The Rage War was the 2692 war in the Human Sphere, fought after Yautja ships crossed the Outer Rim ahead of adult Xenomorph armies the Rage had turned into soldiers. Colonial Marines first treated that crossing as an invasion. In September, Isa Palant sealed a ceasefire with Kalakta, and hunters then fought beside the Marines. By December the Rage flagship Macbeth had jumped into Sol. Liliya burned the Rage command, Gerard Marshall shut the human dropholes, and the war ended as a Human Sphere and Yautja victory.
Prelude
The fighting inside the Human Sphere lasted from March to December 2692. The Rage were older than that year. They had grown out of the Founders, a group that left human space around 2400, and by the time Yautja ships reached the Outer Rim the Rage had been hitting Yautja habitats beyond it. What the Sphere learned about that earlier war came from Liliya, from wrecked Rage ships, and from the September meeting with Kalakta.
The Evelyn-Tew
In September 2351, Liliya was aboard the decommissioned destroyer USS Evelyn-Tew near Alpha Centauri, under cover as canteen staff. The ship held LV-178 Xenomorph samples, including a Queen in a storage sphere, and the hull was on a suicide run into the star. On orders from Wordsworth, she disabled the failsafes, let the creatures out, copied the research onto an internal disc, and wiped the ship's copies. She shoved engineer Kath Roberts into crewman Dearing's pulse-rifle shot. The charge killed Roberts, and a fragment of rib bone passed through Liliya without damaging the disc. An adult Xenomorph then smashed Dearing's skull, and Liliya launched the escape pod. She left scanner range on a Founders loop after she woke.
The Founders
Around 2400 the Founders left after persecution over longevity work and secret faster-than-light drives. They took delivery of three ships, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, fitted the drives at an independent port near the edge of the Sphere, and jumped for the edge of known space. About a thousand people boarded each hull. Hamlet vanished on that outbound run. The people who remained later became the Rage, under Beatrix Maloney.
A second Founders layer stayed in the Sphere. About two centuries before the war, descendants of that layer could hear a prayer frequency the outbound group had used. In 2692 the same frequency carried orders. Historian Angela Svenlap at Love Grove Base was one of the sleepers who acted on a short message sent in Maloney's name. No saboteur from that net was taken alive.
Midsummer
After Hamlet was lost, the survivors found a gel that stretched life, then the ancient habitat Midsummer. Slug-like creatures had built it, and it held thousands of sleeping Xenomorphs. A dog-like fossil there tied the place to the Drukathi. In the September meeting, Kalakta said they had gone about a million years earlier, and that their time in this galaxy was over. Their leftover tools were among the finds, including the Faze, a presence that lived in the ships and rebuilt them. Macbeth and Othello each received a Faze.
Wordsworth wanted the sleepers left alone. Beatrix Maloney took the group the other way, and Liliya treated his death as Maloney's kill. The Founders became the Rage. They ran adult Xenomorphs as soldiers under android generals, using the research Liliya had taken from the Evelyn-Tew, leftover science from Midsummer, and the Faze. Each general could direct about two thousand hatched troops. A fatal wound often made the creature melt or blow apart, so those artificial parts would not be captured, and a Watcher, a fragment of the Faze, could track the same material across space.
Course Of The War
Tim Lebbon wrote the Sphere fighting down in three Titan Books novels, Predator: Incursion, Alien: Invasion, and Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon. The fighting the Colonial Marines could log ran from March through December. Yautja habitats beyond the Outer Rim were falling before that first hunt inside human space.
The First Attacks On The Human Sphere
In March 2692 two Yautja spent about two days hunting Southgate Station 12, an Outer Rim research post with a permanent population of more than a hundred. They killed at least seventeen people, ten of them hired guards, and the count was not finished when the VoidLarks arrived. The 5th Excursionists, under Lieutenant Johnny Mains, lost Private Lizzie Reynolds and Private Brian Willis, then killed both hunters. Mains put the survivors into hibernation and sent the corpses inward for Weyland-Yutani. He would not escort them, because his unit had a classified watch on a habitat a little over six miles long, later tagged UMF 12, the third Yautja habitat humans had seen.
In May those corpses reached Love Grove Base on LV-1529, where Isa Palant had been studying Yautja blood, regeneration, and language for ArmoTech. Gerard Marshall, seventh chair of the Thirteen and director of ArmoTech, called from Charon Station and sent Company linguist Milt McIlveen. Marshall wanted the corpses studied for weapons and fighting ability. Palant wanted a way to speak to the hunters. At the same post, Angela Svenlap received a nineteen-second message under Beatrix Maloney's name and began wiring bombs from leftover processor explosives.
The Sabotage Attacks
In July a plasma device wrecked Swartwood Station 3 over Weaver's World. General Paul Bassett put the dead at about 1,930, including six hundred children and his son Harry, a flight trainer who was off duty. Bassett, who ran the Colonial Marine Corps, did not accept a Yautja bomb. The device needed inside knowledge of the station. The same sabotage net was hitting frigates, staging posts, and training worlds, and a bomber who reached Charon's munitions cell with a homemade charge was shot when he drew a gun. James Barclay, the youngest of the Thirteen, had Section Seven chasing that net.
The same month, Svenlap detonated her charges at Love Grove, in the weeks after the May autopsies. The north wing, life support, and the main comms went with the blast. Independent contractor Rogers was killed in the debris, Svenlap then killed herself, and about a hundred people had been on the base.
The Battle Of UMF 12
By July, General Wendy Hetfield at Tyszka's Star was reporting a ninety-day spike in contacts. The 11th Excursionists were missing in the Holgate system, and Yautja ships were inside the Sphere. Any launch toward human space was to be treated as hostile. Four ships left UMF 12 that month. Laser fire and a drone destroyed two of them, and the other two jumped away at light speed. A second wave then closed on the VoidLarks' Arrow-class Ochse. Ochse decloaked, warned Tyszka, and opened fire. Laser fire cut the cabin open and killed comms man McVicar. A mini-nuke destroyed that ship, particle fire destroyed two more, and a crippled seventh turned back toward the habitat. The unshielded engine room gave Corporal Sara Cotronis a fatal radiation dose. Ochse set down on the habitat's outer surface, and the reactor detonated.
Inside UMF 12 the VoidLarks lasted about four weeks. They found dead Yautja, then live hunters, and Corporal Cotronis died in her own blast on day sixteen. Lieder took shrapnel through the chest and was walking again by day twenty-two. Adult Xenomorphs then reached the habitat. A grown Rage ship lay on three docking arms, its troops stamped PATTON. On the bridge the android general Patton was pinned by a Yautja spear, legs gone and jaw broken, and the hunter who had done it was dead at his feet. In September, Lieutenant Eddie Durante of the HellSparks reached Mains and Lieder in the Arrow Navarro. A grenade and a larger blast drove metal through Patton's skull and computing core, and Mains and Lieder survived it. Their report named returning Fiennes sleeper ships, including Susco-Foley and Aaron-Percival, as nurseries for new Xenomorphs.
The Defection From Macbeth
On Macbeth in July, Liliya refused to send Maloney's coded return after she found a hidden nano command inside the prayer. She broke her bindings, wrecked the eyes of the android general Napoleon, and injected inactive Rage nano into her own neck. Napoleon, damaged by the blow, shot elder Erika Simons through her gel tank. Liliya left the flagship to reach the Sphere ahead of the Rage and hand the control tech to humanity.
Thirty-three days after Liliya left Macbeth, a probe from the general Alexander killed her hyperdrive. The ship that answered her peace broadcast was Yautja. Hashori of the Widow Clan took her aboard the Zeere Za in August and held her there for days. When Alexander's Xenomorphs boarded, Hashori cut her loose and pulled her into a small craft. Seven Rage ships destroyed the Zeere Za about an hour later. Hashori was taking Liliya into the Human Sphere because the material in the android's blood was a way to fight the Rage.
The Battle Of LV-1529
In August, Sergeant Sharp moved the Love Grove survivors away from the processor when radiation rose. Marshall lost contact with McIlveen. He sent Major Akoko Halley and six DevilDogs of the 39th Spaceborne, taken off an Addison Prime assignment, on Bassett's Bolt-class Arrow Pixie. The Arrow went through three dropholes to LV-1529.
On LV-1529 a Yautja ship reached the construction hangar in September, too soon for a Company freighter. For twelve days two hunters circled the survivors. Palant and McIlveen reached about sixty percent translation and nicknamed them Wendigo and Shamana. Wendigo came in and killed. McMahon blasted the hunter's hand off a wrist control and put three bursts through the helmet. Shamana cut McMahon down, carried her into the storm, and three days later set off his own wrist bomb when Halley's DevilDogs dropped a nano-burst into him. A tusk buried itself in Palant's calf. Fifteen survivors left the moon with Halley.
The Yautja Join The Fight
From Pixie, Halley heard the wider map. The 17th Spaceborne orbital in the Jackson system had been wiped out, with about 19,000 dead. There were more than a hundred Yautja-attack reports, and seven Outer Rim dropholes had been taken. Palant treated the saboteurs as human and the hunters as refugees. Without Thirteen approval, Halley sent Palant and McIlveen's Yautja-language call for a truce against the Xenomorphs. The signal was heard more than three billion times. Bassett first ordered a hunt for Halley's group as deserters. Two hours later, Yautja attackers signaled the ceasefire, and Marshall then treated the group as heroes.
The meeting took place on the independent ship Tracey-Jane at drophole Gamma-116 in September. Four helmetless warriors stood behind Kalakta, an Elder of the 677th clan, who asked for Palant and McIlveen rather than for generals. He described a birth across ten thousand suns, an old hunt on Earth, and a greater darkness that had hit Yautja habitats. A combat hologram showed a dark ship dropping objects that hatched and charged. Palant named them Xenomorphs. Marshall, listening in, ordered her to claim that Earth knew the Yautja homeworld and would strike it with nuclear weapons. She took out the earpiece and offered respect instead. Kalakta drew her forehead to his, and Yautja and humans would fight together. Barclay backed an expanded translation program so Halley could plan a defense, while Marshall opposed the pact.
The Gamma Quadrant
In October 2692 the Rage general Rommel closed on the jump gate at Gamma 123 with more than two thousand hatched Xenomorphs and about twenty thousand in reserve. He meant to rename the hole Drophole One. The Titan ship Gagarin, under captain Nathan McBrain, had spent four months assembling a hole more than two miles across, with six Marine escorts instead of the usual two. The Fiennes sleeper Susco-Foley, launched from Sol in 2216, dropped about a million miles out and did not answer hails. Lieutenant Vicar's command destroyer Blue One was destroyed first. Drones and boarding craft wrecked the rest of the screen, and adult Xenomorphs came through all seven of Gagarin's airlocks. Rommel found McBrain dead in his seat, then took his own ship through the first jump into the Sphere with only light damage.
Other Gamma sites were hit the same month. On Priest's World, the 13th Spaceborne MudSerpents met Xenomorphs that swam ashore at Langelli Station, a Company post tied to drophole Gamma 34, and those hides carried the stamp Montgomery. At Gamma 43, Xenomorphs crossed open vacuum with six silver globes on their backs. At another hole a Fiennes laser wrecked two Marine frigates, and an open Rage belly swallowed one of the disabled hulls. The Gamma 77 squadron destroyed the Fiennes sleeper Harmes-Cox, launched more than four hundred years earlier with about nineteen thousand people aboard, at the cost of three frigates and one Arrow. On Charon, Bassett ordered every Fiennes ship destroyed on sight and refused a remote shutdown of the Gamma dropholes, because closing the net would isolate the Rim for decades. Marshall ordered a live android taken for ArmoTech.
The Battle Of LV-1657
Palant was on LV-1657 that October, ten days out of the medical bay after a bleed on the brain from the ceasefire. McIlveen and Halley's DevilDogs were with her, under Marshall's order to get her to Sol. Three Rage ships decoyed the base guns and dropped Xenomorphs on the plateau. One hull then dived into the core as a bomb and killed Major Reece's command. Private Nassise was killed by an inner jaw, and Halley finished Private Gove after acid cut his suit. A Yautja ship, one of two Kalakta had sent to keep Palant alive, destroyed Rommel's third hull over the forest. Rommel refused surrender, went into a cliff cave, and destroyed himself at about two megatons. Susco-Foley later burned in the world's atmosphere. Marshall's next order was to take another android alive.
The Battle Of Othello
About thirty days after the UMF 12 rescue, the Arrow Navarro, bound for drophole Beta 37, intercepted a hull more than three miles long. One hold held about forty thousand gel pods, each with a naked human and a shriveled Facehugger, and the ship's computer counted five more holds like it. The hull was Othello. A Wordsworth remnant had killed the Rage elders there, at the cost of most of the original thousand. Android general Jones held the control decks with a little loyal crew and more than a hundred hatched Xenomorphs. While Macbeth made noise on the Rim, Othello was meant to slip in, split into a dozen attack vessels, and strike Sol. The boarding party armed a hangar nuke and was killed in the blast that destroyed Othello. Macbeth later received an automated signal, the first in seven years, timestamped at the moment the sister ship was destroyed.
The Turn Toward Sol
On Macbeth, Maloney ordered Alexander to take Liliya alive if he could, because the control secret was in the android's blood. Elder Challar reported Patton lost and Othello without contact for years. Maloney intended to finish the war with Macbeth alone. The hold held a bound Queen whose egg sac ran half the compartment. After more than twenty years of searches from Midsummer, she laid forty to fifty eggs a day, and controlled Xenomorphs carried them off. The Faze lived mainly in the engine room and rebuilt the ship. The crew never managed a successful talk with it.
In November, Bassett counted nineteen Gamma dropholes gone and contact lost with about twelve more. The fighting they knew about was limited to Gamma. Marshall raised a shutdown of all six hundred Gamma holes again, and Bassett refused. Macbeth had taken a drophole and shipped about a thousand of the moon's people to the Queen as food and hosts. Maloney treated Othello's loss as a change of plan. She meant to move the Faze onto the captured hole for thirty to sixty days of rebuild work, then attempt a jump far past the usual eight to twelve light years, straight into Sol, and split Macbeth into a dozen attack craft. General Mashima would take Aaron-Percival against Weaver's World and pull Marine attention while that work went on.
The Wreck Of Cooper-Jordan
Nineteen days after LV-1657, two Yautja ships were shadowing Pixie on Kalakta's order. They warned of a wreck ahead, the Fiennes hull Cooper-Jordan. Palant, McIlveen, and the DevilDogs spacewalked into a burned hold, then into another where more than two thousand sleepers had produced Chestbursters. A hunter led them to a wrecked Rage android, one leg gone and the head almost off, who tried and failed to fire a nuke. They bagged the body. Sprenkel put three warheads into the Cooper-Jordan from fifty miles. In the rec room McIlveen drew a laser on Halley rather than let Palant keep the android off the Company's grid. Sergeant major Huyck killed him. Pixie stopped answering Marshall. The Yautja ships led the Arrow for twelve days to an unnamed asteroid about forty miles across, about twenty light years in from the Outer Rim, and the hangar doors closed on the bagged android.
The Battle Of Hell
Fifty-one days after the Zeere Za, Hashori and Liliya forced drophole Gamma 23, whose moon control base the general Parks had wrecked, and jumped seven light years. Alexander did not follow at once. They reached the independent station Hell, once the Company mining post WayStation 14 in orbit around LV-301 in the Scafell Minor system. About two thousand people lived there. Jiango Tann and Yvette Tann took Liliya in after their son had died on an ArmoTech sample run, and Yvette had tried to expose Marshall. Liliya told them what she had stolen, what Midsummer held, and how a fatal wound could be pushed into a living general from light years away.
On Hell Station in November, Jiango counted Alexander in weeks and Liliya counted him in days. The station council wanted the Tanns to take Liliya and Hashori to the Company, because Hashori's own ship might be what Alexander was tracking. The hired hull was Satan's Saviour, crewed by Ware, Robo, Hoot, and Millard, who had also been paid to tag the Tanns for Weyland-Yutani. A drophole fired under an unknown user. Liliya watched a battle about ten billion miles out, then five ships dropped from warp a million miles from the station. Hashori read those five as Yautja come to help, and Hell Station had to fight.
In December, Alexander attacked Hell. He dropped about a million kilometres out and launched nuclear missiles at the ships around the station. Satan's Saviour undocked, wrecked one Rage assault ship, and used Liliya on the comms as bait so the big hull would chase them. Four Yautja ships decloaked and hit Alexander's flagship. One hunter ship was destroyed, and Alexander's hull was reduced to a black wreck. A rescue capsule pulled him out with two limbs gone and a hole in his skull. He grafted adult Xenomorph parts onto himself, killed a Yautja who came for trophies, and stole that hunter's ship. Adult Xenomorphs that had reached Hell continued to attack the station.
Humans Turn The Tide
Palant's group was inside the asteroid hangar that December. Yaquita of the Wounded Clan rolled in on a wheeled platform, both legs gone, and worked the wrecked android Palant had named Oscar. Hours into that work she gave Palant one word, Drukathi. Kalakta met Palant in a holocabin that opened into a jungle. He had ordered the interrogation, then gave her only enough to fight the Rage, and he placed the Drukathi tools, including the Faze, among the finds at Midsummer. Palant pulled out the organ that drove Oscar, which was also the likely control device and the self-destruct. Halley burned the body. Yaquita then gave them Macbeth's location.
The Tanns opened Liliya's chest to sample her heart while they ran for Addison Prime. At drophole Gamma 117, Alexander's stolen ship hit them. Adult Xenomorphs forced the reserve airlock, and Millard burned to death in his straps. Two Yautja ships trapped Alexander, froze him, and took the survivors off the wrecked mercenary hull. Palant met Liliya at the rendezvous. They wrote a signal to seize a general's self-destruct, put it into Liliya's heart through the nano in her blood, and tested it on the frozen android. A nuclear flash about a hundred miles out destroyed Alexander. Yaquita boarded Pixie, and a hidden Yautja drophole at the asteroid's heart dropped them into Sol outside Pluto's orbit.
The Battle Of Weaver's World
Mashima took the rebuilt Aaron-Percival through dropholes Rommel had opened. At Gamma 114 his assault craft cleared Colonial Marines. At Gamma 98 he wrecked a mercenary station and a battleship, then sent more than a hundred adult Xenomorphs across vacuum to finish the survivors. Birth halls on the sleeper forced nearly seven thousand creatures after they left Macbeth, and he wanted a force of about sixteen thousand before the landing. Weaver's World held about nine million people. The first landing put about five thousand adult Xenomorphs onto cities and camps, including New Cardiff, Boston Three, and the polar survey at World's End, rather than onto military sites.
The 7th Spaceborne lost destroyers in orbit and later blew the space elevator after Rage troops used it to send creatures down. Major Sergei Budanov reported the strike to Bassett. Yautja ships then arrived and wrecked landers the Marines could not break. On the sixth day his gunner was killed, thousands of civilians hid in the underground stations, and adult Xenomorphs reached the tunnels. Budanov went underground with the hunters, and no later report names him.
The Battle Of Charon
On the Outer Rim, the Faze had been rebuilding a captured drophole for almost forty days. Maloney ordered a jump of about five hundred light years. Macbeth emerged at Alpha 7, a billion miles inside Pluto's orbit, and wrecked the portal's defences. Seventeen minutes later it split into a dozen destroyer-sized hulls. Two went at Charon Station. Four turned inward toward Earth. Marshall left Charon on the frigate Hagen with pilot Andrea Rodriguez and Marine Lucianne. He had the codes to shut every human drophole from a four-hundred-year failsafe tug named Phoenix, hidden at unused drophole Beta 12. Bassett stayed.
The first Rage hull dumped adult Xenomorphs into Charon's nano-thread net, and the second dumped more than four thousand more, then ran. Bassett cut away a cargo module with seventy-eight people inside, then isolated his command sphere. The docked ship Demidov cooked off its reactor and wrecked a main arm. He sent the Purge Protocol and a last note to Marshall, and an adult Xenomorph killed him. Maloney ordered the wreck filmed and sent across the Sphere. James Barclay called her from Mars and offered a ceasefire after treating the war as lost. She ended the call without ordering Mashima to stop on Weaver's World.
End Of The War
Pixie dropped about a million kilometres out and attacked so Maloney would haul the Arrow in. Liliya walked out of the lock alone. Yaquita's cloaked ship had slipped into the hangar behind them, where twenty-three adult Xenomorphs held the bay. On Halley's mark Yaquita dropped the cloak and cut down the first wave. Adult Xenomorphs later overran that ship and killed Yaquita. Three uncloaked Yautja ships then docked one on another as a bridge, and Hashori spoke Kalakta's name as they crossed. A turret destroyed one of those ships. An adult Xenomorph killed Sprenkel in the corridors. Bestwick held a passage so Halley, Huyck, and Palant could reach a locked control room, where a head-sized piece of the Faze turned on a pedestal. Palant injected the nano and gave the ready signal.
Maloney had taken Liliya to the Queen's hall to be killed. Liliya sent one command through the android network: self-destruct. Pixie's computer dumped the hyperdrive and drove that signal through. Maloney's rebuilt heart heated, and most of Macbeth went with the generals. About two hundred metres of stern survived, which Palant treated as the Faze ejecting the engine bay. The Faze piece vanished from the pedestal. Hoot was dead, two Yautja were dead, and Kalakta was not among the survivors Hashori counted. Other Rage ships blew as well, including detonations near Earth. Hashori claimed the stern for the Yautja. Palant and the Tanns left with her.
Aftermath
On Phoenix, Marshall watched at least fifteen nuclear detonations across Sol, none of them human. Sol then stopped sending signals. He entered the failsafe codes and shut the drophole network. Dropholes across the Sphere went dark. Weaver's World was left on its own for months or years, and crews five hundred light years out were trapped where the jump had caught them. Halley and Huyck were fleet soldiers and meant to report in. Ware, once a Marine, offered them a way out after losing Satan's Saviour, Millard, and Hoot. Hashori treated Yautja dropholes as separate from the human net, and she spoke of the long pilgrimage adult Yautja make to the homeworld. Leaderless adult Xenomorphs remained on Weaver's World and on other colonies the Rage had reached.
Conclusion
The Rage War was the 2692 invasion of the Human Sphere by the Rage, and it ended as a Human Sphere and Yautja victory. Yautja ships entered ahead of Xenomorph armies, Isa Palant sealed a ceasefire with Kalakta in September, and in December Liliya burned the android generals while Gerard Marshall shut the human dropholes. Macbeth was left as a stern the Yautja claimed, Charon Station was lost with Paul Bassett, and leaderless adult Xenomorphs remained on Weaver's World and on other colonies the Rage had reached.
Appearances
- Predator: Incursion by Tim Lebbon (Titan Books, 2015)
- Alien: Invasion by Tim Lebbon (Titan Books, 2016)
- Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon by Tim Lebbon (Titan Books, 2016)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Wars | Avp Lore | Alien Lore | Predator Lore
