The Reapers are a green-skinned, heavily muscled people who appeared in the 1991 Dark Horse short Aliens: Reapers. An armed band of them entered a Xenomorph hive with heavy weapons, fought the creatures that lived there, and faced a gigantic Queen in a chamber already scattered with eggs. They took those eggs as food, and one of them ate a live Facehugger on the way back. On their own world the rest of the clutch was sold in a market, where families bought the eggs as if they were any other day's trade. No individual among them was named.
Appearance And Biology
The Reapers are large bipeds with green skin, heavy muscle, bald heads, and faces built around a flat nose, a wide fanged mouth, and pale, bright eyes. Some hunters show a groove along the midline of the skull, and all have large, thick-fingered hands. Their feet end in claws, on the hunters in the hive and on the smaller folk in the market. They wear armor on the shoulders and arms, often in blue metal, and several carry a short tool or blade at the chest. The same green hide marks the armored hunters and the robed vendors as one people.
The Reapers are strong enough to carry heavy firearms, to club a Xenomorph off its feet, and to tear a live Facehugger from an opened egg with bare hands. A hunter has been seen to vomit at the sight of a body torn open at the chest. Smaller individuals, clearly children, have the same green skin and the same fanged faces as the adults. The hunters are larger and more heavily muscled, armored and armed, while the vendors and families wear cloth. A hunter who ate a Facehugger raw showed no sign that the spray or flesh burned him.
Culture And Society
The Reapers are an organized people, able to travel by air and to enter a Xenomorph hive as an armed band rather than as stragglers on foot. They have been seen arriving in a vertical blaze of light and standing together as silhouettes against a hard, bright sun. Hunters among them carry bulky firearms and move as a tight group, weapons ready, even inside a dim structure coated with yellow resin. That mix of travel, arms, and close order marks a species that can plan a raid and carry it out as a unit.
On their own world the Reapers keep a crowded market, with shelves stacked high and a shopkeeper waiting on customers at a table. Families move among the stalls, including children of the same green-skinned people, and a prepared egg rests on a little cart by the table. Some of the folk wear aprons, robes, and ordinary cloth rather than armor, while armed hunters stand apart with bags from a raid. The settlement treats a Queen's brood as regular trade, sold openly rather than kept as a prize to be feared.
Hunting Xenomorphs
The hunters had not gone far beyond the doorway when a Xenomorph came at them, a pale, long-tailed beast already loose in the hive. It caught one Reaper and drove him down, opening its jaws above his face and striking with its inner mouth. The second set of teeth punched toward him while he was still in the beast's grip. He did not turn away. He bared his own teeth as the inner jaw came at him, and the rest of the party fought to reach him in that narrow space.
The Reapers met that rush with clubs and firearms once the attack had closed. One hunter clubbed a Xenomorph aside, and others fired as more of the beasts came on, muzzle flash lighting the close walls. A second hunter was knocked off his feet in the same clash, still firing as he fell. The party broke the attack and walked on among the dead, stepping over fallen Xenomorphs as they pushed deeper. Two of them paused together after the fight, one with a hand on the other's shoulder, before the band moved on toward the heart of the hive.
Eating Facehuggers
The Reapers are known to enjoy eating Xenomorph facehuggers, fresh from their eggs. Hunters tear open an egg with bare hands and hold the opened shell as a live Facehugger spills out in a spray of fluid. They grin as the creature comes out, and they keep hold of it rather than flinging the egg away. The Facehugger does not latch onto the hunter's face. It comes out struggling, already caught in the hunter's hands.
The same hunters take more eggs from a hive floor and fill bags to carry home. A Reaper will eat a live Facehugger on the way back, biting through it as the creature kicks in his fist, yellow fluid running from his teeth. The spray and the flesh do not burn him, and another of the party has been seen looking on. The raid is a harvest rather than a desperate escape, and the first of the catch is already being eaten before they reach their own world.
The Egg Market
The expedition returned with those sacks of eggs to a crowded market on their own world. Shelves behind the stalls were stacked high with the clutch, and a shopkeeper in an apron waited on customers at a table as if this were ordinary trade. A prepared egg rested on a little cart by that table, and more of the eggs were heaped in bags and bins among the stalls. Vendors in cloth stood where the armed hunters had been only a short time before, selling what the raid had carried out of the hive. The Queen's brood had become a day's inventory.
Families moved among those stalls, and smaller Reapers, children of the same green-skinned people, stood close to the adults who had brought them. A child pointed and shouted toward the goods, and a customer in a robe leaned in at the vendor's table with a smaller child close beside them. At the back of the market the armed Reapers who had walked the hive still stood with their bags, ordinary sellers now that the hunt was done. The settlement treated the eggs as food, not as a prize to be feared, and the trade went on in the open among families who had come to buy.
Encounter With The Queen
The path through the hive ended in a chamber where a gigantic Queen rose over a floor already scattered with eggs. She was far larger than the beasts the hunters had just killed, purple-hided, with a vast head, a thick body, and open jaws lined with huge fangs. One great hand already held a Reaper, lifting him like a toy against her chest. The surviving members of the expedition were small against her bulk, but they did not turn back from the eggs at her feet.
The captured Reaper hung in her grip, still alive in her fist as her mouth opened above him. Around her, the eggs waited in the dust of the chamber floor, a whole clutch within a few steps of the surviving hunters. The other Reapers kept coming, weapons in hand, toward that clutch rather than toward a rescue. Whatever they had lost on the way in, the prize they had come for was now in reach under the Queen. They took what they could carry and left her there, still holding one of their number.
The Reaper Xenomorph
The beasts that met the hunters in those tunnels were a vivid purple, with dark head-carapaces, heavy fangs, and a second mouth that struck from between the jaws. Some of them had a pale inner lining to the mouth and a long tail that ended in a blade, and they were large enough to drag a grown Reaper off his feet. They came at the party in the close tunnels and again in the wider chambers, and the hunters answered with clubs, firearms, and their own teeth. These purple hive-beasts, the Reaper Xenomorphs of that world, were the strain the expedition fought on its way to the Queen.
A gigantic purple Queen ruled that hive, far larger than the drones at her feet and far larger than the hunters who had come for her eggs. Her jaws and her hands were built on the same fierce scale as the smaller purple beasts, and she already had a Reaper in her grip when the others reached the clutch. The raid did not end in a fight to kill her. The Reapers took the eggs and left the Queen in her chamber, and the purple hive-beasts they had killed lay behind them on the path out.
Behind The Scenes
Aliens: Reapers was a short story first published by Dark Horse in the Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special in April 1991. John Arcudi wrote the script, Simon Bisley drew the interior art and the title illustration, and Randy Stradley edited the original special. The eight pages first appeared in black and white, as a stand-alone short in that anniversary anthology rather than in a regular issue of Dark Horse Presents. Frank Miller and Lynn Varley provided the wraparound cover for the special, which gathered new work by many of the publisher's contributors.
Dark Horse reprinted the story in color, with colors by Chris Chalenor, in the Dark Horse Presents: Aliens trade paperback in April 1992. That version was collected again in Aliens Omnibus Volume 3 in March 2008 and in Marvel's Aliens: The Original Years Volume 1. It also appeared in the United Kingdom in Aliens magazine, Volume 1 number 17, in June 1992, and in a Dark Horse digital edition with Aliens: Cargo in June 2013. No character in the story is named, and almost none of it is spoken, so the raid is told through what the Reapers do and what they later sell.
Appearances
- Aliens: Reapers (Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special, April 1991)
Tag Categories: Alien Lore
