Derelict: Marines

When the Colonial Marines set out after their deadliest prey, the Xenomorphs, it's what Corporal Hicks calls a bug hunt - kill or be killed. Here are fifteen all-new stories of such "close encounters", written by many of today's most extraordinary authors. Set during the events of all four Alien films, sending the Marines to alien worlds, to derelict space settlements, and into the nests of the universe's most dangerous monsters, these adventures are guaranteed to send the blood racing - one way or another.

Predator ships stream into human space in unprecedented numbers. The Colonial Marines, controlled by Weyland-Yutani, respond to the incursion, thus entering the Rage War. This terrifying assault by the Yautja cannot go unchallenged, yet the cost of combat is high. Predators are master combatants, and each encounter yields a high body count. Then, when Lt. Johnny Mains and his marines - the VoidLarks - enter the fray, they discover an enemy deadlier than any could imagine.

Under 30,000 feet of water, the exploration rig Leaguer has discovered an oil field larger than Saudi Arabia. The oil is so sweet and pure, nations would go to war for the rights to it. As the team starts drilling one exploration well after another in their race to claim the sweet crude, a deep rumbling beneath the ocean floor shakes them all to their core. Something has been living in the oil and it's about to give birth to the greatest threat humanity has ever seen.

With the failure of Hadley's Hope, Weyland-Yutani has suffered a devastating setback - the loss of the Aliens they aggressively sought to exploit. Yet there's a reason the Company has risen to the top of the food chain. True to form, they have a redundancy already in place: the facility known as "The Cold Forge". Remote station RB-232 has become their greatest asset in weaponizing the Xenomorphs. However, when Dorian Sudler is sent to RB-232 to assess their progress, he discovers that there's a spy aboard - someone who doesn't necessarily act in the company's best interests.

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean's deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face to face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he's sure he saw but still can't prove exists - Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life.

The most advanced scientific enterprise ever mounted, Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage had every expectation of triumph. But for almost two years his ships, HMS Terror and Erebus, have been trapped in the Arctic ice. Supplies of fuel and food are running low. Scurvy, starvation and even madness are beginning to take their toll. And yet the real threat isn’t from the constantly shifting, alien landscape, the flesh-numbing temperatures or being crushed by the unyielding, frozen ocean. No, the real threat is far more terrifying. 

As a child, Chris Hooper dreamed of monsters. But in deep space, he found only darkness and isolation. Then, on planet LV178, he and his fellow miners discovered a storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell - and trimonite, the hardest material known to man. When a shuttle crashes into the mining ship Marion, the miners learn that there was more than trimonite deep in the caverns. There was evil, hibernating and waiting for suitable prey.

Cal Carver is having a bad day. Imprisoned and forced to share a cell with a cannibalistic serial killer, Cal thinks things can't possibly get any worse. He is wrong. It's not until two-thirds of the human race is wiped out and Cal is abducted by aliens that his day really starts to go downhill. Whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of some of the sector's most notorious villains and scumbags.

The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.

Chief Katherine “Kit” Carson, of the elite Pathfinder Corps, joins the mission as a last-minute replacement, hoping to put a spotty past behind her and build a new life on a brave new world. The expedition arrives on Terra Nova, expecting to join the first wave of colonists, instead they find abandoned cities and are soon faced with a new, terrifying enemy humanity has never encountered before. This publisher pack includes Terra Nova and Bloodlines.

The members of the Polaris Project knew what they were giving up when they volunteered to fly to the star named Angel-21, but the allure of being the first explorers to leave the Solar System far outweighed the risks. As it turned out, the most dangerous thing they faced wasn't the mission, it was the homecoming. Eight hundred years have passed, and Earth is nothing like they thought it would be.

On the edge of the galaxy, a diplomatic mission to an alien planet takes a turn when the Legionnaires, an elite special fighting force, find themselves ambushed and stranded behind enemy lines. They struggle to survive under siege, waiting on a rescue that might never come. In the seedy starport of Ackabar, a young girl searches the crime-ridden gutters to avenge her father's murder; not far away, a double-dealing legionniare-turned-smuggler hunts an epic payday; and somewhere along the outer galaxy, a mysterious bounter hunter lies in wait.

When Dan McCarthy stumbles upon a folder containing evidence of the conspiracy to end all conspiracies - a top-level alien cover-up - he leaks the files without a second thought. The incredible truth revealed by Dan's leak immediately captures the public's imagination, but Dan's relentless commitment to exposing the cover-up and forcing disclosure quickly earns him some enemies in high places.

More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to Earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers - men and women who risk their lives by diving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.

When a plane crashes into the Antarctic ice, exposing a massive cave beneath, a rescue and research team is dispatched. Twenty-four hours later, all contact is lost. Captain Alex Hunter and his highly trained squad of commandos are fast tracked to the hot zone to find out what went wrong - and to follow up the detection of a vast underground reservoir.