Predator: Life and Death: Plot, Characters & Lore Overview
Predator: Life and Death is a four-issue Dark Horse miniseries written by Dan Abnett and drawn by Brian Albert Thies, with colors by Rain Beredo, letters by Michael Heisler, and covers by David Palumbo. The series reached shops in March 2016 as the Predator opening of the Life and Death event that also included Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien vs. Predator: Life and Death. On the rapid-response combat ship Hasdrubal, Captain Paget and Weyland-Yutani representative Lorimer drop thirty-three Colonial Marines onto LV-797, nicknamed Tartarus, to stop unlicensed prospectors before the company's development division arrives. The arc follows Predator: Fire and Stone as the hunter-focused branch of that later crossover season.
Plot Summary
Landing On Tartarus
Hasdrubal Over LV-797
The rapid-response combat ship Hasdrubal held station over LV-797 with thirty-three United States Colonial Marine Corps personnel aboard while Captain Paget asked company man Lorimer what kind of trouble he was walking them into. Lorimer said the risk was minimal and that he traveled for Weyland-Yutani, then admitted he had seen worse bunk ships on the far side of Cleo. The captain wanted a clean assist, not another bad tour after the Lightholme assignment that had already left her platoon wired and overdue for rotation.
Weyland-Yutani held long-standing territory claims on five worlds in the region, including the moon the company called Tartarus, and Lorimer warned that a rival, possibly Seegson, was employing unlicensed prospectors to asset-strip the claim before the New Worlds initiative swung in. The company had already lodged a formal complaint with the authorities, and the consequence for the Hasdrubal was a surface sweep to investigate illegal activity under Paget's officers. Paget ordered the drop once orbital green was confirmed.
Dropships Over Tartarus
On the bridge and in the hangar, Paget introduced Lorimer to the platoon and told them they were dropping for a surface sweep against unlicensed prospecting and illegal asset stripping. She asked them to solve whatever they found with reason and conversation when they could, while Freebody and others joked about pirates and sensor voids that looked more like failure than shielding. Bridge talk already flagged magnetic and metallic anomalies in the equatorial belt, and Paget treated that belt as the place to start.
Two dropships left the Hasdrubal and carried the squads into the orange haze over Tartarus, with Marines checking gear in red-lit bays while the hulls punched through cloud toward rugged high ground and thick forest. The platoon was still tense from the previous tour, and Lorimer watched them lock and prep weapons during the descent. Paget ordered a controlled landing and a clean sweep on the company claim.
Seegson Excavation
On the ground the Marines found excavator units and a camp that had already been trashed, with grenade damage and abandoned gear scattered through the clearing. Sergeant Roth and other fire teams fanned left and right while Bird Two deployed for a secondary sweep, and early radio chatter treated the site as a mess rather than an active dig. Someone nearly opened fire on movement in the rocks before Paget ordered them to hold and demand a show of hands under USCM warning.
The excavation showed that Seegson claim jumpers had been here in force, yet the people who should have been working the machines were gone or hiding. Trackers and scopes gave thin returns in the equatorial sensor voids, and the squads pushed past the wrecked plant toward larger shapes half buried in the terrain. Paget still treated the job as interdiction of illegal prospecting while the squads pushed beyond the camp.
The Horseshoe Ship
Singer called Captain Paget into the vines and told her she was going to want to see what rose beyond the trees, a curved hull so large the Marines at its foot could only stare. The horseshoe craft lay half claimed by rock and moss on Tartarus, an Engineer ship of a scale the orbital packet had never cleanly painted. Paget, Lorimer, and Singer moved in for a closer look while the rest of the squad held the approach.
From the ground the vessel looked less like a Seegson strip site and more like the reason the sensor voids had clustered on the equator. Lorimer already treated the find as more important than the claim jumpers themselves, and Paget ordered a slow approach rather than a rush onto unknown decks. Neither of them yet knew how hard the hunters already on world would fight to keep humans off that hull.
Ambush And Survivors
Goode's Warning
Sergeant Roth's sweep pulled a lone survivor named Laurence Goode out of the wreckage, a man who would not shake a Marine hand and who spoke as if the forest itself were watching them. Goode admitted he had come onto a Weyland-Yutani claim and that illegal prospecting would ordinarily mean years in a penal cell, then said the penalty no longer mattered because something in the trees had already judged the camp. He told them no one should have come, not the Marines and not his own crew, because the place belonged to them now.
According to Goode, the hunters killed everyone one by one, by day and by night, sometimes leaving a body or a few bones and sometimes only blood. He begged to be taken off world and sounded so broken that some Marines called him a psych case while others heard real trauma under the rant. Paget ordered an active search for any trace of Goode's people and treated the horseshoe ship as a genuine xeno-tech find that still had to wait on security.
Ambush In The Trees
While the main force worked the excavation, Corporal Chimo's fire team on the first sweep went quiet for hours, and personal trackers could not be trusted across ground spread too thin. In the trees a blue-white plasma bolt tore a Marine apart before the squad even had a clean target, and the survivors emptied magazines into rock and canopy while shouting that they could not see what was killing them. Contact reports stacked faster than Paget could rotate squads, and the assist against prospectors turned into a hunt for invisible shooters.
Marines called contact and man down while pulse rifles chewed the treeline and still failed to pin a silhouette. The attackers stayed cloaked through most of the firefight, just as Goode had described from the excavation. By the time the radio net understood the scale of the loss, Chimo's people were already among the dead of Tartarus.
Predators Over The Dead
When the cloaks dropped, the Marines finally saw the hunters for what they were, armored Yautja with spears, wrist blades, and masks that glowed in the purple dusk. One stood over a fallen Marine with a curved polearm while another turned through the kill zone, and a severed helmeted head on the ground left no doubt about the score. Two of those hunters, later nicknamed for Hive Wars armor and a cracked tusk, had already slaughtered Corporal Chimo's patrol before the cloaks came down.
The missing fire team had not wandered into rival diggers or pirates. Paget's people were sharing Tartarus with a hunting party that already held the night around the horseshoe ship. The first open look at the enemy showed how quickly a Marine squad could be wiped out among the trees.
Melville And Humble
More survivors of the excavation team surfaced near Paget's perimeter, including Melville and Captain Humble, who had stayed quiet rather than walk into the open while the hunters still stalked the camp. They explained that the attackers had been on world when the diggers arrived, that the killing began within hours of planetfall, and that direct confrontation was something the hunters avoided when they could stage an ambush instead. Humble's people had already lost most of their strength just for showing interest in the big ship.
To Melville and Humble the horseshoe craft was not the hunters' own vessel but an artifact the Yautja meant to protect or scavenge on their own terms. They told Paget that the killers treated the camp as prey and that most of Humble's team had already died for showing interest in the ship. Lorimer brushed past that warning and pushed the find as Weyland-Yutani salvage the Marines were obliged to secure.
Counterattack And Mandate
Rucker's Fight
Paget sent Roth on an active search while other fire teams swept for the rest of Goode's crew, and Rucker's small element walked straight into another cloaked attack. A hunter's camo field sparked in the dark before the creature leapt, and Rucker shouted that he could see the bastard even as the fight closed to arm's length among the trunks. Friendly fire and panic tore through the squad as hard as the blades, and names like Stefopoulos dropped off the net in seconds.
The leap forced the Marines to stop shooting at empty canopy and aim at a real body in mesh and metal. Rucker kept firing at close range while the rest of his fire team died around him. Roth's relief element was still minutes out when the rainforest filled with muzzle flash and alien blood.
Hive Wars Kill
Rucker put enough rounds into one hunter to kill it, a heavily armored fighter later associated with the Hive Wars Predator. More Yautja closed in around the lone Marine until Sergeant Roth and the relief squad arrived and drove the hunters off with concentrated fire. Rucker survived the pocket with green blood on the ground and the rest of his fire team dead.
Back on the net, Paget demanded a situation report while ammo counters ran down and Roth reported hard contact. The Marines had killed one hunter in open fire, yet more of the pack still held the trees around the advance. Roth pulled Rucker out before the rainforest closed over the rest of the search.
Hunters Driven Back
Under Roth's guns the hunters broke contact and ran for the deeper rainforest, camo fields flickering as scopes painted four or five hard returns falling back through the canopy. Marines called them turning tail and argued whether the retreat was fear or a regroup, while Rucker insisted he had tagged one of the sons of bitches before the pocket collapsed. Delaria and others tried to hold a clean fix as the returns slid into trees the platoon did not own.
Once the ambush broke, the Colonial Marines could hold a lane of fire long enough to push the hunters back into the trees. Earlier deaths on Tartarus had still come from cloaked attacks the squads never saw cleanly. Paget still had missing people, a contested ship, and Lorimer already talking as if the hunters were beaten.
Lorimer's Mandate
At the perimeter Lorimer stopped pretending the job was only about prospectors and demanded that Paget acquire the ship under the standing USCM mandate to seize and secure xeno-tech. He reminded her that forfeiture talk would die in the courts and that reverse-engineering the vessel would earn the company more money than he could pronounce. Paget refused to take orders in front of her Marines and would not open a war with an unknown species just to satisfy a survey schedule.
Melville and Humble repeated that the hunters were protecting an artifact, not crewing their own hull, and that ninety percent of Humble's team had already died for showing interest. Lorimer still pressed the legally mandated responsibility until Paget chose a compromise that split her force rather than a full retreat to the Hasdrubal. The captain would smoke the hunters out on foot while Roth took a bus onto the ship to hold the main control station.
Taking The Juggernaut
Dropship Crash
Roth's dropship climbed along the horseshoe hull to put an advance team on the control decks, and the Cracked Tusk Predator met them on the exterior with a spear through the glass. Stabilizers failed in the impact, the cabin filled with panic calls for Singer, and the bird came down hard onto the alien ship instead of making a clean insertion. In the scramble after the crash the Marines wounded that hunter and forced it to break contact before they pushed into the decks.
From the ground Paget heard the hit before her own squads closed the forest ring. The dropship's failure left Roth's people scrambling through decks they had meant to secure in good order. Scopes on the surface were late to catch the strike that brought the bus down.
Forest Ambush
On foot, Paget's column tried to smoke the hunters out of the bush with heat and motion trackers while pulse rifles raked the canopy. Incoming fire and close rushes still took Loman, Keynes, and others off the roster, and Delaria warned that the enemy owned the bush even when the Marines owned the louder guns. Humble stayed near enough to guide them toward the vessel's command space while the forest fight chewed through the circle.
Radio traffic from the crashed bus said Roth was heading in to secure the command decks and that Humble reckoned he knew the path. Paget told them to keep her appraised and kept her own column moving despite the bodies already down. The forest fight and the hull crash ran at the same time on two fronts while Marine firepower stayed split.
Inside The Ship
Inside the horseshoe ship Roth's team reached the bridge and found Seegson gear already patched into alien consoles, and Singer reported that he could light environmental and navigation systems well enough to get the hull off world. They also found a sarcophagus-like sleeper berth in the control space while Singer worked the board. The Cracked Tusk Predator, still watching from within the derelict, called the hunters who had been fighting Paget's column back toward the vessel to stop the theft.
The Cracked Tusk Predator ambushed the control party a second time at close quarters and jammed its wristblades into the sleeper berth by accident. Captain Humble killed it with a pulse rifle while its blades were stuck, and Marines died in the corridors around that fight. Roth held the bridge long enough for Singer to bring the drives online while ground trackers showed the remaining hunters rushing the hull.
Course For Ganymede
With the drives live, Singer set course for the nearest USCM facility at Ganymede Station, a nominal three-week jump whose real duration nobody could promise on alien engines. Sergeant Roth scorned Humble for using a firearm after the close fight, and Humble answered that he had killed the big monster. Paget planned to get back aboard the Hasdrubal, warn Ganymede that the juggernaut was inbound, and leave the remaining hunters on Tartarus.
The fight had torn the sleeper berth open, and the giant of the Engineer race inside it began to stir under Hasdrubal guns and company orders. The horseshoe ship left LV-797 with Marine survivors aboard and that passenger no longer safely sealed. Lorimer had the vessel in the air, and the stolen craft carried its waking cargo toward Ganymede and the rest of the Life and Death cycle.
Key Characters
- Captain Paget commanded the Hasdrubal platoon. She argued with Lorimer over pace and risk, split her force to take the horseshoe ship, and chose a hard exfil toward Ganymede after the hunters bled her squads.
- Lorimer was the Weyland-Yutani representative who treated Tartarus as a New Worlds claim and the horseshoe vessel as mandated salvage, pressing Paget until the Marines moved on the ship.
- Sergeant Roth led the search that found Goode, relieved Rucker's ambush, and flew the bus advance that crashed onto the juggernaut before holding long enough for Singer to light the drives.
- Rucker survived a cloaked attack that killed his fire team and killed one hunter in the rainforest before Roth's relief squad pulled him out.
- Laurence Goode, Melville, and Captain Humble were Seegson excavation survivors who warned that the hunters were guarding an artifact. Humble later killed the Cracked Tusk Predator aboard the horseshoe ship after its wristblades stuck in the sleeper berth.
- Singer flew and later brought the horseshoe ship's systems online for the escape toward Ganymede Station after the crash insertion.
- The Yautja hunting party on Tartarus, including the fighters later nicknamed for Hive Wars armor and a cracked tusk, ambushed Marine and Seegson teams to keep the horseshoe ship out of human hands.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Predator: Life and Death as four issues from March 2016 into June 2016, with issue #1 on sale around 2 March 2016 under editor Randy Stradley. Dan Abnett wrote the miniseries, Brian Albert Thies drew it, Rain Beredo colored it, and Michael Heisler lettered it, with David Palumbo on the main covers. Each floppy carried the Life and Death event branding that also covered the related Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien vs. Predator miniseries from the same season. The story opens with the Hasdrubal in orbit over LV-797 and closes with the captured horseshoe ship boosting away from Tartarus toward Ganymede Station.
Collected editions later gathered the Predator issues inside the wider Life and Death line, including the Dark Horse Books Part One presentation that prints the four chapters as a single dump. Credits on that collected title page list Abnett, Thies, Beredo, Heisler, and Palumbo under the Life and Death heading. Later books in the cycle pick up the Marines, the juggernaut, and the Engineer sleeper after this Predator opening leaves Tartarus behind.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse scheduled Predator: Life and Death as the hunter-focused opening of the 2016 Life and Death event, separate from the Aliens and Prometheus branches and from the later Alien vs. Predator wrap on LV-223. Abnett wrote across the event line, and Thies's Predator issues inherit Captain Paget, Lorimer, and the Hasdrubal crew who continue into those later chapters. Randy Stradley edited the floppies, and David Palumbo's issue covers put a roaring hunter against the horseshoe ship that drives the plot.
The miniseries is also where the Hasdrubal Marines first meet the Tartarus hunting party and first steal the Engineer juggernaut that later books continue. Later profiles tagged individual hunters by armor traits such as Hive Wars gear and a cracked tusk when the floppies left those fighters unnamed. The story falls roughly forty-three years after the events of Aliens and a little over a year after Predator: Fire and Stone, with a new Marine cast on a new moon under corporate salvage orders.
Conclusion
Predator: Life and Death is Dan Abnett and Brian Albert Thies's 2016 four-issue Dark Horse Comics miniseries about Captain Paget's Colonial Marines and the hunters who guarded a horseshoe ship on Tartarus. It covers the Hasdrubal drop, the Seegson survivors, the rainforest ambushes, and the crash boarding that lets Singer steal the juggernaut for a run toward Ganymede. The comic ends with the Marines leaving LV-797 while an Engineer sleeper on the stolen ship begins to wake.