Jericho 3: Venture Planet Of The V-22 Lodge Outbreak

Name: Jericho 3
Type: Rocky, windswept planet
Atmosphere: Mostly carbon dioxide, unbreathable
Surface temperature: Averaged about 32 degrees Fahrenheit
Gravity: Slightly below Earth normal
Sky: Dark yellowish brown, bluish sun
Operator: Venture
Facilities: V-22 (the Lodge); proto-colony; the Junkyard
Population: Nearly 600 Lodge staff
Known for: The Necromorph outbreak
First appearance: Alien: Prototype (2019)
Status: Lodge closed; later inspected as a possible refueling station

Jericho 3 was a cold, windswept planet in Tim Waggoner's 2019 novel Alien: Prototype, and it was the main setting of the book. Venture built its V-22 research facility there, known to its workers as the Lodge, along with a small proto-colony. The spy Tamar Prather delivered a stolen Xenomorph egg to the Lodge, and Dr. Millard Gagnon hatched it in a human host. The result was the Necromorph, a Xenomorph carrying cellular necrosis, whose outbreak killed more than a third of the facility's population.

Climate And Surface

The surface temperature of Jericho 3 averaged around 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Lodge itself was always on the cold side because heating it was expensive. Like Mars, the planet had an atmosphere made mostly of carbon dioxide, and dust kept the sky a dark yellowish brown. When the sun showed, it had a bluish glow. Gravity was slightly below Earth normal. The ground near the Lodge was gray, lifeless, and fairly flat, with a meteorite crater to the west and a small mountain range to the north.

The worst feature of the planet was the wind, which blew constantly and sometimes reached gale force, and its whine never stopped. Temperatures near the Lodge ranged from well below freezing to almost boiling depending on the time of year, and electrical storms were not unusual. During the outbreak a severe storm hit, the worst the colonists had experienced, and Zula fought the final battle in it. Anyone outside without an EVA suit could not breathe, a fact that killed Tamar Prather when she fled through an airlock.

The V-22 Lodge

Five Domes And Their Corridors

V-22 was large for a planet-side complex, with nearly 600 staff, and director Aleta Fuentes knew it was close to being shut down because its returns were modest. It was made of five dome-shaped buildings, Administration, Facilities Management, Personnel, Biosciences, and Research and Development, set in a diamond with R&D in the middle. Enclosed corridors joined the domes, and people walked or rode self-driving electric carts through them. Each corridor could be sealed if an outer wall was breached. Human waste processors lay beneath each building, and most staff wore gray coveralls.

Research And Bioscience

Research and Development held the lab of Millard Gagnon, who oversaw every project with biological or medical uses. His main lab had seven doors leading to his office, storage, and testing chambers. He turned one chamber into a hot, humid enclosure behind a clear plasteel window for the Ovomorph, and kept a sealed isolation room for infected test subjects. The Lodge also had a Med Center with examination rooms, wards, and a morgue. During the outbreak the Necromorph killed the medical staff there, and no medical professionals survived.

Personnel And The Mall

The Personnel building housed staff quarters, a Commissary, conference rooms, a shooting range, and a shopping area the residents called the Mall. Zula Hendricks, hired to train recruits for the Colony Protection Force, had her own room there, while her trainees slept in communal barracks. The Necromorph killed five people in a Mall shop, and cellular necrosis spread through the building. Security then barred travel to and from Personnel, an order that amounted to a quarantine. Tamar Prather headed there between jobs to look for a racquetball partner.

Facilities Management And The Dock

The dock was in the Facilities Management building, with two airlocks for ground vehicles and a large warehouse. Dock workers such as Opal scanned every incoming and outgoing item and also delivered supplies to the proto-colony. The escaped Xenomorph killed two dockworkers in the warehouse and left only their skeletons. Technicians from Facilities Management maintained systems such as the thermo units across the Lodge. Night shift workers once played poker in an unused storage closet there until their supervisor caught them and joined in.

Administration And The Lodge AI

Administration held the offices of Aleta Fuentes and her staff, and the Necromorph eventually made its way there. The whole facility ran on a main computer core, and Zula's friend Davis, living in a personal assistant device, could move anywhere in the Lodge through it. When Davis tried to flush the virus from the Administration air, the Lodge AI fought him inside the system. The synthetic Brigette entered the network to help and was destroyed, but the AI was reduced to its most basic functions.

The Proto-Colony And The Junkyard

Northeast of the Lodge stood the Venture proto-colony, two dozen igloo-shaped habitat domes and two larger storage domes. Its colonists, including Renato Bordreau and his wife Valda, were meant to simulate life in a real colony, so they rarely received new equipment. Each dome had inner and outer airlocks. The Junkyard held broken equipment and leftover materials from building the Lodge and colony, and Zula used it as a training ground. After the final fight, colonists drove an ore hauler out to collect her team and sheltered them until the storm ended.

The Necromorph Outbreak

Tamar reached Jericho 3 after a twenty-three day roundabout flight in the stolen pirate ship Manticore, carrying an unmarked stasis pod. Gagnon used the embryo implanter from its egg to infect the test volunteer Hassan Bagrov, who still carried traces of cellular necrosis from an earlier vaccine trial. The newborn Xenomorph took the disease into its own body and escaped through a vent. It killed dockworkers and Mall shoppers, wiped out the Med Center, and spread a mutated necrosis that no treatment stopped. It was finally destroyed along with a skimmer during the storm, after Zula and her trainees tracked it across the surface.

Closure And The Second Egg

More than a third of the population died before the outbreak burned out, and director Aleta Fuentes was also killed. Zula and Davis destroyed Gagnon's research, and a fire whose suppression system failed burned his lab and samples. Venture closed V-22 and reassigned the survivors to other planets, stations, and Earth. Later, site inspectors Royce Leahy and Taneka McKinley came to judge whether parts of the empty Lodge could serve as a refueling station. In the back of the warehouse they found a greenish, lesion-covered egg, which opened as Royce reached for his comm.

The Nelvana System

The Nelvana system was mentioned only once in the novel. Security officer Saul Caswell had worked for years on a Venture station orbiting a gas giant there before moving to the Lodge. The book never placed Jericho 3 in the Nelvana system or tied the two together in any other way. It was simply part of his past career, a sign that Venture ran operations in more than one system. No star system was named for Jericho 3 itself, and the planet was simply called by its number throughout the story.

Conclusion

Jericho 3 was a bleak, cold world of wind, dust, and carbon dioxide, chosen by Venture for its V-22 Lodge. The five-dome complex was a struggling research site until a stolen egg gave its director and its lead scientist the chance they wanted. The Necromorph turned the Lodge into what one trainee called a corpse-filled tomb. Venture shut the facility down and scattered the survivors, but the diseased egg found by its inspectors in the warehouse left the story of the planet unfinished.