberté, Caryn asked Toy why a 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 Salazar 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 hunter's mask. Its display pointed her toward the lab.
Caryn reached the lab ahead of DeMatier's transfer, held the techs with the rifle, and told the bound hunter she knew it was real. It answered with the name Ash Parnall. She told it she did not know who she was. The fight spilled into a shuttle bay. Fuel cells ruptured, the bay burned, and both Gisande and Shirow put rounds into the hunter's chest. It flew anyway, with Caryn in the shuttle. Gisande was burned inside and out. The doctors called the wounds fatal. 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
The shuttle reached Big Mama's ship. The air outside Caryn's mask was ash she could not breathe. A smaller mask from a trophy wall let her breathe, and it did not repair her lungs. She got Big Mama into a medical cocoon. Her own pain dropped, her voice changed, and pulse-rifle work came back into her hands, work 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 hunter she called Big Mama. She wanted to go home and did not know which home that was. The ship later docked at Samara Station. The bay listing named the ship Ellen Ripley, with Ash Parnall as commander.
Samara Station
Caryn left the ship and went into Samara, an old station with bad air. The drink in the lounge was drugged. Nagel's people identified her as Lucien's trophy and meant to wipe her, imprint a new personality, and sell her on the Circuit, a slaver network. The mindwipe put a projection of her memory into a body the machine was meant to erase, and that projection would not come apart. She came out bald, with what she described as a whole lifetime opening inside her skull, and she drove a 1968 Ford Thunderbird across the station. In the nest the old Queen asked for Ash Parnall. Caryn knew the nest, and she knew the Honduras hunt had not been a Toy amusement. She addressed a cocooned 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.
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, and the Queen tightened her grip on Big Mama and the others until she drew blood. Caryn broke that standoff by offering herself as the host, in Big Mama's place. Once she was carrying the embryo, the Queen cut the others free, and TecSeks, Toy's machines, stood between the survivors and the dock.
New Human Allies
After the medpods opened, Caryn armed Genna, Sadiq, Gisande, Shirow, and Maria and sent them to bring back Big Mama's head and heart as training. Big Mama killed all five in under a minute. The pods rebuilt them faster and stronger, and Caryn ran the exercise again. They broke Big Mama's cloak. 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. Madrigal had sold a survey to DeMatier. DeMatier wanted Ash's DNA. 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.
Toy's False Town
Caryn, Big Mama, the Queen, and the five from the training reached the Liberté and found the skyliner was a nest. Toy answered with a town whose sign had once read Samara and then read Liberty. Ash was cast as the law. The simulation hit every sense Toy could reach, and 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. That was another reality, after the changed face and the changed personality, and she decided Toy was past saving.
Fight Against The White Hybrids
Caryn, Big Mama, the Queen, and the five from the training reached the Liberté and found the skyliner was a nest. Toy answered with a town whose sign had once read Samara and then read Liberty. Ash was cast as the law. The simulation hit every sense Toy could reach, and 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. That was another reality, after the changed face and the changed personality, and she decided Toy was past saving.
On the real ship, white hybrids of human, Yautja, 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. Ship tracking 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, then blew the body apart to be sure. 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 the system he called Toy. The original Caryn was maimed by a Queen and called for him. He chose Toy and left her.
The captor on the Liberté was the Hybrid King, Toy's synthesis of human, Yautja, and Alien, speaking with Willem's voice. Willem had been the host, and he 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 it refused the King. An embryo Toy had planted in the Samara Queen hatched as well, and Big Mama and that Queen stood together against the King. 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 so the machine would go on. Shirow and Maria argued over whether killing Toy had saved them.
Final Fate
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. Big Mama brought them out 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 and swore she would not rest until Ash paid for Lucien and for the skyliner. Ash did not turn back, and she left the Liberté as Ash Parnall.
Personality And Abilities
Ash kept a commander's habits under the trophy role. She refused Stephan Madrigal when he sold a survey to Bobby DeMatier, put herself between orbital fire and Big Mama, and offered her own body for the Queen's last royal embryo so the Queen would cut the others free. The Samara mindwipe was meant to erase her and sell a new personality on the Circuit. The projection of her memory would not come apart, and she came out of it as Ash. The designer-gene body carried skills the trophy life had never taught: she field-stripped a pulse rifle in the jungle drill, breathed through a mask taken off Big Mama's trophy wall, and ran the training in which Big Mama killed the five and the medpods rebuilt them. She killed Toy on the Liberté and left with the children.
Behind The Scenes
Chris Claremont wrote Ash and Caryn as one of the two leads in Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species, the 12-issue Dark Horse miniseries published from July 1993 to August 1995. He told Wizard in June 1993 that the in-house pitch treated the leads like Thelma and Louise, with a harder attitude and heavier guns, and that a female Predator was the place he was stretching the Alien and Predator limits. Jackson Guice pencilled the early chapters, and Eduardo Barreto pencilled the rest. John Bolton painted the covers, including the image of Ash beneath Big Mama.
Claremont had used Ash a year earlier, before the trophy life, in Renegade, the two-part short in Dark Horse Comics #1 and #2, dated August and September 1992. Vince Giarrano drew it, Gregory Wright colored it, and Tom Orzechowski lettered it. Diana Schutz and Jerry Prosser edited the short. Wright, Orzechowski, and Schutz stayed with Claremont on Deadliest of the Species. A double-gatefold cover by Dave Dorman ran with the short, and Dark Horse's listing for issue #2 credits a Mike Mignola cover. Issue #2 billed the short as the setup for Claremont's Aliens vs. Predator series. In the story, mercenaries under Javier Milan, with executive officer Moira Delgado of the Descartes Indigenous Self-Defense Forces, moved to take a colony world. Colony leader Caleb Deschanel sent Ash, also called Renegade, to deal with them. No Xenomorph and no Yautja appears in it, and the story does not mention them. The United Kingdom reprint in Aliens magazine, volume 2, issues 18 and 19, in December 1993 and January 1994, retitled the short Aliens: Renegade. That reprint is the last time the short was reissued. It was not included in the Deadliest collections.
Conclusion
Ash Parnall was Caryn Delacroix's buried life in Chris Claremont's Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species. Toy built the trophy body, changed the face, and ran her through more than one reality. She killed Toy on the Liberté, and she left with Big Mama and the children while Gisande Salazar swore to hunt her.
Appearances
- Aliens: Renegade (originally Renegade, Dark Horse Comics #1-2, 1992)
- Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species (Dark Horse Comics #1-12, 1993-1995)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Avp Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
