Isa Palant: Yautja Researcher Of The Rage War

Full name: Isa Palant
Species: Human
Affiliation: Weyland-Yutani (ArmoTech)
Role: Yautja researcher
Known for: 2692 ceasefire with Kalakta; Faze injection on Macbeth
Setting: Human Sphere, 2692 Rage War
First appearance: Predator: Incursion (2015)
Status: Alive; left Macbeth with Hashori
Injuries (novels): Tusk in the calf; bleed on the brain; acid burn on the forearm

Isa Palant was a Weyland-Yutani researcher in ArmoTech, the company's weapons division, in Tim Lebbon's Rage War novels Predator: Incursion, Alien: Invasion, and Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon. Through 2692 she studied Yautja blood, regeneration, and language at Love Grove Base on LV-1529, then sealed a ceasefire with the elder Kalakta. Major Akoko Halley later broke Company orders and took Palant with her. Palant injected a piece of the Faze on the Rage flagship Macbeth, and she left the surviving stern with Hashori.

Biography

Love Grove Base

In May 2692 Palant came back from a rover run with the independent contractor Rogers and found two Yautja corpses from Southgate Station 12 in her lab at Love Grove Base. Gerard Marshall, seventh chair of the Thirteen and director of ArmoTech, called from Charon Station and put weapons, and how the hunters fought, ahead of any attempt to speak with them. He sent the Company linguist Milt McIlveen. Palant's funding had been a fight edge for Weyland-Yutani, while the work she wanted on LV-1529 was contact with the hunters.

Historian Angela Svenlap shared the post and had been taking Founders signals for about two years. After about fifty days of autopsy work, Palant and Rogers found Svenlap by the fuel tanks in the subterranean garage, with no identity bracelet. Svenlap ran into the storm, and the garage became a fire pit. Debris cut Rogers's head off. Svenlap, burned, put a laser under her chin. Life support, control, and the main comms went with the north wing. About a hundred people had been on the base, and Palant later counted fifteen survivors for the rescue ship, including two orphaned children.

Wendigo And Shamana

A Yautja ship reached the Love Grove hangar weeks after the bombing, too soon for a Company freighter. For twelve days two hunters circled the survivors. Palant and McIlveen tapped their frequency and reached about sixty percent translation. They nicknamed the screamer Wendigo and the larger one Shamana, after a sportsman, and they were not sure of either hunter's sex. Wendigo talked of fire lizards, clan, and loss. Shamana wanted them calm, and he wanted to be left alone. Palant read the pair as refugees chased onto LV-1529, not as a trophy party.

Wendigo came in under a cloak, killed, and blew a corner of the hangar. Palant sent Shamana a short signal that she understood why he had come, and he left the hangar instead of joining that fight. Three days later the Arrow Pixie dropped through the rain with Halley's DevilDogs. They hit Shamana with a nano-burst. Palant ran between the Colonial Marines and the hunter with a datapad and held him in place. He laughed at surrender, then set off his wrist bomb. A tusk buried itself in Palant's calf. Fifteen survivors went up with Halley.

The Ceasefire

On LV-1529, Halley heard reports of sabotage across the Human Sphere and more than a hundred Yautja attacks. The 17th Spaceborne orbital in the Jackson system had been wiped out, with about 19,000 dead, and seven Outer Rim dropholes had been taken. Palant treated the saboteurs as human and the hunters as people fleeing Xenomorphs. Without approval from the Thirteen, Halley sent Palant and McIlveen's Yautja-language call for a truce against those creatures. The signal was heard more than three billion times. General Paul Bassett first ordered a hunt for Halley's group as deserters. Two hours later, Yautja attackers signaled a ceasefire, and Marshall treated the group as heroes.

The meeting took place on the independent ship Tracey-Jane at Drophole Gamma-116 in September 2692. Four helmetless warriors stood behind Kalakta, an elder of the 677th clan, who asked for Palant and McIlveen rather than for generals. He threw up a combat hologram of a dark ship dropping compact objects that hatched and charged. Palant named those creatures Xenomorphs, and he nodded. Marshall, listening through her earpiece, ordered her to claim that Earth knew the Yautja homeworld and would strike it with nuclear weapons. She pulled the earpiece and sent respect instead. Kalakta drew her forehead to his and sealed an alliance that put hunters beside the Marines. The contact left her with a bleed on the brain.

LV-1657

In October 2692 Palant was on LV-1657, ten days out of the medical bay after that bleed, with McIlveen and Halley's DevilDogs. Marshall wanted her taken to Sol. Three Rage ships decoyed the base guns and dropped adult Xenomorphs on the plateau. One hull dived into the core as a bomb and killed Major Reece's command. A Yautja ship, one of two Kalakta had sent to protect Palant, destroyed Rommel's third hull over the forest. Rommel refused surrender, went into a cliff cave with a Xenomorph guard, and then set off a blast of about two megatons. Palant came off the plateau with a thumb-sized acid burn on her forearm. Marshall's next order was to bring in another android alive.

Cooper-Jordan

Nineteen days after LV-1657, two Yautja ships shadowed Pixie and warned of an enemy wreck ahead. The dead hull was the Fiennes sleeper ship Cooper-Jordan. Palant, McIlveen, and the DevilDogs spacewalked into a burned hold of cryo-pods, then into another where more than two thousand sleepers had produced Chestbursters. Adult Xenomorphs were loose, and Yautja were hunting through the far side. A hunter in full kit led them to a wrecked Rage android, one leg gone, the torso bitten open, and the head almost off. The android tried and failed to fire its nuke. They bagged the body, walked it back to Pixie, and Sprenkel put three warheads into the Cooper-Jordan from fifty miles.

In the rec room McIlveen drew a laser on Halley so the android would go back to the Company. Palant would not hand it over. Sergeant major Huyck came from the flight-deck door, put a combat knife in McIlveen's back, and cut his throat. They dumped the body to space and stopped answering Marshall. The two Yautja ships led Pixie for twelve days in staged jumps to an unnamed asteroid about forty miles across, with no star, about twenty light years in from the Outer Rim. The hunters offered Palant a hangar for the research, and the doors closed on the bagged android.

The Hidden Asteroid

Pixie docked inside that asteroid, more than forty kilometres across. A hunter left Palant and the DevilDogs in a lab with the wrecked android from the Cooper-Jordan. Yaquita of the Wounded Clan rolled in on a wheeled platform, both legs gone, and seated a living device in the ruined skull. Palant named the android Oscar, after a childhood dog. Hours into that work Yaquita tore the device free and gave Palant one word, Drukathi. Kalakta later met her in a holocabin that opened into a jungle. He had ordered the interrogation, then gave her only enough to fight the Rage. The Drukathi had left this galaxy about a million years earlier, and their leftover tools included the Faze found at Midsummer.

Oscar began shutting himself down around Yaquita's blocks. Palant pulled out the organ that drove him. That organ was the likely control for the Xenomorphs and the self-destruct, the same kind of device Liliya had carried away from the Rage. Halley burned the body in the lab. Yaquita then gave them Macbeth's location, which was what Palant had come to the asteroid to find.

Macbeth

Palant met the Rage android Liliya at a rendezvous after Yautja ships froze the general Alexander and took the survivors off the wrecked mercenary ship Satan's Saviour. They wrote a signal to seize a general's self-destruct, put it into Liliya's heart through the nano in her blood, and tested it on the frozen android. A nuclear flash a hundred miles out destroyed him. Yaquita boarded Pixie, and a hidden Yautja drophole at the asteroid's heart dropped them into Sol outside Pluto's orbit.

Pixie dropped a million kilometres out from Macbeth and attacked so Beatrix Maloney would haul the Arrow in rather than destroy it. Liliya walked out of the lock alone. Yaquita's cloaked ship had slipped into the hangar, and on Halley's mark the cloak dropped so Palant and the DevilDogs could leave. Burned Bestwick held a passage so Halley, Huyck, and Palant could reach a locked control room. A head-sized piece of the Faze spun on a pedestal through blue, dark green, and pink. Palant injected the nano and gave the ready signal. Liliya, in the Queen's hall, sent one thought through the android command, a self-destruct. Maloney's rebuilt heart heated, and most of Macbeth burned.

About two hundred metres of stern survived. Palant treated that as the Faze ejecting the engine bay to save itself, and the piece vanished from the pedestal. Hashori came out helmetless, with a spear almost eaten by acid, and confirmed that other humans had lived. Jiango Tann and Yvette Tann left on Hashori's ship with Palant. Halley and Huyck remained in the fleet and meant to report in. Hashori spoke of the pilgrimage adult Yautja make to the homeworld, and Palant went with her.

Personality And Traits

Isa Palant was a lab scientist in ArmoTech. The company paid her to study how Yautja fought. She worked on their blood, regeneration, and language, and she tried to speak with hunters when she had the chance. She could work from a half-translated signal or a damaged android. She had no Marine training, and she stayed with the research when the people around her were shooting.

She treated stranded hunters as refugees, and she treated the human saboteurs of 2692 as people who had reasons. In a meeting with Kalakta she refused Gerard Marshall's order to threaten the Yautja homeworld. She also refused to send a captured android back to the Company. After Macbeth she left with Hashori instead of returning with the fleet.

A tusk in the calf, a bleed on the brain, and an acid burn on the forearm did not stop that work. She went back to the language and the specimens after each injury. She named the wrecked android Oscar, after a childhood dog, and she removed the organ she needed from him. She left on a Yautja ship, remained interested in the hunters, and did not return to ArmoTech.

Behind The Scenes

Tim Lebbon introduced Palant in Predator: Incursion, published by Titan Books on 20 October 2015 as the first Rage War novel. He brought her back in Alien: Invasion on 26 April 2016 and closed her story in Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon in September 2016. Titan asked him for a military story set later than the films, with an outside force using weaponized Xenomorphs, and he made that force human.

Conclusion

Isa Palant was the ArmoTech researcher who learned to speak with Yautja during the Rage War. She sealed the September 2692 ceasefire with Kalakta, held the captured android away from Gerard Marshall, and injected the Faze on Macbeth so Liliya could burn the Rage generals. She left the wreck with Hashori and the Tanns.