Look, I can see where this is going, but I'm
telling you that those things exist. Thank you, Officer Ripley, that will be all. Please, you're not listening to me. Kane, the crew member - Kane who went into
that ship said he saw thousands of eggs there. Thousands. Thank you, that will be all! Goddamnit, that's not all! Because if one of those things gets down here
then that will be all! And all this - this bullshit - that you think
is so important: you can just kiss all that goodbye! The Earth Government had been quick to act
in the mission to eliminate Xenomorph specimens, and prevent further outbreak on the planet. The first infestations seemed easy enough
to deal with. Orona's Tac teams were primed for sudden mass
disappearances, and whenever an area started missing people, they went in. He mobilized transportation so that a fully
equipped team could launch and parabola down to any spot on the globe in under three hours. The first nests were small, no more than fifty
or a hundred eggs and a single queen. The Tac teams took no chances. They sterilized the area. The nests were razed, surrounding areas destroyed,
suspected carriers picked up and detained. Those with implants were killed quickly and
their bodies burned. New Chicago, Lesser Miami, Havana, Madrid—those
nests were quickly discovered and eliminated. At first, Orona felt a certain smugness. True, there would be a lot of damages to cover
and a certain amount of political heat to be endured, but the Planetary Security Act
gave him a great deal of latitude. The things weren’t very bright; they were
like termites or ants or bees; they built their nests and set up egg chambers and sent
workers out to gather food. The behavior was instinctive; there was no
great intelligence behind it. It had apparently worked for the things on
their homeworld, but there they didn’t have such clever competition. For a time, Orona rested easier. He was the expert, and the military trusted
him implicitly. Weeks went by. Months. More nests were kicked open: Paris, Moscow,
Brisbane, Antarctic City. The things had spread far and wide as he had
feared, but still they were easy enough to find and destroy. The infection was bad, but controlled. Like a staph boil lanced and cleaned, it would
heal. But then things began to change. The Tac teams were getting good at their jobs,
practice making them better, and maybe they started to get sloppy. Or maybe it was some kind of forced natural
selection. Like rats or roaches who have been hunted
and poisoned or smashed flat, the aliens began to vary their nest making. The hives got smaller and more numerous. The Tac teams would find only ten or fifteen
eggs in a tiny chamber, and such places were harder to locate. And there were more of them. An area of Greater North Africa in the old
Ivory Coast yielded no fewer than eighty small nests inside a fifty-kilometer circle. Some of the hives were in Abidan, in the basements
of skyscrapers or old warehouses, but some of them were in the surrounding countryside,
under the ground. Tac squads discovered implanted cattle, horses,
and even goats in some chambers. Anything large enough seemed to work. And while people in civilized countries who
went missing were usually reported, a farmer and a few dozen cattle in some rural area
might not be noticed. It was as though the aliens were becoming
smarter as a survival characteristic. Six months after the escape from the labs
in Lima, Orona had to order a division-sized attack on a giant nest in Diego Suarez, on
the northern tip of Madagascar. It was actually a series of several hundred
smaller nests that had been tunneled and joined together. Eight months into the war, Orona was responsible
for the nuclear destruction of Jakarta. A year after the war began, the continent
of Australia was considered too infested to allow any travel to or from, and a full quarantine
was instigated. Any ship, air vessel, or spacecraft trying
to leave was shot down by Coast Guard laser satellites. It was no longer a matter of Tac units seeking
alien hives to destroy. It was a matter of establishing perimeters
and checking to make certain no carriers crossed into safe territories. It was truly war. Martial law was declared. All national boundaries were suspended. The Military Alliance came into being and
civil liberties were put aside for the duration of the conflict. Suspected carriers of alien embryos could
be legally shot by the command of any military officer above the rank of colonel. Then it dropped to majors and captains. Then sergeants. Pretty soon, any soldier with a gun could
shoot anybody he damned well wanted to, and if the scan came up negative later, well,
too fucking bad. War was hell, wasn’t it? A few civilians here and there to save the
planet? Yes. Alien drones that were captured—a rare event—seemed
to have gotten a little brighter. The smartest could barely keep up with an
average dog, insofar as intelligence was concerned. But the single queen captured in a battle
that destroyed half of San Francisco’s downtown district tested out to nearly 175 on the Irwin-Schlatler
scale. That made it smarter than most of the humans
ever born. The nightmares had come true. Whatever Orona had felt before was nothing
compared to the sinking, twisting coldness in his gut when that little bit of information
arrived in his computer. They were getting smarter. Too smart. And humans were responsible for it. It was war, and men were losing. Orona marveled at this, that it should come
to be this way. Man had the superior technology, it was man’s
world, man had the advantages. Except—
Except that the aliens had a stronger drive to live. They would sacrifice all for that, for the
survival of the species. Only a few rare men were willing to do that. A mother would die to protect her children;
a saint would walk into the fire for his fellow men or his god, but the instinct of self-preservation
was too strong in most humans. The aliens didn’t care. If a hundred drones had to die to save one
egg, then they would. And did. The things sprang up everywhere, in places
where a rat would have trouble living, in spots where no one would have guessed they
could spawn. Buried in the arctic ice floes, in deserts,
in the tamed jungles, on barges, anywhere there was room for a nest. Nobody knew how many of the things there were,
there were only guesses. The estimates ranged from hundreds of thousands
to tens of millions. Private ships left Earth in droves, so many
the military couldn’t stop or even inspect them all. Most only fled as far as Luna or the Belt,
some could reach the far planets of the system. A few wealthy souls banded together and bought
private starships before the government clamped down and made such ownership illegal. Thousands ran, because on Earth, there were
few places left to hide. Orona was in one of those places, a heavily
guarded military complex in Mexico. The perimeter was ringed with force fences,
the ground mined, every car or air carrier that entered or left scanned, every passenger
fluoroviewed for parasites. It was as safe as anywhere left. In the end, Orona finally realized that the
aliens were like a disease, not like an enemy army. The only way to save the patient was to cut
off the cancerous parts and sterilize the wounds. And it was too late for that, it had metastasized
and the knife and radiation and drugs would not be enough. It had all happened so fast, Nobody could
have predicted it would erupt so quickly! A year and a half ago, men were supreme on
their homeworld, top of the food chain, the king predator. But now… The military minds were not brilliant, they
never were, but those in charge were smart enough to know they were losing. All remaining starships were confiscated. Hastily laid plans began to be implemented. There would be a regrouping of key military
personnel to the outer colonies, there to develop new plans for combating the aliens. Sitting in his information center, a cool
and clean place of technological miracles of communication, Orona laughed. The Earth was being abandoned. He wouldn’t be leaving with them. Oh, he could have gone, but what would be
the point? He would survive, but he would have lost the
most important battle of his life. There was an ancient custom that sailors had
once observed: if a ship sank, the captain went down with it. The aliens had been his project. His work. Someone had spilled a retort of crucial fluid,
and the lab had been contaminated. It was his responsibility. He should have foreseen it. Even if everyone else forgot, he never would. He was going to stay here, win or lose. During this time, Hicks and Newt remained
on the Benedict, in hypersleep for the trip home. Unaware there was no longer a home to go back
to. In this series, I'm recounting the Earth War,
as depicted in the Aliens comics series, and the events leading up to it, as well as its
aftermath. The accounts are explored as originally published,
despite certain names, locations, and other events having been altered over time. For more on the Earth War, you can check out
the Accounts of the Earth War playlist on the endscreen, and stay tuned for the latest
videos. As always, I'd like to Thank you very much
for watching. I really appreciate it, and If you enjoyed
this video, please make sure to give it a like, and you can also subscribe for all the
latest videos from the channel A very, very special thanks goes out to Weyland
Yutani Executive EmYaruk, part of the Patreon Hive. I'd also like to thank our Hive's queen: Lady
Anne. If you'd like to join the hive and support
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signing off.
