Chris Temple: Retired USM Colonel On LV-1213
Chris Temple was a retired United Systems Military colonel and the father of Jane and Emma in Brendan Deneen's Alien: Uncivil War. He left the service in the days after the USM Auriga hit Earth, and on 23 May 2381 he was trying to move the girls and their auton Alicia to a civilian colony. The transport aborted to LV-1213 and wrecked near Mining Outpost Omega Seven Tango. Chris killed the two adult Xenomorphs that hunted that dome and flew the family off in an empty USM ship.
Biography
The Service In USM
Chris was the only child of a highly decorated United Systems Military officer. His father died of cancer when Chris was an infant, and his mother was hard on him while he tried to impress her. He joined the service as a young man and rose to colonel. The unlock string he later gave Alicia, sigma epsilon default seven seven two, was one he had not used since that promotion. His last battle before the Auriga crash was against Weyland-Yutani cultists who had attacked USM targets. The company had been gone for decades, and that fight was bloody enough that parts of it stayed with him.
He quit in the days after the Auriga smashed into Earth. A sergeant warned him that war would keep finding a man like him. The crash, and the secrets the public had not been told, were the end of his willingness to stay in uniform. He wanted a new planet for himself and his daughters. His wife Elizabeth was dead by then. On her deathbed he promised that nothing bad would happen to the girls, and her last act was a smile. Jane did not cry again until the escape pod, long after the funeral.
San Francisco
The family lived in San Francisco, in the house where Jane and Emma had grown up. Jane was eleven. Emma was three years younger and nearly as tall. Alicia was a domestic auton the girls treated as family, and Jane told her that she loved her before they left Earth. Robberies in that year had jumped by 876 percent, which was one reason Chris wanted them off the planet. The trip through Gateway Station and onto the transport was a blur.
Shortly before they left, two escaped convicts, Terrence and Mackie, broke into the house for Elizabeth's jewelry. Alicia's inhibitor stopped her from hurting them until Jane came down the stairs and Terrence moved toward the girl with a knife. Alicia broke his arm, took a blade in the back from Mackie, and smashed Mackie unconscious on the stairs. She reached local law after the fight. Jane asked if Alicia was all right, not whether her systems were fine. Chris was not home for that fight. He had sent word that he was on his way, and the family left Earth after it.
The Transport
On 23 May 2381 the Temples were awake in their quarters on the transport ship VX-72383. Most passengers had gone into hypersleep. The girls were not ready for the chambers, so they stayed awake for the months-long run. Chris had studied the ship's layout and carried a go-bag with a pistol he had smuggled aboard. He heard rumors of genetic cargo, live experiments, and cloning, and one name that a man of his rank would know: Ripley. He treated it as gossip until he thought of the disaster that had destroyed the Nostromo.
An adult Xenomorph in the smoke pinned a guard through the gut with its tail. Chris gave Alicia his colonel code, and she opened a locked route toward the pods. When the creature came out of the smoke at his face, she slammed into it and vanished with it down the corridor. He got the girls into a four-seat pod, a count that left two seats empty, and launched as the adult Xenomorph reached the hatch. There was no sign of Alicia behind it. The bags, including the pistol, had been dropped in the run. His head hit as the pod blasted clear, and he blacked out. The abort put them on LV-1213 instead of the civilian colony they had booked.
Under The Dome On LV-1213
Chris woke in the outpost hospital on LV-1213. Jane and Emma led him out of the room, and Lexa Phelan followed. She had watched the girls while he was unconscious. Mining Outpost Omega Seven Tango was a quadromite mine under a dome, with a false sky, a main street, and a bar called Delilah's. Lexa told him the transport had been destroyed and that nothing had survived. That was a lie. Colonists had hauled the wreck into a warehouse, and Cosgrove, a scarred former USM man on warehouse security, would not let Chris near it.
The girls settled into an empty house faster than he expected and ate at Delilah's. A fight started there on a night when the miners were drinking moonshine. Chris put several men down before Lexa pulled him back. On the walk home she kissed him, the first time he had kissed anyone since Elizabeth died. After the girls were in bed he walked the dark side of the stores and found the warehouse. Anthony Milliken blocked him. Cosgrove made the younger guard apologize and promised a tour if Chris filled out paperwork. Chris left with the guards watching him from the door.
The Cells And Alicia
Lexa wanted Chris in the fight against the USM commander she had locked up. He refused. He bypassed a hidden door in headquarters and went down into an underground cell block. Jennifer Chu, the officer sent to put the mine back on ore and profit, was in one of the cells with her staff. No children were down there. The miners with kids had gone with Lexa. Jennifer asked about the transport, and Chris understood the warehouse story. He left her there, went back for his girls, and promised to get the prisoners out if he could.
He later beat Milliken behind the warehouse, took the guard's badge, and used Lexa's headquarters code on the main door. The wreck filled the chamber, black with scorch. A light under a side door led to Margaret Livingston's lab. Alicia was on the table, face cut and burned, one arm gone, white fluid dried through holes in her clothes. Jane and Emma ran in and held her. Alicia warned them the colonists were dangerous. The family decided to leave that night, before a USM landing turned the dome into a battlefield.
The Theater
When the Marines came in during the long night, Chris hid Alicia and the girls, then went back to the cells. He took a pulse rifle from the weapons locker, a model he had used on earlier missions, and burned a door shut with a tight line of flame. He shot two of Lexa's guards, opened the locks, and watched Jennifer's people strip the locker. Chu wanted the colony back and would not leave. When he returned upstairs, a blast had torn the room where he had hidden his family, and the word MOVIE was written on the wall in blood.
He kicked in the theater's back door. A silent black-and-white film was running in an empty house, and Alicia, Jane, and Emma rose from between the front rows. The larger adult Xenomorph dragged a living woman in and started wrapping her against the wall. Chris fired a handgun into its stomach and shoulder. Acid blood burned the floor and his skin, and he tore off his shirt. Alicia caught the tail with her remaining hand. He put several bullets into the creature's head, and it collapsed. The woman on the wall had no pulse when he checked her neck. He kissed Alicia after the creature was dead. He cared about her, and she had made the same feeling plain.
Off LV-1213
Alicia found an unattended USM ship about two miles west by plugging a wrist wire into a pharmacy port. They moved for the main exit. Lexa stopped them with a rifle, struck Chris in the forehead with the butt, and aimed at his head when he would not stay. The smaller adult Xenomorph hit her first, tore her throat, and killed her on the ground. Alicia forced the dome door through a failing grid. Outside, that creature pinned her, then Chris. A tail blow cut his forehead and dropped the rifle. Jane threw it back to him. The throw split her hands open. The creature's teeth went into his shoulder, and the first shots went wide of the skull.
Emma threw a rock that missed. Alicia hit the adult Xenomorph in the head with two more rocks and broke the pin. Chris smashed the rifle across its jaw, rolled clear of the tail, and put one bullet out through the back of its head. The four of them reached the ship under the three moons. In the medical bay they wrapped his wounds and Jane's hands. His old passcode started the engines. He sat in the captain's chair with both girls asleep in his lap while Alicia set a course for another outpost about five hundred trillion miles away, roughly two months at hyperdrive. The dome had lost power. People were shooting in the square as the ship passed over Omega Seven Tango.
Behind The Scenes
Brendan Deneen wrote Chris Temple for Titan Books, which released Alien: Uncivil War on 30 July 2024. The character came out of a private Alien 3 treatment in which Ellen Ripley, Dwayne Hicks, and Newt crashed as a family into a war with a Xenomorph in it. Titan editor Steve Saffel refused another Alien 3 and later asked for an original novel with that same crash and war, and with no ties to the film cast. Chris took the soldier-father place Hicks had held in the unused treatment. Lore consultant Clara Carija set the story shortly after Alien: Resurrection. Blackstone Publishing released an audiobook the same day, read by Austin Rising.
Conclusion
Chris Temple was the retired colonel who tried to get Jane, Emma, and Alicia off Earth after the Auriga crash. On LV-1213 he killed both adult Xenomorphs that hunted the outpost, and he would not stay for Lexa Phelan's war. He left Mining Outpost Omega Seven Tango alive, in the captain's chair of an empty USM ship, with his daughters asleep and Alicia beside him.
Appearances
- Alien: Uncivil War by Brendan Deneen (Titan Books, 2024)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
