ACHERON: RUMOR CONTROL
Responding to what appeared to be a distress call in 2122, the Nostromo altered course and landed on LV-426. Her crew soon located a derelict Engineer Juggernaut with a cargo bay full of alien eggs. Ship’s first officer Kane was subsequently attacked by a facehugger and impregnated with a Plagiarus praepotens embryo which, when fully formed, began stalking the crew. With no Queen present, the alien initiated the ovomorphing transformation on Captain Dallas and technician Brett, converting their bodies into viable alien eggs. Third officer Ellen Ripley set the ship to self-destruct and escaped on the shuttlecraft Narcissus, finally killing the creature by blowing it out of the airlock and blasting it with a burst from the shuttle’s engines.
In 2137, Captain Marlow of the deep space salvage vessel Anesidora also traced the signal back to the derelict, and shut it down—but not before his wife was impregnated by a facehugger.
Decades passed. The derelict all but forgotten, the colony of Hadley’s Hope was established on LV-426. When the current Weyland-Yutani administration learned of the crashed Juggernaut, the colonists were sent out to find it without being told what it was. It wasn’t long before the entire colony was overrun by the aliens and the atmospheric processor converted into a hive.
A colonial marine unit sent to investigate was ambushed by an army of Xenomorph XX121s in the colony’s atmospheric processor. During the ensuing battle the plant’s reactor was damaged, resulting in a nuclear meltdown. Only Corporal Dwayne Hicks, colonist Rebecca “Newt” Jorden, mission consultant Lt. Ellen Ripley, and the unit’s android, Bishop, survived. The hive’s Queen escaped the destruction by hitching a ride in the landing gear of the marines’ dropship, and was finally killed by Ripley on board the Sulaco.
Weyland-Yutani has made quick work of covering the incident up as they search for viable alien eggs—even going so far as to start the rumors that Hadley’s Hope was actually nuked by an unidentified military force—possibly the UPP—or even a rogue colonial marine team.
Kathar Station was placed in orbit to monitor LV-426 and collect any alien material that might have survived the nuclear detonation there. It is possible that the Engineer’s derelict was not completely destroyed in the explosion—as the natural ore in the Ilium Range could have shielded it—although the wreck was already damaged by earthquakes and lava flows by the time the Jorden family located it in July 2179. Even if it is undetectable, the Juggernaut might have been swallowed by a chasm created by the blast and buried under an avalanche. Exactly what happened and what Kathar is doing in orbit years later is unknown.
A NOTE FROM MU/TH/UR
While other sources have indicated that the Derelict did in fact survive, the validity of those works as canon has come into question.
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