Captain Kylie Duncan: Leader Of Midnighters On Hasanova
Kylie Duncan was a Colonial Marine captain and commanding officer of the Midnighters in Alex White's novel Alien: Into Charybdis. She ran the unit from a Colonial Marine ship, the assault carrier USS Benning. In 2184 she seized Iran's data colony Hasanova on LV-991, opened the locked storehouses so adult Xenomorphs could kill the people inside, and later died in a buried Weyland pathogen vault after safety lead Kamran Afghanzadeh tackled her.
Biography
Command Of The Midnighters
Before Hasanova, shrapnel from an IED went through her best friend's head and across Duncan's face, leaving a puffy scar over half her jaw. She was short and slight, with blond hair and blue eyes. After the surgery she kept serving, wore gold-rimmed reading glasses, and smiled on one side of her face.
The Midnighters were not the same kind of unit as Force Recon or a ranger company. They were obscure, well funded, and loaded with special clearances that let command send them on secret jobs other line companies did not get. When the work involved Xenomorphs, the unit called it a black drop. Duncan ran them as something larger than a rifle platoon and better outfitted than a regular line company.
Assigned To USS Benning
On the USS Benning she took Lance Corporal Russell Becker after he requested the transfer. She brought a Company advisor out of cryosleep about two weeks before the Hasanova traffic arrived. That advisor was Dr. Sora Matsushita, from Weyland-Yutani and the staff around Michael Bishop. Gunnery Sergeant Hubert Lee kept order for her on the deck.
American officers approved the secret raid named Cannery Grim in December 2183, after McAllen filed travel papers for Hasanova. Months later, Duncan briefed the Midnighters on the Benning around a distress call from the McAllen tow ship USCSS Gardenia, which was the cover for that raid. Her orders were to lock down every colonist, kennel any Xenomorphs, and take Gardenia.
Arrival On LV-991
Hasanova sat on an atoll around Lake Peacock, with a 400-meter lava-tube shaft the crew called Charybdis. Iran's Independent Core System Colonies ran the data site. Duncan treated the McAllen contractors as captives of a hostile state. Becker moved the Gardenia crew off the pad in an armored personnel carrier, and Duncan packed more than three hundred colonists and families into the data storehouses. Her fireteams boarded the resin-coated Seegson hull UAEV Blackstar, pinned adult Xenomorphs on the landing zone with polymer grenades, and took frozen eggs from the cryo lab. They also caged the large black Xenomorph that used the name Marsalis.
Matsushita wanted the speaking Xenomorph more than the rest of the cargo. Duncan moved caged Xenomorphs into the colony by sling-loading them through gaps in the Data Cannon, the long-range communications array hung over the shaft. She planned to keep Hasanova as a United Americas colony on the border. A marine Bishop unit rode with the platoon until Matsushita shut it down with a company override before the storehouse plan went live.
The Storehouse Massacre
Programmer Cheyenne Hunt showed Duncan how to run the SiteSys event scheduler. Duncan used approaching Independent Core System Colonies security as the reason to have Hunt packed for landing pad alpha in two hours. The real schedule opened 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. A later distress call would then give a new Marine unit a reason to land on a site with no living residents who could claim the planet.
Hunt overheard the plan from a doorway and ran at the console to stop the schedule. She broke Duncan's grip on her wrist and hit the captain in the face. Duncan shot her in the chest, then fired again through the eye. The storehouse gates had opened five minutes before that fight. Banu Sharif and most of the locked colonists died when the doors went up and the Xenomorphs came in.
Mutiny On Lilypad A
Becker left the unit after the storehouse killings and tried to get the remaining McAllen crew out of the colony. Corporal Bull's fireteams later moved to arrest Duncan on Lilypad A. She put her hands up, then refused the arrest and called Hasanova a bioweapons site with no civilians. She and Lee dropped to the deck as the dropship's twenty-five-millimeter turret cut through the arrest team.
The turret cut Bull apart, and his body went into Lake Peacock. Leger, Keuhlen, and Suedbeck died in that fire or soon after. Lee walked around the crates and shot Private Garcia as she lay wounded behind cover. Duncan treated the arrest as a mutiny and ordered the rest of the Midnighters to the Thunder Ring.
Destruction Of The Data Cannon
Becker and climate tech Arthur Atwater climbed the Data Cannon with stolen memory cores after the mutiny. Arthur took a ricochet and bled to death while Becker sent about five of the nine cores onto the public EntaCOMM network. Duncan flew a Cheyenne dropship over the array, took the gunner's seat, and opened up with the minigun. The minigun killed Becker and cut the array off its moorings. The wreck fell down the shaft.
Crash On The Spiral
Kamran triggered a Halo A test, the fan array that pulled poison gas out of Charybdis. The vortex slammed Duncan's dropship into the Spiral wall and killed Private Arnold in the gunner's seat. Duncan and Lee climbed out of the torn fuselage onto the cliff while water and the whirlpool worked the hull loose. She gathered Lee and what was left of the unit for the nest below, and she wanted the Benning to put an orbital shot down the hatch.
Nest Assault
The remaining Midnighters went in with Weyland's Good Boys, four-legged hunter robots that first herded Xenomorphs with sound cannons and then switched to guns. Duncan wore an M56 harness with spare drums. Cooper took acid in the eyes and burned a private with his flamethrower. A Facehugger locked onto Private Bergman, and Duncan shot him four times in the chest with her father's old pistol because the smartgun would not track a friendly.
She also killed a Facehugger that the trackers were not set to follow, then kept firing as acid ate through her cheek, sinus, and nose. Atchison died in that chamber. When the shooting stopped, several hundred adult Xenomorph bodies lay in one room. That count belonged to Duncan, Lee, the last Midnighters, and the Good Boys together. Matsushita pulled robots back toward the exit during the fight. Duncan shot him through the knee, then had Lee burn him.
Death
Duncan and Lee chased Kamran, flight officer Mary Fowler, and Marsalis into the old Weyland ruins under Ghasreh Shab. Lee carried a scavenged pulse rifle into those tunnels. Acid blood stuck Lee to Marsalis and killed him. In the vault trench, operations vice president Haroun Sharif grabbed Duncan as a pathogen Chestburster tore out of him and failed to reach her.
Kamran tackled her off the catwalk into the vault fluid, a lake that behaved like the black goo from the Prometheus films. The pathogen changed her body after she went in. Flesh came off her, and wet larval shapes split out of what was left. Mary picked up Lee's rifle and shot those creatures until they stopped moving.
Confirmed Kills
Duncan shot Cheyenne Hunt twice, the last round through the eye, after Hunt tried to stop the storehouse timer. She later sat in the dropship gunner's seat and cut down Russell Becker with the minigun. In the nest she mercy-killed Bergman with four pistol shots after a Facehugger took him, then shot Matsushita through the knee and had him burned. The several hundred adult Xenomorphs in that chamber were a shared count with the last Midnighters and the Good Boys. She opened the storehouse doors so Xenomorphs would kill the locked colonists. Those deaths were not from her gun.
Weapons And Equipment
Her Marine weapons on Hasanova included a sidearm against Hunt and a flamethrower while covering a retreat on the Spiral. Against Becker and the Data Cannon she used the Cheyenne dropship's minigun. In the nest she fought in an M56 smartgun harness with spare drums, then clipped Bergman's gun into her harness when her own magazines ran dry. The pistol she used on Bergman had been her father's. After the nest she carried Lee's scavenged pulse rifle into the Weyland ruins.
Weyland's Good Boys, National Dynamics SunSpot hunter robots, ran with the last fireteam. They herded Xenomorphs with sound cannons, then switched to sentry guns. The hive wrecked them before Duncan left the chamber.
Behind The Scenes
Alex White wrote Duncan for Alien: Into Charybdis, the 560-page hardcover sequel to Alien: The Cold Forge, published by Titan Books on 23 February 2021. Literary agent Connor Goldsmith sold Titan the sequel, and editor Steve Saffel accepted it after a fan meme campaign by Jason Leger. Military readers Scot Clayton, Matthew Drake, and Russ Milano checked the Marine material. Cover art was by Marco Turini. Duncan appears only in that novel.
Colonial Marine officers are rarely the villains of an Alien story, and Duncan is one of the few. General Thomas Spears in Aliens: Nightmare Asylum was another. Spears bred Xenomorphs at Third Base for a private reconquest of Earth. White's captain used them on Hasanova to hide a raid and kill locked colonists.
Conclusion
Kylie Duncan was captain of the Midnighters on the USS Benning. She took Hasanova in 2184 and opened the storehouses so Xenomorphs could kill the locked colonists. She died in the Weyland vault after Kamran tackled her and Mary shot what came out of her body.
Appearances
- Alien: Into Charybdis by Alex White (Titan Books, 2021)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Colonial Marine Characters | Colonial Marine Lore | Alien Lore
