Siobhan McCormick: Seegson Botanist Who Killed A Queen

Full name: Dr. Siobhan McCormick
Also known as: Von
Species: Human
Age: 38
Affiliation: Seegson Pharmaceuticals
Role: Botanist, assistant director of research at Hygieia Colony
Known for: Turning a Xenomorph Queen on the LV-846 biodrones and exposing Vaughn
Partner: Alec Brand
Setting: BG-791 and LV-846, 2187
First appearance: Alien: Enemy of My Enemy (2023)
Status: Alive, hiding on LM-490 with Alec
Injuries (novel): Burned forearm, wounded shoulder, hip struck by a Xenomorph tail

Siobhan McCormick was a Seegson botanist and the lead of Mary SanGiovanni's 2023 novel Alien: Enemy of My Enemy. In 2187 she was assistant director of research at the Seegson lab on the dying moon BG-791, where a Weyland-Yutani serum test loosed Xenomorphs. She forced the scientist responsible onto a company ship, fought her way to a peace summit full of biodrones, and used his Queen against them. The files she sent from the burning conference center exposed the general behind the attack.

Biography

Seegson Botanist On BG-791

For nearly twelve years Siobhan was assistant director of research at the Seegson Pharmaceuticals lab that Hygieia Colony had been built around. She was a botanist, and she read the moon's coming break-up in its tremors, its storms, and the restless behavior of the vurfur and birds. Hygieia shrank from seventy people to fourteen and one synthetic. Her boss, Arthur Benton, left the evacuation logistics to her, and she and the synthetic Camilla made sure the colonists followed every United Americas procedure. The UA had agreed to lift them in exchange for Seegson plant extraction data.

She was 38, single, and childless, with no family and few friends left. Transmissions from a man named Erik had trailed off to nothing, and her sister on Earth had died hours after sending her a last note. The lab had been all she had for years, and she had come to believe that pharmaceutical companies, Seegson included, put money ahead of saving lives. She joked with Camilla that they might be reassigned to LM-490, a moon known for its beaches, while they waited for the evacuation ship due the next day.

The Menhit Distress Call

That night Siobhan and Camilla received a damaged video from William, the synthetic at the Weyland-Yutani Menhit lab, reporting an accident. She packed medical supplies into the M577 APC and rode west with Camilla and Sergeant Alec Brand's Marine squad. The facility was dark, its door clawed open, and its halls held bodies with burst chests. Alec named the killers as Xenomorphs, creatures she had known only from stories, files, and artists' renderings. Without a gun, she picked up a pipe because she could no longer stand feeling helpless.

In the medical bay a Xenomorph speared Private Danny McGowan through the gut with its tail. Siobhan took up a gun and shot it in the back between two bony protrusions, and it fled into a vent while its acid burned the foot of Private Eddie Rutiani, called Roots. Alec took the weapon from her shaking hands and told her she had done well, calling her Von. She did not answer. She found gauze for Roots's foot and then quietly told Corporal Kenny Elkins to put down the research volunteer he was still holding.

Fowler And Cora Lanning

In the observation room the group found Dr. Martin Fowler beside the unconscious volunteer Cora Lanning, who carried an embryo. Fowler claimed his serum could hold it for three weeks and that she was safe. Siobhan made him admit the serum failed in fifteen percent of cases and told him she would not risk her staff and their families on his word. Fowler stirred sympathy for Cora, and the group took both of them back to Hygieia in quarantine. On the way out, a vurfur-born Xenomorph with antlers chased the APC until Elkins shook it into a fissure.

At the Seegson lab Cora burst in a hallway, and the Chestburster escaped into the vents. Siobhan confronted Fowler and accused him of saying anything to get himself and his cargo off the moon. She remembered the last seven residents in the housing pods, including Hank and Victoria Hernandez and their granddaughter Kira, a child she had a particular soft spot for. She insisted on checking on them, and when Alec hesitated to let her come, she went anyway with a medkit and its laser scalpel.

Deaths In The Residential Pods

Hank met them outside with Kira and a gun, after a Xenomorph killed Victoria in their basement. Inside the pods Siobhan found chemist Shannon Lee, Bill Maloney, and her boss Arthur Benton and his partner Leo dead. When the Xenomorph dragged Hank away, she grabbed his gun, shot the creature, and chased it until it pulled him into a vent. She told Alec she felt she had failed the people she was responsible for. Searching the basements, she pocketed a wedding ring she found by the lobby desk.

The Xenomorph dropped on her in the lobby, and she put a round into its skull before its tail struck her hip and threw her against the wall. Alec finished it. Back at the lab she stayed with Kira when the girl woke and told her that her grandfather was gone, then held her until they both slept. Camilla, under a Seegson update she could not refuse, had reported the infection to the UA, which cancelled the evacuation ship, and then vanished. Siobhan understood that Camilla had acted on logic, even as the others blamed her.

Taking The Company Ship

With the UA ship gone, Siobhan leveled a gun at Fowler's forehead, clicked off the safety, and ordered him to tell Weyland-Yutani the problem was contained so that everyone could board the company's evacuation ship. Fowler later mocked her plan as grand larceny. Rockfall blocked the surface route at Menhit, so she pushed for his quakeproof tunnels, where the group found two M240 incinerators. After Fowler tested one close to her leg, she picked up the other herself, and Alec watched her uneasily.

Xenomorphs chased them through the tunnels. When one pinned Alec away from his gun, Siobhan burned it off him, and he told the squad she had his back. Fowler ran ahead, but the group climbed out to the landing platform and reached the Astraeus. Siobhan held the ramp with her flamethrower as five Xenomorphs came out of the tunnel, and she kept the trigger ready as the last one clung to the windshield after takeoff. BG-791 was left to break apart behind them as the ship headed for LV-846.

The Astraeus And The Demeter

The pilots, Gavin Broadwell and Sam Urban, were Icarus Flight contractors, and Siobhan and Alec talked them into flying to the summit. When Fowler tried to reach Weyland-Yutani and turn the crew against them, Siobhan punched him, the first time she had ever hit anyone. Later she found the pilots drugged and identified the coffee residue as a strong plant-based sedative of a kind Seegson had synthesized on BG-791. She weighed reversing it with flumazenil and brewed coffee for the crew while Elkins cut the company's remote control of the ship. Alec kissed her before he went after Fowler.

The automated Weyland-Yutani ship USCSS Demeter grappled the Astraeus with a retraction arm. Alec planned to go out alone, but Siobhan told him she had been helpless the whole time and needed to do this, and they spacewalked together to unbolt the clamped section. A screwdriver bit nearly punctured her suit when the ship lurched. Kira warned them over the comms just before the Demeter fired, and Siobhan said the girl's warning had probably saved her life. Elkins and Kira flew them clear with damaged navigation and little fuel left.

Landing On LV-846

The Astraeus crash-landed in a storm near the Pushan Conference Center, beside the wrecked Marine transport USS Alexiares. The transport's log revealed that it had carried biodrones and that the general who sent it had known. Fowler then confessed he carried a Queen embryo in his own chest. When he argued that they would need her against the biodrones, Siobhan agreed only to confirm the biodrones first and then let the Queen and the swarm fight. Fowler burst in a side room, and the newborn Queen fled into the building.

Inside, Siobhan realized the biodrones had killed one of their own and were using its blood to melt through the hub doors. The group split as the swarm broke out. Sam and Gavin died, Alec was speared through the ribs, arm, and knee, and Roots reported that Elkins and Kira had been killed. Siobhan sent the wounded Alec and Roots back to the ship, insisting that only someone fast could lead the Queen to the swarm. She kissed Alec on the cheek and went in alone with a flamethrower, telling herself the hunt was for Kira.

The Queen Against The Biodrones

Tracking the Queen through the vents, Siobhan found the dying Joint Chief Stephanie Koslowski, whose family held a large stake in Seegson. Koslowski gave her a drive and named Vaughn, the Engineers, and a shadow group called Deep Void before she died. In the central chamber Siobhan found the dead of the summit and attached the drive's contents to a distress message. About twenty-four biodrones filled the room, and when one seized her, the grown Queen threw it off and began tearing the swarm apart.

Siobhan torched biodrones as they tried to flee through the doors, which turned the fight between the two strains into a slaughter. Biodrone blood burned through her sleeve and singed her forearm, and her shoulder was wounded. In the burning room she recorded her message, identifying herself and reporting no survivors from the summit or its Marine security detail. She sent evidence of the pathogen bomb signatures and of ACG Vaughn's involvement, including what was done to the Alexiares, and asked for help. Then she crawled out of the fire and led the Queen toward the wreck.

Killing The Queen

Outside, in rain and hail, Siobhan faced the Queen with her flamethrower beside the Astraeus. Alec and Roots came out to draw the Queen away, and Siobhan picked up a long, splintered metal rod from the wreckage. The Queen snapped Alec's bad leg and speared Roots through the chest. As the Queen turned on Alec, Siobhan drove the spike through her back and out of her chest. Lightning struck the metal and killed the Queen, and an ICSC ship, the Soteria, landed and took Siobhan and the injured Alec aboard.

Before the rescue ship landed, Alec told her he loved her, and she kissed him and said she loved him too. The UA, the UPP, and the ICSC had all received her transmission and its files on Vaughn's plan to use Weyland-Yutani scientists tied to Deep Void and to replicate an Engineer pathogen. Publicly, the disaster on LV-846 became a fire started by lightning. Privately, the new Joint Chiefs opened an investigation into Vaughn, and the shared goal led to an armistice between the three governments. Officially the person who brought the information to light was a ghost who had vanished with the original drive.

Hiding On LM-490

Siobhan and Alec spent those six months on an isolated beach on LM-490, the moon she had once joked about. She kept a garden of plants imported from across the galaxy, while Alec still limped and sanded his fishing boat. Both suffered after what they survived. Alec had bad nightmares, and Siobhan could not get comfortable with even small fires, and when it rained she felt it in her burned arm and bad shoulder. One evening the meteors falling on the uninhabited planet Naraka turned out to be pathogen bombs, and the novel ended there.

Personality And Relationships

Siobhan described her own clumsiness as the old McCormick grace. She took responsibility for the colonists seriously and blamed herself when they died. Untrained in combat, she hated feeling helpless, and over the novel she went from holding a pipe to firing guns, using a flamethrower, and hunting a Queen alone. She stood up to Fowler from the start, demanding real numbers, threatening him at gunpoint, and punching him. She had seen enough of corporate life to believe that pharmaceutical companies cared about money first.

Alec Brand had served for years as chief security officer at the lab, and for most of that time neither of them acted on their feelings. He called her Von, and their bond grew from a kiss on the Astraeus to an open declaration of love on LV-846. Camilla, a Seegson 226-B/2 synthetic, had worked beside her for twelve years and always called her Dr. McCormick despite being told to use her first name. Siobhan treated Kira almost as her own and defended Camilla when the others blamed her.

Behind The Scenes

Siobhan appeared only in Alien: Enemy of My Enemy, written by Mary SanGiovanni and published by Titan Books in 2023. The story was set in 2187 and moved from BG-791, a moon of the gas giant Hephaestus, to the summit world LV-846. She was one of the novel's point-of-view characters, alongside Alec, Fowler, and members of the Marine squad. The title described her strategy on LV-846, using the Queen as the enemy of the biodrones. Her early wish to be reassigned to LM-490 for its beaches became the novel's closing setting, where she and Alec hid after the summit.

Conclusion

Siobhan McCormick was a Seegson botanist who spent twelve years on BG-791 and became the reluctant lead of its last days. She shot Xenomorphs, forced Martin Fowler to get her people onto a company ship, and walked in space to free the Astraeus. On LV-846 she led Fowler's Queen into the biodrone swarm, sent the files that exposed Vaughn, and killed the Queen with a spike and a bolt of lightning. She ended the novel alive with Alec Brand on LM-490 as pathogen bombs fell on Naraka.