Shānmén, cataloged as GJ1187.03, was a rainforest mining world of the Union of Progressive Peoples and the Jùtóu Combine at the rim of the Weyland Isles. The air was already breathable, so the Union did not terraform it. Combine crews cut equatorial Eitr for hyperdrive work until 2186, when an Engineer Juggernaut dumped Black Goo over the port town of New Luhansk in Alien: Inferno's Fall. Colonel Zula Hendricks sent the Jackals from the Righteous Fury after a satellite lock, recovered people from two settlements, and left the planet empty of mining.
Location
Free League's Alien: The Roleplaying Game hardcover Building Better Worlds places GJ1187.03 at −0.4 Rimward, 10.8 Spinward, on the outer edge of the Weyland Isles. The printed star plot groups it with Iota Persei, P Pelops, POL-6362, and GL537A. Mae Hendricks treated the next Border Bomber target as that same rim, and a satellite lock sent the Fury on a 67.2-hour burn to GJ1187 / Shānmén. The novel also uses the older Combine name Isle V for a different world, Heaven's Cradle, the previous strike, not for Shānmén itself.
Conditions
Building Better Worlds lists a terrestrial world with a tropical-to-temperate climate, mean temperature 20 °C, and air people could breathe without processors. Terrain ran from lush jungle to thick rainforest, with fungi clumps and rocky mountains. Union policy did not raise atmosphere processors, so a naturally livable world like this was crowded once the Combine opened the Eitr cut. Lightning storms and a heavy cloud deck covered the equatorial mine in the novel, and the Fury hid behind the planet's largest moon while it hunted the hovering bomber.
Native Life
Before the pathogen, Building Better Worlds listed meter-long flying insects, large predatory cats, sauropod-scale megafauna, and large hawk-like flyers, and it treated those animals as a research resource beside the Eitr. The novel names shovel-heads, earth trucks, kopats, cave modere, and dragon eagles with wingspans Nathan put at about ten meters. After the black rain, local fauna produced rust-red Xenomorph forms that kept host shape: burrowing kopats the size of small dogs, shovel-headed giants about four meters at the shoulder, fin-headed avian Xenomorphs about three meters tall, a river beast about 12 meters long, and winged eagles. The bound EVAC scenario later names the river form a Thrasher and the eagle form a Raptor. Human hosts produced pale adult Xenomorphs instead, eyeless, with spear tails and acid blood, and without a Facehugger cycle.
Settlements
Building Better Worlds counts five colonies and several small outposts, all destroyed after the bombing, with a pre-strike population above 20,000. Named sites in that book are Sueños Grandes, New Luhansk, and Romashka Outpost. Philippa Ballantine's novel adds the equatorial mine Svarog, the silent towns Neues Aurich and Novaya Tver, and Hyperdyne's zero-G factory Seneca in northern orbit.
New Luhansk
New Luhansk was a Union port of about 10,000 people, about ten kilometers from Svarog. It had begun as a food colony before Eitr poisoned the water. Nathan Bennetts-Riley was in that town, at Trevor's with the Brotherhood fence Marchuk, when a silent horseshoe ship came through the cloud and hung over the port. Pitch-black objects fell without a conventional blast, people vomited black fluid, and pale adult Xenomorphs tore out of their backs. About 10,000 people there were lost in that strike, not counted as individual kills.
Svarog Mine
Svarog was an equatorial Eitr mine on a mountain above rainforest, with two deep shafts, geodomes, and a fence built to keep workers in. The Knot, a family company indentured to the Combine and based on Pylos when they were not on a contract, had been on site only a couple of weeks when an underground blast in Shaft Two killed five miners. Mine manager Petro Kozak ran the camp with recalled Weyland-Yutani David units and Working Joes on the labor line. Under Shaft One, Toru McClintock-Riley and the synthetic Carter fell into a built oval tunnel and found a two-leaf iris door with writing in at least three scripts, then a temple of giant bone, Eitr sculpture, and two sleeping Engineers.
Romashka And Other Sites
The site plan is from the Free League cinematic EVAC bound into the Inferno's Fall paperback. That one-act puts Delta Squad on the same Atlatl-class hull during the bombardment, at Romashka Outpost rather than at Svarog. Sueños Grandes, Neues Aurich, and Novaya Tver went silent on the radio before New Luhansk was hit. Captain Olivia Shipp flew a northern-hemisphere lift while Lieutenant Ray Ackerman held the Svarog tailings, which matches the later RPG note that survivors were confirmed from only two settlements.
Eitr Mining
Equatorial Eitr was the reason the Combine held the world. The rust-red residue poisoned water, food, and wildlife, and the novel ties that contamination to the red color of the animal-born mutants. Combine attack papers written after the Hasanova black site told Svarog to lock the cage, collapse the shaft head, and wait in a hardened ventilation tower. Hyperdyne's factory Seneca orbited the northern hemisphere and supplied the security dome with company weapons. After the rescue, Shānmén was left empty of mining, and Alien: Seventh Circle treats the Eitr cut as finished.
Important Events
The Combine Contract
The Union assigned people to colony ships rather than taking volunteers, and a livable Eitr world filled quickly under Combine indenture. Each Knot member wore a vial of New Zealand soil. Toru ran the team at about fifty, with her daughter Lena Waipapa-Riley next in line, Bianca Ting-Riley on security, comms specialist Jin Hua Deng with the children Bai Yun and Da Shi, minerals specialist Pinar Osman-Riley in a sealed shell, and Nathan on the town run. Shaft Two's five dead, a jammed shotcrete robot, and the iris door under Shaft One were the first signs that the mountain was not only an ore body.
The Border Bombing
The horseshoe ship was the second such strike after LV-038 and Heaven's Cradle. No United Americas, Union, Three World Empire, or ICSC file matched the hull. Jin Hua later played an infrasound call-and-response between that ship and the buried door. Two XIP-34B Hornet missiles from the Fury wrecked the bomber, and the hull fell on New Luhansk. Building Better Worlds records the same attack as a Border Bomber drop of black pathogen into the atmosphere, which mutated the listed megafauna into the forms the Jackals then fought on the ground.
The Jackals' Rescue
Kozak sealed the Svarog gate on Nathan and about two dozen people still outside, then Toru blew the decline as the fence failed. Pinar aligned the long-range dish in her 5,000-psi shell and got a satellite mayday out before a rust-red winged form dropped her. Lieutenant Roza Ganser's UD-24 Austrian Egg-Terminator was lost at the broken gate with two fireteams, and Bianca died holding the ventilation tower in a P-5000.
Ackerman put Egg Beater and Queen B on a scoured tailings valley. The last people who reached a climbing dropship were Toru, Lena, Bai Yun, Carter, and the archaeologist Uros Antonijević, who smeared pathogen in the bay. Toru locked onto that mutation and fell with it into the cloud, and Lena, Bai Yun, and Carter reached Pylos.
Quarantine
In cargo bay E7 at Pylos, Zula, Olivia, and Mae met the three generals who had funded the Jackals in 2145: Christian Cunningham of the USCM, Kasey Ristic of the Union, and Washington Sekiguchi of the Three World Empire. Mae's read of Jin Hua's recordings put human and Nearfield synthetic traffic inside the bomber's signal, and the generals ordered the Jackals to find who was flying those hulls. Building Better Worlds, writing after that rescue, marks every colony destroyed and the planet quarantined, and it notes that UNISC sessions then discussed whether to nuke the world. The novel does not show that bombardment. It leaves Shānmén without a working mine.
Behind The Scenes
Philippa Ballantine wrote Alien: Inferno's Fall from a story with Clara Carija. Titan Books issued the paperback in 2022, 26 July in the United Kingdom and 9 August in the United States, with cover art by Alex Ronald of Jackals fighting rust-red forms in the rain. The same volume binds Andrew E.C. Gaska's cinematic EVAC for the Alien RPG, set at Romashka Outpost during that bombardment. Two years later, Free League's Building Better Worlds put GJ1187.03 on the Weyland Isles map with the Combine affiliation, the 20,000-plus headcount, and the UNISC quarantine line. Ballantine and Carija thanked Cold Iron in the novel's acknowledgements for help pinning down Olivia Shipp's history and the Union kit on the mine world.
Conclusion
Shānmén was a Union and Combine Eitr world in the GJ1187 system, a rainforest planet that needed no processors, until the 2186 Border Bomber struck New Luhansk. The Knot sealed Svarog, opened the Engineer temple under the cut, and lost most of its people on the way to the tailings. The Jackals destroyed the hovering hull, lifted a handful of survivors, and left the quarantined planet behind them.
Appearances
- Alien: Inferno's Fall by Philippa Ballantine, from a story with Clara Carija (Titan Books, 2022), including the bound Alien RPG cinematic EVAC
- Alien: The Roleplaying Game — Building Better Worlds (Free League, 2024)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Planets | Alien Universe Colonies | Alien Lore
