Literature / Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey

Aliens Vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey is an Anthology of 15 short stories set in the Aliens vs. Predator universe, similar to Aliens: Bug Hunt and Predator: If It Bleeds. It chronicles various encounters between Xenomorphs, humans, and Predators across history, on Earth and beyond. The stories are:

• Below Top Secret by Chris Ryall: Two friends go looking for proof of aliens at Area 51. They find a lot more than they bargained for.
• Isla Matanzas by Steven L. Sears: A shipwrecked sailor observes what he perceives as Nephilim fighting Demons.
• Homestead by Delilah S. Dawson: A pregnant pioneer woman waits for her husband to come home from fur trading, tries to keep their homestead running, and contends with strange goings-on on their property.
• The Hotel Mariposa by David Barnett: A team of three paranormal investigators visit a notoriously haunted hotel. They would have been lucky to only meet ghosts.
• Planting and Harvest by Mira Grant: Agricultural space station Philomelus receives a shuttle of seeds and plants from another station that has been declared lost. The shuttle's cargo isn't all botanical, though.
• Blood and Honor by Susanne L. Lambdin: Marooned by her treacherous lover, Lieutenant Kai Kentarus has to survive blistering desert heat, no supplies, being poisoned, a planet claimed by Xenomorphs, and dueling Predator hunting parties. How hard can that be?
• Carbon Rites by Jess Landry: Just another perfect day in the sleepy prairie town of Morden where nothing ever happens for a young waitress named Blake. But nothing is as it seems. This is no sleepy prairie town, Blake is no mere waitress, and a whole lot is about to happen.
• First Hunt by Bryan Thomas Schmidt: A Predator elder leads three Youngbloods on their first hunt, a world where a human freighter infested with Xenomorphs crashed, leading to a hive. Ignorant of the danger, other humans have established a colony. . .
• Abuse, Interrupted by Yvonne Navarro: Jazz is at the cabin of her abusive boyfriend, hatching a plot to escape him. That plan is about to be interrupted by something worse than him.
• Better Luck Tomorrow by Curtis C. Chen: High School student Lily Shou makes a shady deal with Company rep Preston Bevetoir for some specimens her parents somehow acquired.
• Film School by Roshni "Rush" Bhatia: Some budding young documentary filmmakers go to a planet under Company quarantine after a mining accident to figure out what really happened.
• Night Doctors by Maurice Broaddus: On the colony of New Allensworth, African diaspora colonists have a chance for a fresh start thanks to Weyland-Yutani. Never trust the Company.
• Scylla and Charybdis by E. C. Myers: A long-range colony ship is stranded dead in space. Good news: a ship appears to have picked up their distress beacon. Bad news: it's not a human ship.
• Another Mother by Scott Sigler: A new Demon uprising is ravaging the population of Lemeth Hold on Ataegina, and General Ahiliyah Cooper must slay the new Demon Mother. This time, she'll have some help.
• Kyodai by Jonathan Maberry and Louis Ozawa: Eiji Kawakami wakes in free fall, an odd parachute strapped to his chest. As he surveys the strange jungle he finds himself in, perhaps he'll finally learn what became of his brother.

This Anthology includes examples of:

In General

• Action Girl: Many of the stories follow a strong female protagonist very much in the Alien mold. Fitting, given the yin-yang symbolism the franchise mashup obtains. There's even a few female Predators.
  • Isla Matanzas: Nan and the other African slaves. They were the Praetorian Guard of their king.
  • Homestead: The only Predator seen in the story is female.
  • Blood and Honor: Kai Kentarus, marine weapons specialist, is explicitly trans, identifies as female, and is extremely badass. Also the female Predators, especially Blood Venom.
  • Carbon Rites: Mariana, who came to get Blake. Huntress, the female Predator. And Blake, prototype for a next-generation combat synthetic.
  • Abuse, Interrupted: Jazz graduates to something a bit closer to this over Action Survivor. Also, the Predator in this story is also female.
  • Another Mother: Ahiliyah Cooper, General of Lemeth Hold, has killed several xenomorphs, and participated in the battle that killed the last Queen. She's quite good with a bow and arrow. Also, the female Predator Yeh'kull desperately wants to be one, but is relegated to ecological surveys to determine good hunting grounds.
• Action Survivor: For those protagonists who aren't the above, they're generally this.
  • Homestead: Lucy grabs her hubsand's shotgun, her neighbor's shotgun, and her neighbor's scythe (the weapon she's most confident in) to fight off the Aliens long enough to feel safe enough to deliver her baby. Subverted in that, well. . . she doesn't survive.
  • The Hotel Mariposa: Carol does get the last blow against the Alien, but Hin'tui did most of the fighting. Still, she leaves with a newfound sense of self, knowing she has what it takes to survive, to defend herself and her unborn child, or die trying.
• Idiot Ball: Many of the stories are set on Earth, with a setup at least implied that the Predators came, dropped some Alien eggs, then waited for mature Aliens to be about to start hunting them. Given the dense population of Earth, that humans are worthy prey in their own rights, and how quickly the Xenomorphs can entrench themselves even in the regular films (to say nothing of the vastly accelerated growth rate seen in the AVP movies), not to mention how difficult they are to get rid of once they establish a hive, and this seems to be a beyond stupid idea. There's a reason the earlier comics showed Predators seeding eggs on remote and sparsely-populated worlds like Ryushi, and the hunt in Aliens vs. Predator went spectacularly pear-shaped precisely because of human involvement.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The "dissolving liquid" from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem shows up again.
  • The Hotel Mariposa is the first story to use "Yautja" as the name for the Predator species, have a Predator POV and name similar to other named Predators in previous works, call the cloaking device a "shift suit," have a Yautja call humans "oomans," and identify the Xenomorphs as "kainde amedha" (misspelled kiande amedha and not italicized).
  • Kai comments in Blood and Honor that "there must be some bad blood" between the rival Predators she encounters. In other EU works, "Bad Blood" was the term for Yautja who disgrace their society's codes of honorable conduct, and the Predator she dubs "Old Rhino" definitely seems to be one.^note A later story explains Bad Bloods directly.
  • Among the simulated environments in Carbon Rites are "CA, Jungle" and "Sevastopol." In the same story, Blake ties into the computer systems the same way Call did on the Auriga.
  • Bo'kui, the Predator viewpoint character in First Hunt, is the descendant of the Bad Blood from the story Drug War in Predator: If It Bleeds.
• Series Continuity Error: "Kainde Amedha," the Predator term for Xenomorphs (meaning "Hard Meat) is changed to "kiande amedha." Italics and capitals vary.
• Shout-Out:
  • The scientists at Area 51 nicknamed their captive Predator "Dean." Kupihea admits it's a somewhat underwhelming name, but, well, he is a hunter. . .
  • In Isla Matanzas, Nan and her fellows are the Dora Milaje in all but name and vibranium weapons.
  • In The Hotel Mariposa, the first season of American Spook-Chasers did well because of it's "Blair Witch style."
  • From the same story, when the humans see the Predator cloaked, they think they're seeing a ghost (yay, confirmation bias!) When it decloaks and they see it's armor, all they can compare it to is a European knight. Carol's internal monologue points out it makes no sense for the ghost of a European knight to be in a hotel in America, "This isn't goddamn Scooby-Doo."
• Villain Decay: In contrast to many modern Alien stories, the Xenomorphs are a lot more fragile here. Predator weapons carve them up easily, and lone Predators can stand against fair-sized groups of Aliens with a reasonable expectation of victory.
  • Gets really bad for the Xenomorphs in Isla Matanzas. They are taken down not only by Predators and their formidable weapons, but by ordinary 1700s steel weapons, and even falling off a cliff onto wooden spikes (remember, we saw Gorman's bullets bounce off a Xenomorph in Aliens).

Below Top Secret

• Area 51: The story takes place here, and the characters are specifically looking for proof of government coverups of UFOs and extraterrestrial life.
• The Greys: Brockton is disappointed Area 51 doesn't have any.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The Predator dies from his wounds and the effect of the dissolving liquid he made the Alien eat to kill it.
• The Reptilians: The Predator is likened to one.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The story is pretty obviously based on the "Storm Area 51" social media event that happened a few years prior to the anthology's release. Someone even asks if this is another "Occupy Area 51" thing.
• Summon Bigger Fish: The only real hope the characters have to deal with the escaped Alien is to sic a captive Predator on it.
• Suspiciously Stealthy Predator: The Alien is in top form here, hunting and stalking from the shadows and striking faster than the characters can react, just like aboard the Nostromo, or Sevastopol Station. Even the Predator has a hard time dealing with it, though he lacks even his writsblades, and is forced to go pure hand-to-claw.

Isla Matanzas

• An Aesop: Jorge doubts God will send the Nephilim to defend humanity again, since we're kind of acting like assholes. The Aesop is ignored.
  What will we say to God if we allow the Angels he has already placed among us to be enslaved? Indeed, what if we ignore that we can all, like the Minos, be the defenders of humankind? If our lot is to enslave each other and arrogantly war upon those who could enrich us, then Satan has already won.
• Bodyguard Babes: Nan in particular is quite attractive (at least, to the narrator), and she and her sisters were their king's bodyguards.
• Corrupt Church: Upon reading Jorge's account, and seeing the Xenomorph skull he brought back as proof, the Cardinal declares it is rare for a kingdom to be built on truth. . . but they can easily be toppled by it. Then he throws the manuscript in the fire.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: How Nan and the African women dispatch a few Xenomorphs, evading their attacks while cutting them to bleed them out slowly.
• Mistaken for Aliens: Inverted. The narrator can only contextualize what he's seeing by dubbing the Xenomorphs as demons (and thus believing the island is a Gate to Hell from which they spawn) and the Predators as Nephilim, sent by God to slay the demons and close the gate.
• Non-Action Guy: Our narrator, Jorge Rodriguez de Aviles, doesn't do much, if any, fighting, letting the Predators and Praetorian Guard African women handle that. He does help coordinate their efforts, but as part of the plan Nan came up with.
• Praetorian Guard: The African slave women were all the guards of their king, enslaved because they stayed and fought to buy the king time to flee.
• Robinsonade: Very downplayed. Jorge is on the island because he was shipwrecked, but much less focus is given to his efforts to survive than to the battle between Predators and Xenomorphs.
• Zerg Rush: Apparently, the Aliens bred a lot more than the three Predators coming to hunt them counted on. It's unknown how many they've killed, but enough that its implied whatever powers their plasmacasters and cloaking has run out. There are still nearly two dozen to contend with at the story's climax.

Homestead

• All for Nothing: Two examples:
  • First Lucy notices several signs that things are wrong and she is in danger but decides against fleeing as the farm animals need someone to take care of them and she and her husband are dependent on the farm to live. Turns out that the entire farm, aside form a couple of the horses, is already infected by the xenomorphs and end up dead regardless.
  • Lucy spends an entire night desperately fleeing and then fighting the xenomorphs infecting the area to protect herself and her unborn baby. Unfortunately because she chose not to flee earlier, as mentioned above, Lucy has already been implanted with several womb-bursters dooming her and her child.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's implied that the Alien eggs were there all along, under the water of the ponds, and only exposed as the drought lowered the water levels. But since there's at least one Predator, and the story is entirely from Lucy's perspective (who has no way of knowing anything about Aliens, Predators, or how the latter hunt the former), they could have been seeded by the Predators. The answer is not given.
• Downer Ending: The female Predator is holding off the Aliens outside, so Lucy can focus on giving birth to her baby. Only it's not a baby anymore. Apparently, there was something like the Predalien from Requiem about. And her husband has finally returned home as the womb-bursters emerge.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy: Lucy is very heavily pregnant at the start of the story, as the Xenomorphs begin to breed on her land.
• Kick the Dog: Lucy's dog is one of the first victims, either impregnated or eaten by the Aliens.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Realizing the Aliens have already come for her neighbors and she'll find no help, and her labor won't hold off forever, Lucy grabs a gun and a scythe and decides to fight the Aliens off until it's safe enough she can have her baby.
• Womb Horror: Early in the story, Lucy has a dream about a dark figure standing over her, and wakes with a sore throat. At the end, we figure out there must have been something like the Predalien from Requiem about, which implanted a clutch of embryos in her womb to eat their way out.

The Hotel Mariposa

• Call-Back: Early, Carol experiences a memory of her vanished mother, when Carol was a little girl playing with dinosaur toys and asked her mom, if a T. rex was after her, would her mother protect her? Carol's mom said of course, she'd fight off anything trying to hurt Carol. In the end, Carol takes Hin'tui's offer of the killing blow against the Xenomorph to become the mother who will slay monsters for her child.
• Do with Him as You Will: At the climax, Hin'tui has subdued his Xenomorph prey, but offers his weapon, and the killing blow, to Carol. Less because he placed her in danger or for her to take revenge on the Xenomorph for killing two of her friends, but because he feels she might want to reclaim honor the same way he does (see Missing Mom). Carol takes it less for that reason and more to prove to herself that she will slay monsters for her own unborn child, as her mother once promised to do for her.
• Eldritch Location: The Hotel Mariposa. An alien ship with an advanced FTL engine carrying Alien eggs (possibly an Engineer ship) crashed there, and the drive is still active but malfunctioning, warping reality in nonsensical ways in the hotel built in the crater it made.
• Hell Hotel: The Hotel Mariposa, where several guests have experienced paranormal phenomena, a group of guests were murdered (supposedly) by a Manson-like cult, and there have been recurrent killings of people on the property by apparently having their hearts torn out.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Hin'tui is one of the most heroic Predators seen in the canon, and brings only his wristblades and a sword as weapons on this hunt. Especially notable because swords are very rarely used by Yautja.
• In Harmony with Nature: Hin'tui places great stock in this. When we first meet him, he's meditating to get a feel for the hunting ground, noting that many other Yautja pay the terrain no mind, considering it little more than an arena in which to stalk their prey. Hin'tui believes the land itself can be a powerful ally, and if you don't make it an ally, you risk it becoming another enemy.
• Missing Mom: Both Carol and Hin'tui have one. Carol's left with no explanation and was never seen again, Hin'tui's became The Alcoholic and followed her people's rituals, exiling herself to the desert to die for disgracing herself. Both characters are driven by this experience. Carol is a paranormal investigator because it's her way of continuing to search for her mother, Hin'tui hunts to redeem the shame his mother brought upon him, his family, and herself.
• Paranormal Investigation: Our three human characters have a show on Netflix in this vein. The first season did really well, but ratings have been tepid for season 2, so they need something with some punch. Enter the Hotel Mariposa.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Carol first sees the Alien, her internal monologue concludes a description with "What. The. Actual. Fuck."
• Regularly Scheduled Evil: Less regular than most. The eggs on the alien ship are in stasis, but the stasis fails every so often, letting an egg or two or three hatch and release their facehuggers. When this happens, and humans are present to be impregnanted, then the Hotel Mariposa becomes one of the most storied Predator hunting grounds.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: As with Leona Cantrell in Predator 2, Hin'tui spares Carol when his IR vision shows him she's pregnant. Even more, knowing the Xenomorph will have no such compunction, he works to defend her from it.

Planting and Harvest

• Accidental Murder: Most anyone assigned to a place like Philomelus is guilty of this. One scientist was tinkering with tomatoes and turned them deadly with too much solanine. Another created a variety of rice which was incredibly durable to freezing — and "nutritionally about as valuable as water."
• Agri World: Agri-Station, actually. Philomelus and her sister stations specialize in hydroponic gardens to grow foodstuffs for colonies and space missions.
• Black Comedy: It's noted the administrator's job is mostly to keep the bored and easily-distractable horticulturists from accidentally engineering a horrific weaponized kudzu — but doing so deliberately would probably get everyone promoted.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Lisa uses the facilities' intercom and surveillance cameras to give the Predators precise warnings about where the Aliens are, if they're attempting an ambush, and so on, making the Hunt a lot easier for them. They appreciate her assistance.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Nor do Yautja maintenance technicians. They jump at the chance to respond to a human distress call because the Xenomorphs are present, a hunt opportunity they never would have been offered.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • After their Accidental Murder incidents, the Philomelus is where these scientists are dumped. To some extent, also Reassignment Backfire — sure, they're far away from the seats of corporate prestige, power, and wealth, but also far away from the infighting, backstabbing, and brinksmanship.
  • Similarly, the Predator ship crew. They tested as adults, completing a hunt, but failed to distinguish themselves enough to earn further hunting opportunities. So they're relegated to a maintenance ship making the rounds to refuel and repair the ships of more elite hunters.

Blood and Honor

• Awesome McCoolname: Kai chooses to call the female Predator she teams up with "Blood Venom," because "It sounds bad-ass."
• Death by Woman Scorned: Kai is sleeping with Captain Duran, who's married. Much as he insists his wife can't know, she apparently does, because when she calls her husband to say he's going to get a big promotion, she adds "there can't be any scandal. Kill her." Kai then rather foolishly accepts a glass of water from Duran.
• Fan Disservice: Kai finds Blood Venom naked. Even if a naked female Predator is your thing (not judging), the fact that she's tied up with her feet being slowly roasted in a campfire is probably not sexy.
• Left for Dead: Duran poisons Kai, then ejects her in an escape pod with no weapons onto a planet known to be filled with Xenomorphs and frequented by Predators, with his ship leaving the system before the pod even lands. Not a bad way to tie up the loose end of your unwanted mistress. . . unless she's as badass as Lieutenant Kai Kentarus.
• Praetorian Guard: Praetorian Xenomorphs appear, guarding a young queen.

Carbon Rites

• Black Site: Morden is located in such a site, along with several other simulations to pit Aliens and Predators (and apparently stranger things) against the prototype androids.
• Robot Soldier: The whole point of the facility is to design and test the next generation of combat synthetics.
• Robotic Reveal:
  • Blake notices strange white liquid from Hernandez's wound, something that should be familiar to any Alien fan.
  • The same is later seen from Washington.
  • Mariana's blood at first seems red in the dark, but is revealed to be gray, and she survived having her throat slashed by Huntress' shuriken.
  • Blake herself sees the wires through a small patch of skin burned away by acid blood.

First Hunt

• Ambiguous Ending: The story ends with Joseli being perhaps the last human alive on the planet. She grabs some supplies and looks for a place to hunker down until rescue arrives. How long that will be, and if she can evade the Xenomorphs for that long, is a good question.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Bo'kui's assessment of Zo'keah. While G'kon'dchah and T'ua'sa deride him as weak and meek, Bo'kui knows that sometimes the quiet, patient ones are far more dangerous than the loud, boisterous ones. Indeed, Zo'keah shows far more precision and control during the hunt than his two comrades.
• Blood Knight: Two of the young Predators, G'kon'dchah and T'ua'sa. The former a bit more than the latter — to the point of nearly branding himself a Bad Blood by slaughtering unarmed humans.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Adriana slaps Timoteo across the face to calm him down and get him to focus on being a solider. It works. . . temporarily.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Well, Portugese, as the settlers on this planet are looking found a New Brasilia.
• Plasma Cannon: The humans are armed with them this time, too, in the form of plasma rifles and pistols. The Predators, naturally, have their shoulder-mounted plasma casters.

Abuse, Interrupted

• Bullying a Dragon: Marc thinks the Predator is a friend of Jazz's cosplaying, and threatens to "teach [her] a lesson, too." This goes about as well for him as you'd expect.
• Culture Clash: After the Predator defends Jazz and herself from Marc, and Jazz shots him dead with the shotgun, the Predator rips out his skull and spinal column, as Predators do. She then offers it to Jazz as a trophy in recognition of her efforts. Jazz, not understanding the significance of the gesture and not wanting the complications of carrying around her abusive boyfriend's severed head, declines. The Predator accepts this readily, seeming to understand this trope is in play.
• The Dog Bites Back: Marc leaves a shotgun in the cabin, in case Jazz needs to defend herself (or more importantly for Marc, his stuff) from wild animals. He knows he has Jazz to beaten down to consider using it on him, and she concedes he's right. But Jazz does use it on him to keep him from shooting the Predator.
• Domestic Abuser: Marc beats Jazz pretty routinely, and has her traumatized and broken enough that she's barely able to try and plan her escape. Apparently Jazz's dad was one, too, beating both his wife and his daughter.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: A shotgun loaded with rifled slugs is good against bears, and Xenomorphs, as it turns out.
• Stealing the Credit: Downplayed. Jazz finishes the Xenomorph off by pouring shotgun slugs into it, but the Predator takes its head as a trophy. Normally, this is only done with the very worthiest of kills. However, the battle had clearly been going on for quite some time before it spilled into Jazz's presence, the Predator has wounds all over from the Xenomorph, indicating that had she finished it herself, it would indeed be a worthy kill. But Jazz finished it for her, and one wonders if that part of the story will make it into this Predator's recountings of how she obtained this trophy.

Better Luck Tomorrow

• Addled Addict: Bevetoir is using some kind of drug when Lily finds him. He proceeds to get into a tug-of-war with her over the facehuggers, causing them to drop on the ground and break out.
• Artificial Limbs Are Stronger: Lily has a prosthetic hand, since she lost hers in the same power loader accident that killed her parents. It is stronger — she casually shatters a jar by squeezing — but, despite her classmates teasing, not capable of punching through walls. It's not that tough, and even if it was, the flesh it's attached to isn't.
• Baddie Flattery: Lily faces off with the Predator, daring it to attack her. The Predator seems impressed by both her valor and her acid resistant weapon and wrap, shoots an Alien that was coming up behind her, and leaves her unharmed to make her escape with the other survivors. . . after indicating interest in her tools, which she gives him.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Science teacher Abraham Ahidjo. He's understanding of Liky making a shady deal with Bevetoir, since she's just a teen and has had a rough time lately. He even says he'll put her up for scholarships to get her off this backwater colony.
• Science Hero: Lily figures out Bevetoir's drugs are alkaline, and combining them with the acid blood of a facehugger will create an explosion to get her out of the locked cargo bay. She also scavenges materials to protect herself from the acid blood and uses a saw blade with a non-stick (and thus, acid resistant) coating as a weapon.
• Stab the Scorpion: For a moment, it looks like the Predator has accepted Lily's "come at me bro" challenge, his laser sight flicking on and shoulder cannon aiming. . . but then he blasts the Alien that had been creeping up behind the group of survivors.
• Teens Are Monsters: Lily's classmates often tease her, mostly about her robotic hand. The one she has as a result of the accident where her parents died.

Film School

• Distress Call: Lara intercepted one from the colonists, guiding her to realize there was something going on the Company didn't want anyone to know about.
• Gas Leak Cover Up: The official story is that a mining accident led to an explosion that irradiated the area, explaining the deaths of all the colonists and the Company quarantine to keep anyone from visiting. This isn't even close to the truth, except for maybe the "mining accident" part.
• Leave No Witnesses: Downplayed. The Predators let the documentary crew go (except for the one who was armed and the one they thought was was armed), but destroys their equipment. Luckily for the crew, they had their footage saved on memory cards.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: A Predator mistakes a holocamera for a weapon and kills one of the film crew when he points it at the Predator.

Night Doctors

• Admiring the Abomination: Dr. Saenger thinks the Xenomorphs are magnificent. The only thing she finds more fascinating is cutting them up.
• Broken Aesop: Tries to show the horror of unethical medical testing on an unwitting population by having the most horrific experiments performed on Predators and Aliens. Predators are sapient, and honorable in their way, but still hunt and kill humans for sport, and the Xenomorphs are an existential threat, so this comes off as more than a bit of false equivalence, even if the Company's experiments on humans are just as bad.
• History Repeats: The narrative bluntly calls out many other times black people have been used as disposable test subjects for medical research.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Nyota makes a deal with the captive Predators and the captive Alien Queen to escape Company control, saying "We all want to be free." The Predators might get a pass — they can be heroic from time to time, but still kill humans for sport and chop off their heads as trophies — but an Alien Queen? Up to taking her last egg away to give it "freedom?" At least one person is going to suffer gruesomely for that, in all liklihood. . . probably lots of people.
• Tested on Humans: The Company is using the colonists to test vaccinations against Xenomorph impregnation. They don't always work.

Scylla And Charybdis

• Citizenship Marriage: Amelia marries Bak to secure passage to Babylon. Subverted in that they both love each other and want to go. Double Subverted in that Amrlia really only was interested in getting on the colony ship by any means necessary.
• Tranquilizer Dart: Keeper fires these to subdue the crew to abduct them to his trophy zoo.
• Vehicular Sabotage: The colony ship is dead in space because someone screwed with it. It was Amelia, under orders from the United Americas so the colonization effort would fail, letting the UA send their own and take complete control over Babylon.

Another Mother

• Breast Plate: It's pointed out Yeh'kull is female because her chestplate is decorative rather than functional, covering her breasts but leaving most of the rest of her torso bare. The practical version of the trope is discussed in Ahiliyah's internal monolgue; that some women, including Ahiliyah herself, have had their armor chestplates reshaped to accommodate their breasts, but the armor is still solid and full-coverage.
  Creen: I take it you didn't notice the odd, less-than-protective design of her chest plate. She's got boob armor, Liyah. No protection for her vital organs, but those boobies are safe and sound.
• Sequel: To Aliens: Phalanx.
• Stay in the Kitchen: The Yautja equivalent. Yeh'kull is the last of her line, so the Clan Elders forbid her from going on actual hunts. Instead, she does ecological surveys of planets, seeing if there's any good game.
• World of Badass: With only a medieval level of technology and society, the humans still survive, even thrive, on a world with Xenomorphs. Yeh'kull Lampshades how implausible this is, yet they manage it. Subverted if you've read Phalanx, which shows just how close humanity on Ataegina came to being wiped out forever by the "demons."

Kyodai

• Due to the Dead: Eiji comes across a memorial where the gear from the Falconer and Hanzo is set up, commemorating their mutually-fatal duel. Whether the memorial honors the Falconer, Hanzo, or both is left ambiguous.
• Enemy Mine: Unusually, not between humans and Predators, but between a human and a Xenomorph, after a fashion. Eiji destroys the control device keeping the Xenomorph compliant through pain, and the Xenomorph elects to go after the other Predators instead of killing Eiji. Eiji himself doubts the alliance will last long.
• Sequel: To Predators.
• Shock Collar: This batch of Super-Predators uses Xenomorphs as hunting dogs, keeping them compliant through a pain-inducing implant in their heads.

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