LV-363: Rift World And Khatura Harvest Planet

Designation: LV-363
Also known as: Rift world (Yautja name for the type)
Type: Planet
Atmosphere: Breathable oxygen
Gravity: Normal
Known for: Khatura harvest; Xenowing blooding
Native fauna: Riftwings, jivenings, primates
First appearance: Aliens vs. Predators: Rift War (2022)
Status: Xenowings left for later hunts

LV-363 was the rift world of Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro's Aliens vs. Predators: Rift War. Humans used the survey name. The Yautja treated it as a rift world because deep gashes split the surface. A cartel forced addicts to harvest the narcotic flower Khatura on those rims, and a blooding party later found flying hybrids there after Facehuggers took the local riftwings.

Designation And Setting

The novel gives no star chart, constellation, or colonial name beyond LV-363. A mothership dropped the hunt ship at the edge of the system. The captains entered from a Lagrange point, scanned for ion traces, and found only a possible seeder path from weeks earlier. For the nine unblooded, it was their first world off the homeworld.

This was the fifth planet the seeder Ar'Wen had prepared for the elders. He hid his ship after he placed the eggs and set a beacon. The elders chose the rock because local mammals and primates were large enough to host embryos, and because the rifts would force the young to solve hard ground.

Surface And Conditions

Humans could breathe the air, and gravity sat at a normal pull. Almost no one lived there. Flora in the rifts made the air damp. Away from those cuts the growth shortened, the animals thinned, and nothing larger than a ship rat moved on the ground.

The hunt ship landed in a clearing, cloaked, and the party hauled supplies about half a kilometre toward the nearest rift for a forward camp. Trees grew tallest beside the gashes, where damp air and richer ground pushed the foliage. Branch snakes and tree rodents lived in that belt. Farther out, the party treated the open ground as empty enough to check a perimeter.

The Rifts

Hundreds of north-south cracks cut the surface. The drop to the floor ran several hundred metres, with bushes rooted in the rock and reaching for the short window of sun. A rift received full sun for about two hours a day. The long dark hours stayed quiet until birds and flybees started up with the light.

The walls held moss and Khatura flowers, and footholds were poor. Harvest cables and net grids hung from the rim. The floor collected droppings, nests, and later the acid-scarred remains of fights. One hidden cave held a riftwing nest, the floor thick with droppings, the walls packed with white sacs, and a bloated mother hanging from the ceiling.

Wildlife

The apex hunter was the riftwing, a human-sized winged insectoid with a long proboscis, needle claws, and wings that moved like a dragonfly. It ate anything it could hold, ignored Khatura pollen, and tracked prey on more than one visual spectrum. Its hunt call, a long jai-reeee, cleared the rift of smaller animals. A tiny parasite in those flyers slowed their hunger and kept them from ranging too far or wiping out the rest of the food chain.

The floor also held six-legged rodents called jivenings, an albino raccoon-like animal with a gray striped tail, and native monkeys that stayed hidden in daylight. Tiny birds and flybees worked the flowers. Senior xenobiologists on Yautja Prime wanted to test a theory that a Xenomorph in a riftwing host might produce a mutation. That test is what later gave the hunters the flying hybrids they called Xenowings.

Khatura Harvest

Khatura grew along the upper rims as fuchsia beards of flower. At sunrise the bulbs opened and threw red pollen into the air. The cartel treated the world as one of the few places the flower could be taken in quantity, and the harvest needed locked masks because the pollen was a strong narcotic. There were not many other sites that grew it, and the camp here ran on addicts lowered down cables to vacuum the blooms.

Murray ran that camp for a contact he messaged as Scar Face Major. Former Colonial Marines Shrapnel and Margo guarded the lines and shot riftwings off the cables. The addicts included Enid, Khaleed, and Fetch. When Murray asked for a pullout after the first Xenomorph kills, the cartel refused.

Seeding And Hunt Ground

Ar'Wen planted Xenomorph eggs in the rifts, then stayed fifteen years instead of leaving. Former Battlemaster Ny'ytap later landed with hunting captains Ca'toll and T'U'Sa and nine unblooded. He ordered the party off the humans. The young were not told that the riftwings were the real test.

Ordinary adult Xenomorphs took mammal and primate hosts and still did most of the killing on the floor and in the forward camp. With no Queen on the ground they also used eggmorphing. Facehuggers on riftwings produced the Xenowing, a flyer that kept the long head, inner jaw, tail, and acid blood of an adult Xenomorph and kept insect eyes, extra mid-legs, and cutting wings from the host. Red pollen in the harvest nets sent some Xenomorphs into a short rage.

Aftermath

The harvest camp was wrecked. Enid ended locked on the cartel ship with whatever Khatura she could find. Ca'toll refused to burn the world, because other mining colonies sat a long way off and the humans here were not prey worth that blast. She left the living Xenowings for a later blooding, in case the strain spread and the rifts became a hunting ground for the next generation.

Conclusion

LV-363 was a breathable rift planet with almost no towns, a rim harvest of Khatura, and a blooding ground the elders had seeded on purpose. The hunt left flying Xenowings on the rock and three living young bloods on the road back to the mothership.