Daryl Corgan was the captain of the United Nations Interplanetary Corps ship Hornblower in John Shirley's 2007 novel Aliens: Steel Egg. In 2058 his crew found an ancient egg-shaped vessel hiding behind Saturn's moon Iapetus, and he chose to board it before a rival CANC expedition could claim it. The ship held dormant Xenomorph Eggs, and the creatures that hatched from them killed almost everyone under his command. Corgan survived capture, the loss of his ship, and a final fight aboard the alien vessel, and was rescued in space with science officer Ashley Norton.
Biography
Earlier Life
Before joining UNIC, Corgan served as a soldier. He trained under a sergeant in Syria and, as a young lieutenant fresh from the academy, commanded an experimental o-spike drop craft in the Orbital Marines during the war against the People's Jihad in Pakistan. His o-spike crashed into the Pakistani presidential palace, and he half carried his injured partner out, shooting his way through Jihad platoons until other teams arrived. He later fought beside Nate Eusebius at the taking of Lahore, won medals, and was treated by a division psychiatrist after losing men in an ambush there.
His personal life suffered during the war. His wife, June, grew tired of waiting for him to be rotated out of Pakistan and left him for another man, and he still dreamed of her years later. By 2058 he was 36, young for a captain and younger than most of his crew. Aboard the Hornblower he had a brief affair with life-support officer Julie Murteno, which he regretted, and he was strongly attracted to Ashley Norton, though she kept her distance. His mother had been a lapsed Catholic, and he swore by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph when shocked.
The Anomaly At Iapetus
The Hornblower, a fifteen-person ship, had entered orbit around Saturn when Norton woke Corgan to report an anomaly near Iapetus. Scans showed a steel-colored egg shape more than two kilometers long, at least a thousand years old, that moved to keep the moon between itself and the human ship. A CANC probe was already approaching, and asking Earth for permission would have meant leaving the Saturn system. Corgan noted that the mission orders asked the crew to check a strange metal reading on Iapetus, and he suspected that UNIC, or the corporation behind it, had known something was there.
He admitted to himself that he wanted to explore the object and was looking for excuses. When he told the officers they were going in without permission, Eusebius agreed but asked him to record that it was the captain's responsibility. Corgan thought of the move as initiative, but he knew it could wreck his career. He also distrusted the crew roster, since Reynolds, Bayfield, and Dix had been rushed aboard, and he wondered whether The Company, the conglomerate that influenced the United Nations, had arranged their assignments for hidden reasons.
Inside The Steel Egg
Corgan flew in Lander One with Norton, Beresford, and exobiologist Eli Reynolds, and led the survey team down the whirlpool-shaped opening in the hull. The vessel scanned the humans, let them in, and filled its first chamber with breathable air. When Reynolds removed his helmet without permission, Corgan reminded him that he was under the captain's orders. At a workstation Corgan watched holographic recordings of the tall builders, and because one of them kept repeating a sound while gesturing at itself, he began calling the species the Giffs.
The same recordings showed an adult Xenomorph killing a Giff pilot with its inner jaws and a creature bursting from a Giff's chest. Corgan split the crew into two teams, and while he studied the bridge controls with Norton, the other team found the hidden egg chamber. A Facehugger attached itself to Cruz, and others took Beresford and Collindale. Corgan knew quarantine rules forbade it, but he decided alone to bring all three men back to the Hornblower, saying they could not be abandoned and could not be helped aboard the alien ship.
The Outbreak On The Hornblower
Corgan kept the three men in quarantine and privately feared that something was growing inside them. UNIC ordered a second expedition, and he returned to the Giff ship with an armed team. In a pipe-filled chamber they found dead Giffs glued to the wall, and Corgan recognized the arrangement from the warning recordings. He ordered everyone back to the ship, but they arrived too late. A Chestburster had killed Cruz, Beresford had died after cutting out his own embryo, and Collindale had stolen a lander and taken Julie Murteno hostage.
The newborn creatures fed and grew to adult size in about a day. Corgan searched the ship with rifles and moved the crew onto the bridge, the easiest part of the ship to defend. In the port engine room he used a maintenance robot as a decoy, but an adult Xenomorph clawed his left shoulder and killed Dix, while the second adult killed Dinswood. Corgan then had improvised flamethrowers brought in and sent Dorea Rondell and Chang to repair the external scanners, unaware that Reynolds had sabotaged them to help CANC.
Buxton and Chang died in the scanner chamber, and Dorea was killed in a dark corridor while Corgan's group tried to reach her. A drop of acid blood burned Corgan's left arm and ruined his rifle. Back on the bridge a printout revealed that Reynolds had disabled the scanners and the long-range transmitter. A wounded Xenomorph then broke onto the bridge and killed O'Neil and Hesse before Norton killed it, and its acid wrecked the ship's controls. Only Corgan, Norton, and Eusebius were left.
Captured By CANC
The three survivors were preparing a lander when soldiers from the CANC ship Glorious Sun boarded the hangar. Corgan reached for the switch that would have opened the bay doors and blown them into space, but Norton called it murder, and he decided it would be illegal unless they were attacked first. He surrendered to Commander Kyu Kim and warned him about the Xenomorphs. From the lander he watched CANC engines push the Hornblower toward Saturn to destroy it, and he refused to explain the Giff technology, telling Kim that CANC would kill the prisoners anyway.
Corgan carried a sonic key from the first expedition and noticed an opening that Reynolds had left in the deck of the food-growing room. He closed it while staging an argument with Eusebius, then reopened it so that Kim and Sergeant Ho went down to investigate. The shaft led to the nursery of a new Queen. When the guards were distracted, Corgan and Eusebius knocked two soldiers down the shaft, Norton tackled Lieutenant Zhang, and Corgan sealed the opening behind them, trapping Kim's group with the eggs.
Escape And The Death Of Nate
Armed with captured missile launchers, the three rested in the ship's axis tunnel and then made for the Giff shuttle hangar. Only one shuttle was undamaged, and Corgan opened it with a second sonic key as CANC soldiers blasted the hangar door. Eusebius refused to board and took a defensive position, telling Corgan to get the craft flying. Corgan fought beside him for a few moments, killing Zhang and three soldiers with mini-missiles, then traded launchers with his friend and ran for the shuttle. The hangar depressurized as the craft launched, and Corgan saw Eusebius's body float past.
Larry And The Iapetus Base
The shuttle flew on its own toward Iapetus and slipped into a tunnel beneath the moon's equatorial ridge, which turned out to be an unfinished Giff base. A Giff artificial organism seized Corgan and Norton, and while they were unconscious a translation machine learned English from their minds. They woke beside a living Giff, whom Corgan called Larry. Larry explained that enemies from beyond the galactic rim had planted eggs aboard his ship during peace talks, and that the ship's name was roughly the Unbreakable Womb.
Corgan argued that CANC would misuse Giff technology, but he privately admitted that UNIC was growing corrupt under pressure from the Company. As an officer he had caught Company representatives skimming millions from troop supply contracts, and he could not decide which side was worse. Larry destroyed the Iapetus base and flew the two humans back to the alien ship, which Reynolds had set on a course for Earth. Corgan tried to bargain with Reynolds by radio, but the exobiologist mocked him as captain of nothing, and Larry warned that the ship would reach the orbit of Earth's Moon in an hour and twelve minutes.
The Last Fight And Rescue
Larry gave Corgan a device that could erase another user's control of the ship, then headed for the bridge while Corgan and Norton crawled through a maintenance tunnel on long flyers. The route crossed a chamber of preserved human warriors taken from ancient battlefields on Earth. When a Xenomorph knocked Norton down, Corgan attacked it with a Roman short sword and shield until its acid dissolved them. He then fired a preserved crossbow, taken from a dead Norman soldier, point-blank into its jaws and killed it. In the engine room he used Larry's device to cut Reynolds out of the controls.
A CANC warning shot exploded near the acid-damaged hull and cracked it open, and Corgan and Norton were pulled into space in their pressure suits. As they tumbled, Corgan watched Larry fly the Unbreakable Womb into the Sun to destroy the Xenomorphs and keep its technology from humans. Norton switched on her mayday beacon, and Corgan finally told her he loved her. Commander Haz Ahmed of the UNIC ship Al Gore heard the exchange, picked up the beacon, and sent a drone to bring them aboard.
Corgan faced a court-martial, but it was a formality, and no one blamed him for losing the Hornblower. UNIC classified the proceedings and seized the video recorded by his and Norton's suit cameras, which was the only proof of what had happened. He later heard that The Company had paid off officials and taken the footage. There were no medals or public appearances, which suited him. He married Norton, and the two spent their honeymoon on a beach on St. Croix, where he tried to forget Nate, Beresford, Julie, and the rest of his crew.
Personality And Traits
Corgan could be awkward and tongue-tied around Norton, but in what he called "Captain mode" his training took over and he became all authority. He kept discipline informal and did not sweat small matters, yet he came down hard on Reynolds and on frightened crew members such as O'Neil. He was also willing to break rules when he thought it right, boarding the alien ship without orders and ignoring quarantine to save his men. Eusebius described him as a good officer with good instincts who always took point and worried more about his crew than himself.
He was practical under fire, using a robot as a decoy, choosing defensible positions, and improvising with flamethrowers, sonic keys, and ancient weapons. During the outbreak he deliberately shut off his feelings, a habit learned in Pakistan, but the losses still reached him, and he wept after Eusebius died. He distrusted both CANC and The Company and could not believe he was working for the good guys. His feelings for Norton grew throughout the crisis, and his last words to her in space were the confession he had put off since their near-crash on Iapetus.
Famous Quotes
- "It'd be a goddamn anomaly if I got any sleep around here."
- "It's the greatest discovery since Eric the Red found America. We can't just let CANC have it."
- "How come they get vacuum-ready missile launchers and we get assault rifles that only fire in a pressurized vessel?"
- "You got to know I love you, Officer Norton."
Conclusion
Daryl Corgan was the UNIC captain who led humanity's first survey of the Giff ship near Iapetus and lived through the outbreak it caused. His choices to board the vessel and bring the infected men home helped spread the creatures to the Hornblower, where all but two of his crew died. He trapped Kim's party with the new Queen, escaped with Norton after Eusebius's sacrifice, and helped Larry take the ship back from Reynolds. The recordings from his suit later passed to The Company, giving it evidence of the species long before the Nostromo mission.
Appearances
- Aliens: Steel Egg by John Shirley (DH Press, 2007)
- The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 6 (Titan Books, 2018), reprint
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
