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Description
One of the last Alien Projects Darkhorse did was an adaptation of the Dan O'Bannon original screenplay "Starbeast" which would go on to become the script for Alien. With that having been said the design was so cool I had to draw it. So I decided to do a write up for it as well to help it fit into the Alien EU, which actually works, seeing as Dallas was listed as a former navigator on the USSCS "Snark" before being in charge of the Nostromo. I also tied in the stories of Steel Egg, Bloodlines, and The Destroying Angels to round it out.

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When the life boat of the USSCS SNARK was recovered in 2230, it held a suprise. The ship and its crew had vanished without a trace nearly 110 years earlier. They were long written off as dead when a deep space exploritory vessel stumbled across the lifeboat. There was a single survivor, the executive officer Martine Roby, found in Cryosleep. Not only was the discovery a suprise to all, the events that transpired on the Snark would shake up everything we thought we knew about the deadliest organism we have ever known, the xenomorph.

In summation of the events, the ship intercepted a extremely powerful gamma ray signal being emmited from an uncharted planet some 250 lightyears from the middle heaven region. Upon investigating the signal, a powerful energy pulled the ship to the planets location. There the computer woke the crew up and they found a crashed ship of unparalleled technological sophistication. The ship and its deceased occupant, whom the xenobiologists have dubbed "the celestial" will be covered further in their own writeup. But needless to say, no species encountered to date appears to be as technologically advanced. The crew found a structure on the planet as well, unrelated to the ship, which was emitting the signal. The crew went to explore the structure, which was revealed to be a temple, and inside were rounded, egg-like "spores". In a event that strangely mirrored the Nostromo encounter two years later, the spore opened releasing a parasite that infected a crewmember. Several days later the crewmember awoke, only to have an alien creature, which had been inserted into him and gestate in his chest cavity, erupt from his chest. The creature then killed most of the crew before Roby managed to blow the creature out of an airlock in the lifeboat.

Based on Roby's account, it was initially thought to have been a standard xenomorph encounter, much like the one the crew of the Nostromo had. However, when the data feed from the ship's security system was examined, the creature was not a xenomorph.
The creature stood nearly eight feet tall with three tails, and had was covered with a tough, dense skin. It lacked the secondary jaw and biomechanical features of the xenomorph, but like the xenomorph its blood was highly acidic. Interested in a potential new species, the WY xenobiologist took an interest. This lead them to search the ship for biomaterial from the creature, and based genetic structure in the samples found, it was a xenomorph. This contradictory information forced the scientists to look over the data on the celestial's ship and discovered something shocking. The ship was nearly 12 billion years old. This also means that the spores in the temple were nearly as old. It had been assumed that one of three known species (the Engineers, the Space Jockies, or the Drukathi) had been the creators of the xenomorph, but the temple and the celestial were vastly older than any artifacts associated with the three. This means the xenomorph came first. The strange appearance of the starbeast was not a result of the DNA reflex, but rather the creature was an older version of the xenomorph. It was suggested that every time the xenomorph hosts in a species, it takes a bit of that species with it, and that the starbeast is what it used to be.

This idea is not entirely without merrit. In 2080 the UNIC ship Hornblower encountered an alien craft orbiting saturn's moon Lapetus. The ship, dubbed the "Steel Egg" was infested by xenomorphs. As it turned out the Steel Egg belonged to a race called the "Giff".They had established an observation post on Lapetus 1000 years earlier. The crew awoke the last surviving Giff, who went on to describe the dangers of the Xenomorph and descriped them as "being older than the stars. Similarly, in 2137, Dr. Lucian Kleitel examined a space jocky derelict in the Shambleau system. From there he would formulate a theory that the Space Jockies had been wiped out by the xenomorphs, and that the species had always existed in some form or another, and acted as sort of a universal cleaner that kept space faring races in check. Finally the synthetic terrorist Iris Humphries expressed a similar theory to Kleitel in 2200. If this theory is right, then it means that as mankind may never be rid of the xenomorph.

Description
One of the last Alien Projects Darkhorse did was an adaptation of the Dan O'Bannon original screenplay "Starbeast" which would go on to become the script for Alien. With that having been said the design was so cool I had to draw it. So I decided to do a write up for it as well to help it fit into the Alien EU, which actually works, seeing as Dallas was listed as a former navigator on the USSCS "Snark" before being in charge of the Nostromo. I also tied in the stories of Steel Egg, Bloodlines, and The Destroying Angels to round it out.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the life boat of the USSCS SNARK was recovered in 2230, it held a suprise. The ship and its crew had vanished without a trace nearly 110 years earlier. They were long written off as dead when a deep space exploritory vessel stumbled across the lifeboat. There was a single survivor, the executive officer Martine Roby, found in Cryosleep. Not only was the discovery a suprise to all, the events that transpired on the Snark would shake up everything we thought we knew about the deadliest organism we have ever known, the xenomorph.

In summation of the events, the ship intercepted a extremely powerful gamma ray signal being emmited from an uncharted planet some 250 lightyears from the middle heaven region. Upon investigating the signal, a powerful energy pulled the ship to the planets location. There the computer woke the crew up and they found a crashed ship of unparalleled technological sophistication. The ship and its deceased occupant, whom the xenobiologists have dubbed "the celestial" will be covered further in their own writeup. But needless to say, no species encountered to date appears to be as technologically advanced. The crew found a structure on the planet as well, unrelated to the ship, which was emitting the signal. The crew went to explore the structure, which was revealed to be a temple, and inside were rounded, egg-like "spores". In a event that strangely mirrored the Nostromo encounter two years later, the spore opened releasing a parasite that infected a crewmember. Several days later the crewmember awoke, only to have an alien creature, which had been inserted into him and gestate in his chest cavity, erupt from his chest. The creature then killed most of the crew before Roby managed to blow the creature out of an airlock in the lifeboat.

Based on Roby's account, it was initially thought to have been a standard xenomorph encounter, much like the one the crew of the Nostromo had. However, when the data feed from the ship's security system was examined, the creature was not a xenomorph.
The creature stood nearly eight feet tall with three tails, and had was covered with a tough, dense skin. It lacked the secondary jaw and biomechanical features of the xenomorph, but like the xenomorph its blood was highly acidic. Interested in a potential new species, the WY xenobiologist took an interest. This lead them to search the ship for biomaterial from the creature, and based genetic structure in the samples found, it was a xenomorph. This contradictory information forced the scientists to look over the data on the celestial's ship and discovered something shocking. The ship was nearly 12 billion years old. This also means that the spores in the temple were nearly as old. It had been assumed that one of three known species (the Engineers, the Space Jockies, or the Drukathi) had been the creators of the xenomorph, but the temple and the celestial were vastly older than any artifacts associated with the three. This means the xenomorph came first. The strange appearance of the starbeast was not a result of the DNA reflex, but rather the creature was an older version of the xenomorph. It was suggested that every time the xenomorph hosts in a species, it takes a bit of that species with it, and that the starbeast is what it used to be.

This idea is not entirely without merrit. In 2080 the UNIC ship Hornblower encountered an alien craft orbiting saturn's moon Lapetus. The ship, dubbed the "Steel Egg" was infested by xenomorphs. As it turned out the Steel Egg belonged to a race called the "Giff".They had established an observation post on Lapetus 1000 years earlier. The crew awoke the last surviving Giff, who went on to describe the dangers of the Xenomorph and descriped them as "being older than the stars. Similarly, in 2137, Dr. Lucian Kleitel examined a space jocky derelict in the Shambleau system. From there he would formulate a theory that the Space Jockies had been wiped out by the xenomorphs, and that the species had always existed in some form or another, and acted as sort of a universal cleaner that kept space faring races in check. Finally the synthetic terrorist Iris Humphries expressed a similar theory to Kleitel in 2200. If this theory is right, then it means that as mankind may never be rid of the xenomorph.