WildC.A.T.s/Aliens: Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: August 1998
Writer: Warren Ellis
Pencils: Chris Sprouse
Inks: Kevin Nowlan
Colors: Laura DePuy of WS FX
Lettering: Bill Oakley
Covers: Chris Sprouse and Kevin Nowlan; variant by Gil Kane and Kevin Nowlan
Editor: Scott Dunbier
Publisher: Image Comics and WildStorm, with Dark Horse Comics
Format: One-shot, 44 story pages
Setting: Manhattan and the Stormwatch space station Skywatch in Earth orbit

WildC.A.T.s/Aliens is a one-shot crossover comic written by Warren Ellis, pencilled by Chris Sprouse, and inked by Kevin Nowlan. Image Comics and WildStorm published it with Dark Horse Comics in August 1998, with a regular cover by Sprouse and Nowlan and a variant by Gil Kane and Nowlan. After an escape module from the Stormwatch space station Skywatch crashed into Manhattan, Grifter brought the old WildC.A.T.s team back together, and Void teleported them aboard a station overrun by Xenomorphs. They found most of Stormwatch dead, got the last survivors off, and left Winter to fly Skywatch into the Sun.

Plot Summary

The Escape Module

A burning Skywatch escape module marked with the Stormwatch eye plunging between the skyscrapers of Manhattan

Early one morning over Manhattan, a burning object fell past the Chrysler Building, and an escape module marked with the Stormwatch eye tore through an apartment block and crashed into a street full of cars. Firefighters were still working the wreck when Stormwatch's Event Rescue Team One took control of the site, and U.S. Army troops under United Nations authority sealed it off.

From a nearby rooftop, Grifter and Void of the WildC.A.T.s watched the troops lift a woman in a Stormwatch uniform out of the module. Grifter recognized her as a Stormwatch officer, and the two of them followed her to a warehouse where Stormwatch staff questioned her. She was Victoria Ngengi, code-named Flint, who had served with Stormwatch for about two and a half years, and one side of her face and body was badly scarred.

Flint told the staff that Skywatch had taken an analysis craft on board after it ran into trouble, and that something inside had gotten loose. She carried a recorded message from Jackson King, the Weatherman, who had invoked the Storm Door protocol and placed the station under quarantine for a xenobiological infestation, and who said that the personnel in the escape modules were clean. Flint had not been meant to ride the module at all. She had been defending its entrance when she hit one of the creatures, it burst and sprayed her with acid, and she fell back inside as the module sealed and undocked.

Flint remembered something on her face during the fight, but she had kept her mouth shut and locked her jaw. Grifter decided that only Daemonites could have done this, and Void teleported the two of them away.

The Team Reassembles

Spartan, Grifter, Zealot, Warblade, Maul, and Void standing together as the WildC.A.T.s reunited

Later that morning, Grifter walked back into the headquarters of Jacob Marlowe, the WildC.A.T.s' old backer, and found Zealot waiting with him. She greeted Grifter with "Die, Cole," and he told Marlowe that there were Daemonites on Skywatch. Marlowe pointed out that the Daemonites had lost the war years earlier, but Grifter compared them to Japanese soldiers still fighting on remote islands decades after the war and insisted that someone had to go up.

Stormwatch's files said that the Storm Door was a heavy-duty forcefield wrapped around the station, and that no one could get through it or teleport in. Void was the exception, because she could teleport past it and take the others with her. Marlowe noted that six or seven superhumans were stationed on Skywatch, and Grifter admitted that he no longer led a team and asked Zealot for her help.

Marlowe had already called in the rest of the old team. In the next room waited Spartan, Maul, and Warblade, and the seven of them gathered for the first time in years.

The Skywatch Records

Void teleported the team into the Watch Hall, the nerve center of Skywatch in high Earth orbit. The hall was empty, and Grifter, Zealot, and Warblade checked the entrances while Spartan patched into the station's systems to pull every record from the previous two days. The first image on the big screen showed a huge rock in space, and Zealot remarked that whatever it was, it was not Daemonite.

Zealot knew the voice on the recording as Jackson King, once the telekinetic soldier Battalion and now the Weatherman, the station's commanding officer. In his report to the United Nations Special Security Council, King explained that what had looked like an asteroid passing through the inner solar system was an artifact, a habitat built inside the rock to shield an interstellar spacecraft. Stormwatch had sent two analysis craft to study it and redirect it into the Sun, and their radios had gone dead.

The next records came from personal radios and security cameras. One of the analysis craft returned to Hangar Seven carrying the first Xenomorphs to reach Skywatch, and medics found a crewman with a Facehugger clamped over his face. King called an internal alert, life signs were detected in the craft's cargo bay, and he sent Fahrenheit, the Stormwatch pyrokinetic, to deal with them. Void explained that the creatures had been on the asteroid first and had gotten into the cargo bay, and the bay had been sealed too late.

Maul found one more lead in the station's sensors. The Cold Penitentiary, the vault where Stormwatch kept war criminals in cryogenic lockdown, was no longer cold, and it was full of motion that could be people hiding. It lay near Transfer Bay One, a long walk from the Watch Hall, so Void teleported the team there.

The Cold Penitentiary

The Cold Penitentiary had turned hot and humid, and mist filled the vault. Spartan cleared the air with the plasma glow of his hands, and a pack of Xenomorphs came out of the mist. Grifter opened fire, Zealot cut into the creatures with her sword, and one of them grabbed Void while another wrapped itself around Maul.

Maul tore his attacker apart, and its acid blood burned his arms down to the bone. Void teleported the team out of the vault, but she collapsed in the corridor outside. Zealot examined the acid on her blade, which had been forged on Khera and had cut through countless Daemonites without a mark, and told the others that the creatures were not Daemonites.

Grifter reported to Marlowe that Maul was burned, Void was down, and the creatures were not Daemonites. Void could not take them home for hours, and Transfer Bay One was too close to the vault to use, so Marlowe pointed them toward Transfer Bay Two in the station's western wing. Spartan suggested that they find a working computer port on the way, and the team set off through the Officers' Lounge.

The Officers' Lounge

The Officers were Stormwatch's superhuman field team, who had tried to fight the creatures and been wiped out, and their lounge reeked. Inside lay the empty containment suit of Fuji and the uniform of Hellstrike, both sentient gaseous posthumans, and Warblade realized that the green muck in the air was what remained of them. A Xenomorph dropped from the ceiling onto Warblade, and he cut it apart with the blades of his hand.

Further on, burn marks led the team to Fahrenheit, Lauren Pennington, who stood in a corridor in a daze. A Xenomorph rose behind her and seized her, and fire burst through the corridor as Grifter opened up on it. Spartan worked out what the creatures had done with the bodies from the cryonic tanks and the eggs in the penitentiary: they were using people as hosts for their young, following the Xenomorph life cycle. Grifter wondered whether one had grown inside Fahrenheit, and Spartan asked how many other superhumans had been on Skywatch.

Past the next junction, the team found a hive spread across a corridor, with crew members cocooned in resin among skulls and bones. Then the lights dimmed in a brown-out. If the reactor went down, the Storm Door went down with it, and the creatures could ride the station's escape modules to Earth. Spartan sent Grifter and Zealot to the reactor deck to kill everything they found and keep the reactor running, while he took Warblade, Maul, and Void on to Transfer Bay Two.

Training Center 3

The Xenomorph Queen towering over her eggs beside the reactors on Skywatch's reactor deck

Spartan's group found Fahrenheit's crushed body beside another dead woman and reached Training Center 3, whose door was sealed and fitted with defense mechanisms. When it opened, Jackson King stood inside with his assistant Christine Trelane, who held a pistol, and a crowd of survivors. King refused to let anyone off the station until Spartan proved that none of them carried an embryo, because a single egg reaching Earth was too much of a risk. Ninety-six staff members had survived, along with Trelane and Winter, the Stormwatch field leader, who apologized for not shaking hands because something had eaten most of his.

On the reactor deck, Zealot reminded Grifter that she was a Kherubim warrior of the House of Coda, while he had been born in the back of a bar in Columbus, Ohio, and would always be poor white trash with guns. The two of them came face to face with the Xenomorph Queen, towering over a field of eggs beside the station's reactors.

Transfer Bay Two

Zealot slashing through Xenomorphs as Grifter fires behind her, acid blood spraying across the corridor

The others led the survivors into Transfer Bay Two, and the Xenomorphs struck as soon as they arrived. King hurled the creatures away with his telekinesis, but Spartan's body was badly damaged in the fight, and the bay could only move people around the station, not down to Earth. Void agreed to teleport the survivors to the surface in groups of six before her strength gave out. Trelane found that the station's reactors would shut down within twelve hours and that the nuclear cascade had already been disabled, and Winter chose to stay behind in the Watch Hall to work the bay's power from there.

Grifter and Zealot fought their way back as more creatures closed in, and in the middle of the fight Zealot told him that she had never wanted to cause him pain, and Grifter told her to shut up. Trelane used the bay to pull them in beside the others. Void was nearly spent, with four more groups to move, and she thought she could manage one last trip for herself and one other person. Grifter stayed behind with her to wreck the bay so nothing could follow, and the transfer sent Spartan, King, Trelane, Maul, Warblade, and Zealot away as Zealot cried out against it. Grifter shot the bay apart, wondered aloud what Zealot's "no" had meant, and decided to ask her later over a drink. Void took him home as the Xenomorphs reached them.

Full Burn

Alone in the Watch Hall, Winter confirmed that the last person in Transfer Bay Two had gone and declined to send a distress signal. He ordered a full burn on Skywatch's engines, knowing that it would wreck them and drain the reactors, and aimed the station at the Sun. The Weatherman's final report to the United Nations recorded that for a few days, Winter had been the fastest human ever to live. The Storm Door failed a few hours before Skywatch struck the Sun, too late to make a difference. Stormwatch had lost its station and most of its people, and King reached Earth with Trelane, ninety-six staff members, and the WildC.A.T.s.

Key Characters

Grifter (Cole Cash) brought the WildC.A.T.s together after Flint's crash, fought on the reactor deck, and stayed behind to wreck Transfer Bay Two.
Zealot was a Kherubim warrior who proved with her Kheran blade that the creatures were not Daemonites. She faced the Queen with Grifter.
Void teleported the team past the Storm Door and moved the survivors to Earth until her strength ran out.
Spartan led the team on Skywatch, pulled the station's records, and was badly damaged in Transfer Bay Two.
Maul found the Cold Penitentiary in the sensors and was burned by acid when he tore a Xenomorph apart.
Warblade killed the Xenomorph that dropped on him in the Officers' Lounge.
Jacob Marlowe called in the old team and guided them through Skywatch by radio.
Jackson King, the Weatherman, invoked the Storm Door protocol, held the survivors in Training Center 3, and fought the creatures with his telekinesis.
Winter was the Stormwatch field leader. He stayed on Skywatch and flew it into the Sun.
Christine Trelane was King's second, who ran the transfers from Transfer Bay Two.
Flint (Victoria Ngengi) survived the crash of the escape module and brought King's message to Earth.
Fahrenheit, Fuji, and Hellstrike were Stormwatch Officers killed by the Xenomorphs.
The Queen laid her eggs on Skywatch's reactor deck and burned with the station.

Editions

WildC.A.T.s/Aliens was published as a single issue with an August 1998 cover date and 44 pages of story. The credits page lists Warren Ellis for the story, Chris Sprouse for pencils, Kevin Nowlan for inks, Laura DePuy of WS FX for computer colors, and Bill Oakley as the letterer. Scott Dunbier edited it, Ed Roeder designed it, Denisse Chong was the editorial assistant, and Jim Lee was the publisher. The issue was printed in Canada.

The back pages reprint both covers without their logos: the regular edition by Sprouse and Nowlan, showing the team in a swarm of Xenomorphs, and the variant by Gil Kane and Nowlan, showing Zealot under a Xenomorph. The story was collected with Stormwatch Volume 2 #10 and #11 in the StormWatch: Final Orbit trade paperback (ISBN 1-56389-788-1) in 2001, and again in the DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens trade paperback (ISBN 978-1-4012-6636-3) in 2016.

Behind The Scenes

The issue went on sale on September 2, 1998, at $4.95. Gil Kane was first set to draw the book and withdrew for personal reasons, and Chris Sprouse took over the pencils while Kevin Nowlan stayed on as inker. Kane's work survives on the variant cover.

Editor Scott Dunbier planned the crossover to have lasting effects, and Warren Ellis, who was finishing his run on Stormwatch, used it to kill most of the Stormwatch cast before starting The Authority. Ellis said that he first found the idea stupid and agreed once he was told that he could kill any character he wanted. The story sits between Stormwatch Volume 2 #10 and #11, and between the first and second volumes of WildC.A.T.s, although the Xenomorphs appear only in this issue. The team that boarded Skywatch was the original WildC.A.T.s line-up without Voodoo.

Stormwatch Black, made up of Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor, and Swift, was not aboard Skywatch and does not appear in the issue. The three became the core of The Authority, which Ellis otherwise filled with his own characters. Winter returned in the Authority one-shot Scorched Earth, which revealed that his energy-absorbing powers had kept him alive in the Sun but driven him mad, and the Doctor could only imprison him there. After WildStorm's Worldstorm relaunch, the dead Officers were back in service, and Fahrenheit, now without her powers, joined Stormwatch: Post Human Division, whose fifth issue explained that a new Doctor had restored Winter and the others with him.

WildC.A.T.s/Aliens is one of the Aliens crossovers, and unlike most of them it counts as part of the continuity of its other franchise. In the Dark Horse crossover line it was followed by Overkill: Witchblade/Aliens/Darkness/Predator.

Conclusion

WildC.A.T.s/Aliens is Warren Ellis and Chris Sprouse's one-shot for Image Comics, WildStorm, and Dark Horse Comics. It follows the WildC.A.T.s from the crash of a Stormwatch escape module in Manhattan to the rescue of the last survivors aboard Skywatch. The comic ends with most of Stormwatch dead, the survivors and the WildC.A.T.s back on Earth, and Winter flying the station and its Xenomorphs into the Sun.