LV-187: The Storm-Lashed Oil World Of Colony War

LV-187 was a small, storm-lashed world in the Weyland Isles sector, home to a French oil colony of the Independent Core System Colonies. It was the nearest planetary neighbor of the British colony New Albion, and so small and bleak that nobody had ever given it a proper name. In July 2186 a Xenomorph outbreak wiped out almost all of its colonists, and New Albion claimed the deserted colony as its first conquest after leaving the Three World Empire. The events there, told in Alien: Colony War, made the little oil world the flashpoint of a war between the colonies.

Geography And Climate

A storm raged over LV-187 almost without pause. The days were pale and dim, with the weak sun barely piercing thick, churning clouds that dropped rain, hail, and at times shards of ice as sharp as knives. A single storm could last a whole night and the following day, cutting off communications and grounding ships. The worst Merrilyn ever saw there struck in July 2186, shaking even the concrete comms tower. When the clouds finally broke, the sky above the world showed a striking violet color, while drone footage from orbit showed the planet as a dull grey ball.

The land around the colony was bare and rocky, covered in loose wet shale and pools of dirty rainwater, with ravines, ridges, and cliffs but no visible seas or forests. The colony stood at the edge of a terraformed sector, and its landing platform stood high above a long drop. Survivors could hide a vehicle in a ravine or behind a rocky ridge, far enough from the buildings to escape a blast. LV-187 lay so close to New Albion that the cruiser Elvik made the crossing without hypersleep, and passing traders thought of it as the nearest colony to home.

The Colony And Oil Operation

The Independent Core System Colonies had hunted aggressively for oil for decades, a drive sped up by the Oil Wars. LV-187's crude escaped the sabotage that ruined stocks on other colony worlds, where a bacterial agent broke down the petroleum itself. By 2186 the Oil Wars were effectively over, and the ICSC was trading its plentiful oil for major deals, which made the little world more valuable than ever. The French energy company TotalEnergies, one of the first major oil firms to drill off-world, ran the operation for the ICSC. Shipments went out to other ICSC colonies, and as long as the oil kept flowing, almost nobody thought about the place.

The colony was about 2 kilometers from end to end. The landing platform and the concrete comms tower stood on the east side, above a small fusion reactor that powered everything from beneath a meter of lead shielding. Corridors, laboratories, recreation areas, and living quarters stretched west toward the canteen, stores, and command center. A garage called the dispatch deck held jeeps, trucks, flyers, buggies, and an Alphatech XT-37 Stinger refitted with a haulage winch. A manual shut-off for the reactor lay deep inside its housing, reachable only through a hatch behind a stairwell in the chamber above the core.

Before the outbreak, LV-187 was loud and lively. Drilling crews came off shift to eat steak and frites in the canteen, drank pastis, and filled the corridors with music and laughter over the clanking of the wells. Supply ships came rarely, and when the outbreak struck the next was not due for a month. Smaller settlements sometimes sent informal trade missions in the hope of buying oil outside official channels. Such visitors were told to go through the ICSC and sent on their way. The colony was so isolated that when it went silent, its geologist doubted anyone would notice before the next oil shipment failed to arrive at its ICSC destination.

The People

Merrilyn Hambleton

Merrilyn Hambleton was a leading petroleum geologist for TotalEnergies and the head of the colony operation. She came from the hillside village of Ramatuelle in Provence and had built a successful career before taking a string of off-world postings. LV-187 was her first major posting, which she began about six months before the outbreak and expected to last a year. She brought her young daughter Therese with her, even though she knew the bleak, oil-stained colony was no place to raise a child. After the outbreak she survived for days by hiding with Therese in a storeroom beside the canteen and watching the security cameras.

Therese was in truth a synthetic replica of Merrilyn's real daughter, who had died of Batten disease at the age of six. Unable to accept the loss, Merrilyn paid a black-market maker to build an exact copy, and for three years she had moved from posting to posting so no one would notice that the girl never aged. Therese called her mother Mama, carried a filthy soft toy named Pinky Ponk, and sang an old French pop song while she wandered the corridors. She had found the first egg on the colony, survived the creature that sprang from it, and kept her secret from most of the other survivors.

The Victory Crew

The New Albion trade ship Victory answered the colony's distress call while returning from a trade mission. Its captain was Tom Moran, a bearded former soldier, and his crew were the Yorkshireman Frank Priestley, Amina Mir, Teesha Bromley, and the ship's science man Jerry Bough, called Boffin. They were traders rather than soldiers, and they treated the dead colony as a chance to profit and to serve New Albion. Mir shot a surviving miner named Francois on the landing platform, and Moran had the body thrown over the edge. Bromley lived the longest, fighting beside the survivors, but none of the five left the world alive.

The Visitors

The former Weyland-Yutani scientist Chad McLaren came to LV-187 hunting a set of stolen Xenomorph eggs. With him was the journalist Cher Hunt, who wanted proof of the creatures that had killed her sister, and Davis, an artificial intelligence living in the body of a synthetic dog. They arrived on the Elvik despite a refusal of permission to land, and a gust slammed the cruiser into the platform and wrecked its starboard engine. Two military forces later landed as well, a Colonial Marine squad in Company pay and a company of New Albion Royal Marines.

The Xenomorph Outbreak

The Seeding

About a week before the Victory arrived, a group of visitors landed claiming to be an informal trade mission. Its crew asked about buying oil, accepted the advice to contact the ICSC, gave Therese a lollipop, and left. They were in fact Colonial Marines under Corporal Barrington B. Jones III, working for Weyland-Yutani. They had stolen the eggs from the salvage ship Clara, crashed it on New Albion, and hidden the eggs around the colony in corridors, access hatches, and storage cupboards. The Company meant LV-187 to serve as a test site, where the eggs would infect the colonists and produce adult Xenomorphs for capture.

Therese found the first egg in a little-used service corridor on the east flank of the colony. When it opened, a Facehugger leapt at her face, but she tore it off and stamped on it, and her mother sent a maintenance team to investigate. Within a day colonists began to vanish, first two or three, then more each day until the missing outnumbered the living. The comms tower became the heart of the infestation, and the colonists who fought back killed only about 2 of the creatures before they were overwhelmed. Apart from the doomed miner Francois, Merrilyn and Therese were the only colonists the outsiders ever found free.

The Victory Claim

The Victory landed in the storm to find at least ten mutilated bodies, some with their chests burst open, and ten split egg cases. Boffin's scans picked up 17 unexplained life forms, which Moran took for hidden survivors. After Mir killed Francois, Moran had his crew report that no one was left alive, and orders came to claim the colony. The crew raised a Union flag on the rain-swept landing platform, and Prime Minister Maurice Pepper showed the footage while announcing New Albion's secession and claiming salvage rights over LV-187 and its crude oil. Some of the crew blamed the carnage on rumors of black goo from the distant border bombings.

The creatures soon turned on the newcomers. One dragged Priestley into the crawlspaces, one killed Mir in the dispatch deck, and another killed Boffin inside the Victory. Merrilyn shot the creature that attacked her and Therese in the dispatch deck, and Bromley brought them to the comms tower before the Elvik crash-landed. Priestley returned with a mangled face and a story of escape, but he had been taken to the hive, where the Queen released him as her chosen servant. A Chestburster later tore out of him in the comms room, and Xenomorphs began battering the doors.

Trapped on the comms deck, the survivors built a rope from blankets, plastic ducting, and steel cable, and Moran shot out the great observation window. They climbed down the outside of the tower in the storm, but when Chad shot the newborn creature at the top, its acid blood ate through the rope. Merrilyn fell to the ground and survived, while Therese was left dangling far above until Cher Hunt climbed up and brought her down. Chad held off the creatures inside with Davis, then escaped from the tower as well. The survivors were cornered at the foot of the tower when a Cheyenne dropship came down through the storm.

The War Over LV-187

The Colonial Marines

The dropship carried Jones and four more Marines from the attack transport USC Cronulla, which waited in high orbit. Using cannons that fired weighted nets, they captured 6 adult Xenomorphs alive for the Company. Jones admitted his team had posed as the trade mission, arrested Chad for crimes against Weyland-Yutani, and shot Moran when he protested. The Marines then left the rest of the survivors to die and sheltered in a ravine to wait out the storm. That left Teesha Bromley as the last of the Victory crew, alongside Merrilyn, Therese, Cher, and Davis.

The Cronulla did not last long. The Royal Marine frigate HMS God's Hammer, under Captain Augustus Trent, had sworn itself to New Albion and ordered the American ship out of LV-187's space. When the Cronulla refused, Trent's fighters stripped its defenses and four of his missiles crippled it, and the burning wreck fell through the planet's atmosphere. Stranded, Jones's men flew back toward the comms tower, but a small creature born from the pet rat of the pilot Segura attacked them in flight, and the Cheyenne crashed into the tower and brought it down. Jones himself was killed by the Xenomorph waiting inside the Victory.

The Royal Marines And The Hive

Trent then landed with his Royal Marines, saving Merrilyn and Cher from a creature in the canteen after Bromley had been killed. Scans placed the hive in the circular chamber above the fusion reactor. Chad went in with a fire team and found cocooned colonists and a sea of eggs, guarded by a Queen almost 10 meters tall. The Queen injured several Marines and wounded Trent before Chad rammed a grenade into her jaws. Trent's men then carried away more than 150 eggs instead of destroying them, intending to use them as weapons. Grateful for his life, Trent left Chad and his companions free when his three dropships departed.

Fate

The dying Queen's acid ate through the lead floor, and she fell into the reactor below, sending it toward a meltdown. With the mainframe failing, only a manual shut-off could save the world from a blast like a nuclear bomb. Therese chose to go in her mother's place, and Davis went with her, guiding her through the codes as heat and radiation shut down their bodies. Both synthetics died in the reactor housing after the shutdown succeeded. The others waited behind a ridge in the Stinger, then returned to the landing platform, where the Victory pulse cannon killed a Praetorian and Chad McLaren flew the three survivors to orbit.

By then the space around LV-187 was crowded with rival claimants. An ICSC warship, New Albion transports including the Churchill, and a ship of the Union of Progressive Peoples all hailed the Victory, each insisting that the airspace was its own. The ICSC had already declared war on New Albion over what it called the invasion of the colony. The colony itself was left empty, its reactor shut down and its comms tower in ruins, with the bodies of Therese and Davis still lying deep in the reactor housing. Its stolen eggs had gone with the Royal Marines.

Behind The Scenes

LV-187 first appeared in Alien: Colony War by David Barnett, published by Titan Books in 2022. The novel follows the threads of Alex White's Into Charybdis, which Barnett credited as the springboard for his story, and uses the storm-bound oil colony as the setting for most of its action. The book gives the planet no proper name and calls its owner the Independent Core Systems Colonies, a slightly different form of the usual name. Barnett made the colony French and placed it under the real energy company TotalEnergies, alongside invented firms such as the budget space line RyanSpace.

The novel is not fully consistent about Merrilyn's posting. She first describes it as lasting a year, then later tells Cher it was meant to be a three-year posting, and later still describes it as a year again. The broadcast by Maurice Pepper calls LV-187 a small satellite, while other characters treat it as a planet, so the book never settles whether it orbits a larger world. The exact size of the colony's workforce is also never given, and the book never names the system or the star that LV-187 belongs to, beyond its place in the Weyland Isles.

Conclusion

LV-187 was a grim, forgotten oil world until a Company experiment turned its French colony into a Xenomorph hive. Its people died almost to the last, its one surviving geologist lost the daughter she had already lost once, and a Royal Marine captain left with more than a hundred and fifty eggs. The storm-lashed little world began as a footnote to New Albion's secession and ended at the center of a war between colonies. Its story shows how quickly greed, politics, and the Xenomorphs could turn even the most remote outpost into a battlefield.

Appearances

• Alien: Colony War by David Barnett (Titan Books, 2022)