Alien, Covenant

Alien, Covenant by Alan Dean Foster

A generation‐ship carrying colonists in hypersleep diverts from its long‐planned destination when an anomalous transmission is detected from a nearby, seemingly habitable system. The acting captain, torn between duty and the hope of saving lives, orders a risky descent through a raging ion storm. The ship, designed for deep space travel rather than atmospheric entry, endures tremendous stress as the landing craft touches down on a planet with an eerily familiar yet alien environment. On the surface, an expedition team composed of security personnel, scientists, and pilots begins to explore the landing site. They first encounter vast fields of cultivated wheat and ancient forests, only to find that the local fauna is completely absent, as if every living creature has been wiped out. As they follow the faint signal into the wilderness, disturbing traces of catastrophe emerge—shattered trunks, scorched landscapes, and immense ruins whose scale suggests a long‐lost civilization of giants. The team’s investigation rapidly turns to horror when members of the landing party suffer inexplicable, violent afflictions. A private suddenly becomes violently ill during the return from collecting specimens, his body convulsing and hemorrhaging without visible wounds. Within moments, a grotesque parasitic creature erupts from his body—a neomorphic entity that defies natural biology. As more crew members are attacked and transformed in horrifying fashion, chaos erupts: wounded soldiers scramble to defend themselves in close-quarter firefights against these fast, vicious predators whose forms shift unnervingly in the darkness. Amid brutal encounters in the dim corridors of a crashed alien vessel and in the open, devastated landscapes, survivors cling to desperate attempts at reestablishing communications with the mother ship. While the colony ship’s bridge struggles with failed links and an unpredictable storm, members on the surface face relentless, shape‐shifting monstrosities. A mysterious hooded figure appears periodically, offering cryptic guidance and hints that the returning creatures are not random but follow a pattern known to an unknown force. The expedition eventually leads the survivors through a silent, vast necropolis—a ruined city built for a race far larger than humans, its streets littered with the colossal, decaying remains of its inhabitants. In this morbid tableau, the survivors realize that the alien threat and the desolation of the planet are intertwined with a cataclysm that may have been wrought by the remnants of this ancient civilization. Personal loss and guilt compound the terror: trusted comrades fall in gruesome manners, and the acting captain is haunted by his decisions that diverted the mission toward this horrifying destiny. As the remaining crew members—already traumatized by the violent metamorphoses and relentless attacks—are forced to flee the ruined city under a dark, oppressive sky, the colony ship is left suspended in orbit. With communications down and the storm unyielding, those aboard the ship must wait in isolation while the survivors on the surface struggle to escape an alien nightmare that now blurs the line between biological infection, parasitic mutation, and the cold indifference of cosmic forces. In this narrative of human colonization turned into a descent into cosmic horror, guilt, loss, and the unknown converge. The mission that promised a new beginning instead reveals a bleak confrontation with the remnants of an ancient, catastrophic alien presence—a warning that some signals should never be followed.

By Alan Dean Foster · First published 2017 · Genre: Science Fiction, Horror, Thriller · 26 chapters

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