Cheyenne (Shy) Hunt: Programmer & Charybdis Victim

Full name: Cheyenne Hunt
Also known as: Shy
Species: Human
Affiliation: McAllen Integrations
Role: Frontend programmer
Known for: Tried to stop the Hasanova storehouse massacre
Family: Ken Hunt (father); Cherokee "Cher" Hunt (sister)
Setting: LV-991 / Hasanova, 2184
First appearance: Alien: Into Charybdis (2021)
Status: Dead; shot by Kylie Duncan
Injuries (novel): Tased at the hidden lab; chest shot; shot through the eye

Cheyenne Hunt, called Shy, was a McAllen Integrations programmer in Alex White's Alien: Into Charybdis. In 2184 she landed on Iran's data colony Hasanova on LV-991 to install climate and network systems over the old Weyland-Yutani ruin called Charybdis. Captain Kylie Duncan shot her in the command center after she tried to stop a timer that would open the locked storehouses to adult Xenomorphs.

Biography

Frontend Work On Gardenia

McAllen Integrations ran from McAllen, Texas, on the worn tow ship USCSS Gardenia. Captain Jerry Fowler introduced her as the frontend developer and told clients to call her Shy. She built the user screens for the NovArc SiteSys install, a job the crew called floater, and she had no college degree. She had spent time around horses and veterinary work near Texas A&M, and she smoked Balaji Imperials.

Jerry and flight officer Mary Fowler treated the small crew like family. Network tech Noah Brewer kept taking her interface drawings and putting Jerry's name on the approval. The McAllen synth Marcus kept her company on the long hauls, and she treated him as her closest friend on the ship. Cryo stretches and lump-sum pay were how she planned to retire in her late thirties looking as young as her mid-twenties.

First Days On Hasanova

American officers approved the secret raid Cannery Grim in December 2183, after McAllen filed travel papers. Eight months later Shy woke from cryosleep beside Jerry, Mary, Noah, climate tech Arthur Atwater, mechanic Joanna Hardy, and Marcus. Hasanova sat on an atoll around Lake Peacock, with a 400-meter lava-tube shaft at the center. Safety lead Kamran Afghanzadeh met them after his mentor Reza Hosseini died in that shaft.

Colony apartments gave her a king bed and a parlor. On Gardenia she had shared a bunk with Joanna or slept in a cryopod, and at the Astropuerta de Juarez she used a capsule hotel and left her things on the ship. Operations vice president Haroun Sharif treated the Americans as spies. Joanna and Arthur were sent to move air handlers with John Deere Badger exosuits instead of the power loaders in the contract, and Shy pressed Haroun that the colony was hiding new construction.

On the fourth work day she pulled a conference-room panel and tore open huntsman spider sacs while wiring the switch. Jerry had told the crew the world had no indigenous life. Those spiders were a colony pest, not Xenomorphs. She later lost a half hour of SiteSys work in a records room when Haroun interrupted her at the LuxMOS gateway, and the room never appeared on the central server.

The Island Lab

Haroun later sent her with Kamran and a militia team toward a crashed ship on a nearby island. He wanted an American the press would care about if the landing was a trick. Security captain Akbari ran the hovercraft crossing and threatened to cuff her when she froze at the waterline. The wreck on the rocks was the resin-coated hull UAEV Blackstar, but the team found a cave hatch with a Weyland mark instead of the ship's interior.

Shy recognized the empty cabinet as a class-two airlock. The lab dated from a time when the world had no breathable air, before the later Russian work. An adult Xenomorph took Kamran's arm there and dragged him into the dark. Colony security tased Shy, and Blue Marsalis cut the arm away to keep the infection from spreading. She went back to the apartments covered in Kamran's blood.

Resignation On Gardenia

CTO Tiran Shirazi offered the McAllen crew ten million dollars each to sign a silence contract, wait for fuel on Gardenia, and stay off the colony. Shy asked for twenty million and offered to sign that night, with the harshest penalties if she talked. She wanted a house outside Nashville and a way off Hasanova. Tiran took the demand to the board.

Back on Gardenia she resigned during a galley toast, then learned Jerry had been close to firing her. Mary asked her not to leave angry, and they drank from Jerry's Captain's Stock and sang country songs for hours. Mary had always thought Shy liked horses more than climate screens. Noah sent a distress call that named American hostages and a compromised colony. The twenty million vanished with that broadcast, and the call became the public reason for a Marine landing.

The Storehouse Timer

Duncan's Midnighters came from the assault carrier USS Benning and treated the Gardenia crew as prisoners. Shy named the animals in the tunnels as Xenomorphs, not a new species. The Colonial Marines boarded the Seegson hull Blackstar, took frozen eggs, and caged the speaking Xenomorph that used the name Marsalis. Duncan then packed more than three hundred colonists into the data storehouses.

She used approaching Independent Core System Colonies security as the reason to have Shy packed for landing pad alpha in two hours. The real job was a SiteSys schedule that would open every door from the bottom up, starting with the storehouses, so adult Xenomorphs grown from the Blackstar eggs would kill the locked people and hide the raid. Duncan had picked Shy over Noah because she needed the person who understood the screens, and Shy showed her how to load a saved workspace into the event scheduler.

Death In The Command Center

Shy overheard the plan from a doorway with Noah, then ran at the console to pull Duncan's drive. She broke the captain's grip on her wrist with a pinwheel she had learned in a McAllen self-defense class at fourteen, after six local girls went missing, then hit Duncan in the face. Duncan shot her through the chest. The round left an exit wound in her back, and she fell off the dais.

Duncan told her the storehouse gates had opened five minutes earlier, then fired again through the eye. Corporal Russell Becker saw the shooting, and Marcus later forced him to tell the remaining McAllen crew that Shy was dead. Banu Sharif and most of the locked colonists died when the doors went up.

Her Sister's Search

Two years later her sister Cherokee Hunt, called Cher, was a New York journalist. She left Earth to find out why Shy had died on Hasanova. A hearing at The Hague had cleared Duncan six months before that trip and treated Shy and the rest of the McAllen crew as collateral in a covert Marine job.

Chad McLaren sent Cher a paper postcard of the Charybdis whirlpool, posted to her New York address, with New Albion written on the back. He named Duncan's Midnighters as the unit that wiped witnesses after the raid. Cher went to New Albion in Alien: Colony War looking for that answer. Into Charybdis never names her.

Behind The Scenes

White's novel presents Shy as a McAllen, Texas contractor with horse work and a vet-school memory. Barnett later gave the sisters an Oregon childhood under their father Ken Hunt, who named them Cheyenne and Cherokee, and said their mother had died of cancer. Those two family pictures sit beside each other.

Conclusion

Cheyenne Hunt was a McAllen programmer who landed on Hasanova in 2184 to finish a SiteSys install. She overheard Duncan's storehouse timer, ran at the console, and died in the command center after two gunshots, the last one through the eye. Two years later her sister Cher left New York to find out why.