Bunda was the jungle planet at the center of Aliens vs. Predator: War, the 1995 Dark Horse miniseries by Randy Stradley. A Weyland-Yutani survey crew worked there from a floating station called Big Archey, while the Yautja clan of Top-Knot chose the same world for a great hunt of Xenomorphs. When the hunters turned on the humans, Machiko Noguchi broke with her clan and freed its captive Queen. The station was destroyed, and Machiko left the planet with the last survivors of a Company station disaster.
The Planet
The Jungle
Most of Bunda was covered in dense jungle. Troops of tailed, monkey-like animals lived in the canopy and fled through the trees when a Yautja hunt ship came down among them. The sky was a pale lemon color, flocks of native birds filled the air, and the plants grew in many shades of green. Katherine Lara thought she had never seen such a beautiful place after the slaughter she had escaped, and the brown-furred animals reminded her of the test monkeys from the history books. Each of them stood no more than a meter high.
A Company Backwater
On the human side, Bunda belonged to the Company. It was a small survey planet with only a research station and more than thirty technicians, and the executive Lucas Briggs dismissed it as one of those Company backwaters that would not be livable until the jungle was cleared and paved over. When the station answered the distress call of the survivors, its channel operator Windy never mentioned that the planet was a Company world. A station pilot loaded an auto program that flew the survivors' shuttle straight to the station. The station's staff had no idea that the planet was a Yautja hunting ground until the night the hunters came for them.
Flora & Fauna
One of the native animals was the primacet, the only creature on Bunda with lungs big enough for a loud call. That detail mattered on the first night, when the station manager Kevin Vincent heard a harsh trilling sound from the jungle and tried to explain it away as an animal. Soon afterward, a Facehugger seized one of the monkey-like animals in the trees just as the survivors' shuttle passed overhead, a clear sign that the hunters' quarry was already loose in the jungle. At twilight the jungle filled with gentle insect sounds much like those of Earth, and a musky smell rose from the undergrowth at night.
Big Archey
The MultiEnvelope Design
The Company outpost on Bunda was a white installation that rose above the jungle on tall supports, with a cluster of rounded spheres above its decks. The station was called Big Archey, and its staff ran a control level, a landing pad and a D-ship that could fly out to help ships in trouble. It was a Hess MultiEnvelope design, named after the architect who drafted the first one, in which huge off-white spheres filled with buoyant gas held up decks for landing, observation, laboratories and living space. Only a few slender posts and a single lift touched the ground.
The Station Staff
The envelope design was cheap to transport and kept contact with the native life to a minimum, which suited a survey world that had barely been explored. Kevin Vincent ran the station as its administrator, although he was a botanist who had taken the post mostly for the extra pay. His research coordinator was Tom Cabot, and the station also had pilots, technicians and a communications crew. His posting was meant to last only two years, and he had taken it after his doctoral theory on the medical use of bryophytes collapsed. None of them were soldiers, and the station kept only a small store of weapons, which proved useless against invisible attackers.
A Yautja Hunting Ground
The Hunt Ships
At night, two moons hung over the jungles of Bunda, which stretched over swamps, grasslands and low hills below them. Hunt ships from several clans gathered above the planet before Top-Knot's party went down to hunt. Like every other part of Yautja life, the hunt followed strict rules, which covered the places that could be hunted and even the types of ships used to reach them. Hunts usually began at dusk over the seeded planet, after most of the eggs had hatched, because the Xenomorphs were far more active at night. Machiko thought those rules were the closest thing to religion she had seen in hunter culture.
The Xenomorph Quarry
For the Yautja, Bunda was a hunting ground stocked with Xenomorphs. Xenomorph eggs were waiting in the jungle, and two surveyors, Pratt and Rembert, were driven into an egg silo where Facehuggers took them. Machiko later told the survivors that the clan had started its hunt in another part of the planet and would soon be heading toward the station. Deep in the jungle, Kevin Vincent later found himself trapped in front of an egg and decided that a rival biotech company must have seeded the planet with Xenomorphs for its own experiments.
The Captive Queen
The clan had brought its own prize to Bunda as well. Before the hunt, Top-Knot's party had captured a live Xenomorph Queen and locked her down in the hold of its ship for the next hunt. Machiko lost her place in the Bunda hunt after a pit fight with the young hunter she called Shorty, so she stayed on the ship while the rest of the party went down. From there she overheard human voices on the ship's receiver and realized that people were in danger on the planet.
History
The Nemesis Survivors Arrive
Katherine Lara, Martin Jess and Brian Ellis were the last of the Nemesis crew after the station disaster in Aliens: Berserker. Their drifting shuttle sent a distress call with little air left, and Bunda survey answered and sent a ship to guide them down. On orders from Lucas Briggs, a Weyland-Yutani executive, Kevin Vincent quarantined the shuttle, and the station staff arrested the three survivors on the landing pad. Briggs then arrived in an expensive Sun Jumper with a synthetic named Nirasawa and a guard named Keene, and pressed the prisoners for the data they carried from the lost station.
The Night Attack
Top-Knot turned the hunt on the humans, and cloaked hunters attacked Big Archey at night. Above the planet, Machiko broke with the clan, killed the ship's captain and freed the captive Queen, who tore through the young hunters left aboard and then went down toward the surface. On the station, Brian Ellis doused one hunter in jet fuel while refueling the survivors' shuttle. The blast set off one of the gas envelopes, the platform tilted and fell, and the landing pad dropped into the trees as the survivors were thrown clear.
The attack left thirteen of the Bunda staff missing and eight confirmed dead before the station finished coming down. The station pilots Lee Goldmann and Les Drucker called for an immediate evacuation and led the armed survivors to the orbital transports. Kevin Vincent woke in the bushes with a broken shoulder and looked out over kilometers of smashed decks and burning envelope. He survived the fall, but a hunter later copied his voice and cut him down in the wreckage.
Escape From Bunda
Machiko put the stolen ship down in the jungle in front of Jess and Lara. The Queen she had freed reached the same ground with her brood, and the fight split three ways between the hunters, the Xenomorphs and the humans on the wreck of Big Archey. Ellis came back in the MAX 09 armor and pulled the others into the trees. Machiko killed Shorty there, cutting off his left arm and wristblades before she finished him, and acid blood ran from the stump.
In the jungle the survivors met Nirasawa, who was carrying Lucas Briggs after a Facehugger had taken him on the wreck. The synthetic was destroyed covering the others as they reached the ship. Before they lifted off, Machiko put Briggs into the MAX armor, with a Chestburster about to tear out of his chest, so that he could fire at the hunters and Xenomorphs with the time he had left. Then she flew Lara and Jess away from Bunda toward the place Lara called home, somewhere Machiko had not been yet.
Fate Of Bunda
In the end, the Big Archey survey station lay in burning ruins in the jungle, and most of its staff were dead or had fled to the orbital transports. Top-Knot was still in the field when Machiko left, so his clan and the Queen's brood remained on Bunda with the last of the hunt. No record showed that the Company ever returned to the planet. Later stories looked back on Bunda as the place where Machiko left the hunters for good, and Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War was set ten years after that break.
Conclusion
Bunda was a beautiful jungle world where a small Company survey station and a Yautja clan's great hunt met by accident. The arrival of the Nemesis survivors and the ambitions of Lucas Briggs drew the hunters to Big Archey, and the station fell into the jungle in fire. For Machiko, the planet marked the end of her year with the clan and the start of her road back to humanity. She left with Lara and Jess, while the hunters, the Queen's brood and the ruins of the station stayed behind.
Appearances
- Aliens vs. Predator: War #0 to #4 by Randy Stradley (Dark Horse Comics, 1995)
- Aliens vs. Predator: War by S. D. Perry (Bantam Spectra, 1999)
- Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War by Randy Stradley (Dark Horse Comics, 2010), mentioned
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Planets | Alien Universe Planets | Predator Lore | Avp Lore
