Zagreus: Independent Colony World

Zagreus was an independent colony world with twin suns and an orange sky, home to almost five thousand people under Governor Delia Burton. Mira Grant's Alien: Echo follows Olivia Shipp there in 2172, when a stolen survey ship brought a hive down on the colony and the creatures began taking local lion-worm DNA. Olivia left orbit on the family shuttle While There's Hope with Kora Burton and the severed head of her synthetic twin Viola, and she warned other ships not to land.

The Planet

Zagreus had four continents, island clusters, and oceans, and the climate was close enough to Earth that the Shipp family lived outside the settlement dome. Twin suns crossed the sky together, so the sky stayed orange while they were up, and the ice caps rained sulfur. Almost everyone lived in the main settlement. Besides that dome, Olivia knew of two small seasteads and one mine in the high mountains. The colonists recycled what they already had and waited for materials from off-world before they built any farther out. The family house stood outside the dome, near mountain caves and the launch port at the edge of the settlement, and one seastead lay about a hundred miles from the main dome.

Flora And Fauna

Many of the smaller animals on Zagreus had stubby legs or fringes of cilia instead of ordinary limbs. Snuffle-squirrels had both: four caterpillar-like legs at each end, cilia along the body that worked like whiskers, four eyes, and green fur stiff enough to resemble cactus spines. They ate fruit, stored fat in the tail, and lived in the forest, the meadows, and the dry foothills. Meat-deer came to a fresh kill and licked the blood. Predators in the forest were smaller than the animals that hunted on the open grass.

Lion-worms were the apex predator on the continent the Shipps surveyed. They had waxy white skin and no limbs, with a razor beak, ears along the body, a cluster of nostrils, and gold cilia that sampled the air, and they had no eyes. They hunted by vibration and smell, and they came up through the ground. A juvenile was about the size of a cat, while an adult was about the size of an Earth pig, and the largest had hides thick enough that a machete would not cut them. They attacked people when they thought they could, and they used the grass to push smaller animals into a tighter space before they struck. The Shipps stored lion-worm scent in jars, and that scent made other lion-worms treat whoever carried it as a rival or a mate.

The colored grasses between the forest and the residence belonged to one plant colony. Green razorweed cut skin, the purple blades soaked up liquid, and yellow butterweed grew among them. A pale orange grass, the same color as the sky, stuck to insects and blistered Olivia's hand when she reached into it. Katherine Shipp described the grasses as opportunistic plants that took whatever liquid they touched. In the pollen grove the stalks rose taller than the trees. They were fruiting bodies, and the pollen erased scent, which was enough for a lion-worm to lose a trail. Hippos in the wetlands had bony heads and horns, and they were large enough that lion-worms avoided that water. One of them charged an adult Xenomorph after Olivia threw lion-worm scent into the waterweeds.

The Colony

Weyland-Yutani did not own Zagreus. Governor Delia Burton bought a retired research hull that smugglers had taken off a corporate scrap run, and the colony treated independence as a reason to stay clear of company hardware. Ordinary citizens could not own androids, a rule tied to spyware fears. The Shipps were an exception because Viola was a unique custom build whose brain maps had been disclosed. Xenobiologists John and Katherine Shipp took a contract to catalogue the wildlife for the governor, and their daughters had been on the world about three months when the outbreak started.

The Outbreak

The survey crew found a wreck and brought something alive back toward Zagreus. John Shipp sent a recording that a creature had killed Petrov and that a shuttle was returning, then the same animal killed him on that recording. The hive reached the colony, killed Governor Delia Burton, and killed Katherine at the family residence before the survivors found her cocooned in the caves. Hybrids that had taken lion-worm traits hunted in the flower fields and at the launch port. Olivia shot one adult Xenomorph in the wetlands after a hippo wounded it, then shot a paler hybrid on the catwalk at the port. She left the dome on While There's Hope with Kora and with Viola's head. In orbit she lit the emergency beacon, asked for medical help for Kora, and told other ships to stay away.

Behind The Scenes

Mira Grant wrote Alien: Echo for Imprint, a Macmillan young-adult line, in 2019. The novel does not give a year for the outbreak. Later Colonial Marine files used with Aliens: Fireteam Elite place it in 2172, and they place Olivia's enlistment on 5 January 2173, her eighteenth birthday.

Conclusion

Zagreus was a small independent colony under an orange twin-sun sky, almost five thousand people in one dome plus two seasteads and a mountain mine. In 2172 a hive from a stolen survey ship killed Governor Delia Burton and the Shipp parents. Olivia Shipp left with Kora Burton and Viola's head, and from orbit she warned other ships not to land.

Appearances

• Alien: Echo by Mira Grant (Imprint, 2019)