Warning! Spoilers for Alien #3 by Marvel Comics below.
Marvel’s Alpha Alien Versus Predator: Requiem’s Alien-Predator hybrid in the most gruesome way. While not as flashy or obvious as many of the Xenomorph’s mutations, this talent is extremely dangerous in a Xenomorph infestation, especially one aboard an enclosed environment such as Epsilon Station.
Marvel’s Alien series focuses on retired colonial marine and Weyland-Yutani security employee Gabriel Cruz as he is brought out of retirement to extract Weyland-Yutani’s prized Alpha embryo from the rapidly decaying Epsilon Space Station. Cruz boards the station accompanied by two colonial marines, and after entering the lab complex and facing several Xenomorphs, quickly learns that the Alpha Alien he’s hunting after posses several deadly abilities that make his incursion into Epsilon station more than just another bug-hunt.
Alien #3 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Salvador Larroca picks up where the previous issue left off as the Alpha Alien continues to evade capture. The Alpha Alien appears to have the potential to snowball out of control, as Cruz quickly executes a man infected by the Alpha Xenomorph only to witness a chest-burster erupt from the deceased man’s chest. As Cruz begins capturing the chest-burster, a second erupts from the man’s mouth and begins attacking a nearby colonial marine. While this is dangerous enough on its own, the implication that more people could be infected in the same manner and without the use of a face-hugger. Not only that, hosts infected by the hybrid are implanted with three Xenomorph embryos, as opposed to one.
While most Xenomorph outbreaks are bad enough within the Alien franchise, the hybrid’s run in Alien Versus Predator: Requiem gets out of hand exponentially, simply because the hybrid is able to spawn many Xenomorphs at a rapid pace. By infecting several hosts with multiple embryos, the small town in the film is quickly overrun by the hybrid and its cohorts. As the amount of Xenomorphs in a space grows, the likelihood of a queen, and a new hive forming, grows exponentially. Xenomorphs are already dangerous to face out in the open, but when they have a home-field advantage, and the ability to keep spawning more and more of themselves, escaping alive becomes nearly impossible. Cruz and his team now potentially face both a hostile environment as Epsilon station collapses into Earth's orbit and the Xenomorphs settle in and potentially create a new hive.
The Alpha Alien is one of Weyland-Yutani’s most prized assets, and like all Xenomorphs developed in the shady megacorporation’s bioweapon developments program, it is remarkably dangerous. While it possesses the usual deadly abilities possessed by all of the Xenomorph species, in Alien #3 it demonstrates the terrifying ability to implant several embryos into a single host, rapidly creating more bloodthirsty Xenomorphs. This unique ability, seen before only in the Alien-Predator hybrid, elevates a Xenomorph outbreak from a “bug-hunt” to an outbreak capable of threatening an entire planet.
