Rosamond 6: The DNA War Planet

Name: Rosamond 6
Type: Habitable terrestrial planet with a breathable atmosphere
System: Greenish-yellow sun, one large green-striped moon
Climate: Hot and fairly dry in the landing region, 104 degrees in the shade
Terrain: Red glass pillar forest, caves, ravines, two oceans, the Blue Valley
Native life: Grazing herds, flightless birds, glitter-winged flitters, possible pre-mammals
Claimed by: PlanCom Nebula Habitation Division
Infestation: Two rival Xenomorph hives
First appearance: Aliens: DNA War (2006)
Status: Poison-packer extermination ordered, outcome unknown

Rosamond 6 was a habitable planet with two oceans and a large green moon in Diane Carey's 2006 novel Aliens: DNA War. Its landing region was a forest of translucent red pillars, and a sheltered shelf called the Blue Valley held most of the native herds. PlanCom, a colonization company based in Cincinnati, claimed the planet for settlement, but Xenomorphs spread across it before settlers could move in. Milwaukee homicide detective Rory Malvaux landed there in July as PlanCom's legal officer, sent to bring home his mother, the scientist Jocasta Malvaux, and her research team. He found two rival hives fighting for control and ordered the company's poison-packer robots released across the planet.

The Planet

Sun, Moon And Climate

Rosamond 6 orbited a greenish-yellow sun that gave a harsh, glaring light, and its sky was often veiled in mist. A single large moon with green stripes hung overhead, bigger or closer than Earth's moon, and at night it lit the landscape brightly enough for people to move without lamps. Captain Clark Sparren treated the moon as one of the planet's great assets, because a moon stabilized a planet's rotation and spared it wild tides, storms, and polar shifts. He described the landing region as rocky, hot, fairly dry, and semi-desert for part of the year.

The air was breathable, though Clark warned that humans could not run marathons in it. He expected about another decade of atmospheric modification before full settlement, with little terraforming needed beyond that. Pocket's scanners read 104 degrees in the shade on the first walk from the ship, and the caves under the rock were cooler. The planet held two oceans, which PlanCom valued for oceanography, and Clark counted it as one planet in about eight million that people could live on without destroying the native species. He put the value of its arable land alone in the hundreds of trillions.

The Glass Pillar Country

Around the landing site, the ground rose into a forest of glossy red pillars that ranged from pencil-thin wands to columns as wide as buildings. They looked like rubies or art glass and were translucent enough to see through, except for the largest. Many reached about 50 feet, and gauzy white growth draped from their tops, forming a canopy over a world of banded light and permanent shadow. Rory Malvaux found that the pillars held heat even out of direct sunlight, so they were not ordinary glass. Half-tube channels curved around the bigger columns, and holes in their bases opened into caves and gullies.

The ground between the pillars was covered in skulch, the name Rory and Pocket gave to a layer of countless tiny skeletons broken down to the consistency of bark mulch. It was slippery on slopes, and climbing through it felt like wading in a bowl of cereal. Sergeant Berooz slipped on it near a grotto of opened eggs, and fallen pillars left mounds of crushed glass that no one dared climb by hand. Beyond the pillars, the rock around the research base was riddled with holes and caves, and a ravine about 2,000 feet deep separated the pillar country from the Blue Valley.

Flora & Fauna

Plant Life

Away from the red pillars, the land changed into lush gold and blue forest. On the walk to the Blue Valley, pink vines hung hundreds of feet from an escarpment, studded with fleshy cherry-like nodules that each carried a tiny black fan. Bright green fern-like growth lined the path. The research base's cameras showed other regions with brushy yellow grasses, tall red and blue ferns, and white stick plants that looked like bare winter trees. Near the base lay an open meadow of black and white spiky growth no taller than 10 inches, where Rory later faced hundreds of adult Xenomorphs.

Native Animals

Jocasta Malvaux's team recorded algae, microbes, insects, flightless birds, and possible pre-mammals up to 28 pounds, and she believed mammals might also live there. From the cliff above the Blue Valley, herds of large grazers with quills or stiff hair moved across the shelf, along with flocks of short-necked, ostrich-like birds with feathery crests and clouds of glitter-winged flitters. Stealth technician Tad also noted a buffalo-sized animal that moved in herds. As the infestation spread, much of the native life gathered in the valley, where the ravine blocked the Xenomorphs.

Outside the valley, the Xenomorphs were destroying that wildlife. Rusty, the expedition's chemist, took Rory beyond the Blue Valley to a field of slaughtered herds whose bodies had been torn apart rather than used as hosts. Clark's court order classed the Xenomorphs as BioHazard One, a plague that would eat every animal over twenty pounds and collapse the food chain. Jocasta's own reports supported that warning. They showed the creatures consuming every native species large enough to carry their larvae, and Clark expected no native species to survive another year of infestation.

Human Presence

PlanCom's Claim

Automated scouting androids reached Rosamond 6 about eight years before the Vinza landed, and the company PlanCom returned three years before that mission to stake a claim. Its Nebula Habitation Division, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, planned to turn the planet into a second Earth within ten or twelve years. Xenomorphs reached the planet first. Sixty-two advance scouts and settlers were killed before PlanCom realized that the creatures were the same species met earlier on one of the mining spacelanes. The company logo, a cowboy on a mustang lassoing a planet, was printed on every container the Vinza carried.

PlanCom's plan rested on poison-packers, six-legged robots that compared a creature's DNA with the native life and fired hypersonic darts filled with DNA-targeted poison at anything foreign. Humans and Xenomorphs were both targets, while native species were spared, and the robots could even work underwater. Once released, they could not be recalled until they had checked every part of the planet, which Clark expected to take about a year. If the first wave worked, PlanCom planned to send another 10 million robots. The Alien Species Act, shaped by the Malvaux Amendment, stood in the way until a court made an exception for the planet.

Jocasta Malvaux's Expedition

Scientist Jocasta Malvaux, who had helped shape the Alien Species Act, was brought in to study the infestation and led a 52-person research team of specialists, interns, and students to the planet. Her first camp stood near the landing area, with huts that could be clamped shut from outside. Rory found it abandoned, with researchers killed by Chestbursters, a pregnant woman who had hanged herself, and more than a dozen opened eggs in a nearby grotto. Rusty later confirmed that 36 of the researchers were dead and that the locked huts had served as incubation chambers.

The Hidden Research Base

The surviving researchers lived in a hidden base they called the blind, built into natural caves in a rock mass riddled with openings. They lined the caves with compact tunnels, cameras, scent control, and sound masking, and hid the entrances behind holographic curtains. Tad maintained blue suits that refracted light and held in body odor and skin cells, which hid a motionless wearer from Xenomorph senses. Jocasta sent watchers to scan the landscape with heat sensors before anyone left the blind, and she planned for her daughter Graciella to inherit the outpost and continue her work there.

The Xenomorph Infestation

The Hive War

By the time the Vinza arrived, the adult Xenomorphs had stopped attacking the researchers. Jocasta took their restraint as proof that Rosamond 6 was adapting to them and argued that the creatures had become an indigenous, possibly intelligent species that no one could legally remove. A low horn-like call carried across the land and halted a group that had cornered Rory, and later the adult Xenomorphs tore apart Facehuggers that leapt at the humans. Ship's doctor Bonnie Bardolf offered a simpler reason, that predators protected their young, their territory, or prey saved for later.

The real cause was a war between two hives. Rory and Bonnie watched two armies of adult Xenomorphs meet on a meadow, one uniformly black and the other marked with blue between the ribs and green tissue in the mouth and under the arms. Graciella Malvaux concluded that rival Queens had produced separate genetic lines, and that both hives had paused hunting and breeding while they fought over which line would spread across the planet. The humans were hosts saved for the winner. A final call across the land told the survivors that one hive had won.

Flying Facehuggers

During the hive war, the Facehuggers on Rosamond 6 entered a dispersal phase in their life cycle. They stood on their fingers, inflated their side lobes into wing membranes, and took off in flocks over the glass spires toward the Blue Valley to start a new colony there. Gracie compared the flight to winged carpenter ants leaving to found new nests, not a permanent new caste. A flying Facehugger later attached to Colonel MacCormac at the old camp. The swarm left Rory unsure whether the infestation covered the whole continent and whether the Blue Valley, perhaps the last untouched place on it, could be saved.

History

The Vinza Mission

On 14 July, the PlanCom container ship Vinza landed on Rosamond 6 under Captain Clark Sparren, carrying Rory Malvaux as the company's legal officer and a Colonial Marine escort under Colonel MacCormac. Rory had to confirm that the researchers were dead or evacuated before the poison-packers could be released. On the first walk, Berooz died when residual acid in an expended egg ate through his skull, and hundreds of Facehuggers drove the party back toward the ship. Computer specialist Axell was shot along with the Facehugger on his face, and Marines Donahue and Brand were later found murdered.

The Evacuation

After watching the hive war, Rory ordered everyone off the planet and authorized the extermination. Jocasta withdrew the base's protection around his group and collapsed the main blind. Carmichael shot MacCormac through the head along with the flying Facehugger on his face, and Rusty returned from the ravine to confirm that Jocasta had arranged the deaths of dissenters. Gracie, Tad, and the other researchers chose to leave. Rusty collapsed on the ramp with a Chestburster emerging, and Rory shot him at his request. Corporal Edney had been killed earlier in the hive battle.

Jocasta then held Bonnie hostage with the spike from a severed Xenomorph tail. Bonnie's flying fox, Buttercup, landed on Jocasta's head and wrapped its wings around her, and Rory pulled Bonnie aboard. Jocasta stayed behind as adult Xenomorphs closed in, and the novel never confirmed her death. The Vinza launched with Rory, Bonnie, Gracie, Tad, Carmichael, and the surviving researchers. Clark asked Rory for the final legal decision as the ship climbed away, and Rory ordered the poison-packers deployed across Rosamond 6.

Fate Of Rosamond 6

The novel ended before the poison-packers finished their sweep, so the fate of Rosamond 6 was never shown. Clark Sparren expected the robots to cleanse the planet within about a year, after which PlanCom would colonize it and the research outpost could be used again. Rory chose to save the planet and the Blue Valley by wiping out the Xenomorphs, though he wondered whether the infestation was worldwide and whether the damage could be reversed. Jocasta's fate, the identity of the winning hive, and the result of the extermination were all left open, and no later Alien story returned to the planet.

Behind The Scenes

Diane Carey created Rosamond 6 for Aliens: DNA War, published by DH Press on 17 May 2006, and told the whole story in Rory Malvaux's first-person voice. The book never gave a year for the July landing, and Rory linked the Alien Species Act only to a rumored ship incident about fifty years earlier and a later expedition with no known survivors. That distance separated the planet from Ripley's films. Stephen Youll's cover put a lone woman among adult Xenomorphs in dense vegetation, and the hive war on the planet echoed the war between red Xenomorphs and black Xenomorphs in Aliens: Genocide.

The text was not always consistent about the planet. Its name appeared once as plain Rosamond instead of Rosamond 6. Clark called it a planet that settlement would not harm, while the court order and Jocasta's reports said the Xenomorphs were wiping out its native species. A crew member asked whether the expedition held 42 or 52 people, and Rory answered 52. Jocasta claimed only nine deaths before Rusty gave the true figure of 36, and the poison-packer cargo changed from five hundred robots per container to one hundred in a later count.

Conclusion

Rosamond 6 was the habitable red-pillared world of Aliens: DNA War, a planet with two oceans, a green-striped moon, and a sheltered Blue Valley full of native herds. PlanCom claimed it for colonization, but Xenomorphs killed its first settlers and most of Jocasta Malvaux's research team, and two rival hives fought for control of the planet. Rory Malvaux evacuated the survivors on the Vinza, left his mother behind among the adult Xenomorphs, and ordered PlanCom's poison-packers released to clear the planet of every species that did not belong there.