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Wilks was a space marine with a near-fatal flaw: he had a heart. Billie was a child, the only survivor of a far-flung colony outpost. Thrown together in the last hellish night of an alien invasion, Billie and Wilks helped each other get out alive. Thirteen years later Wilks is in prison, and Billie lives in a mental institution, the nightmare memories of the massacre at Rim seared into her mind.

Now the government has tapped Wilks to lead an expedition to the aliens' home planet to bring back a live alien. But the competition on Earth to develop the aliens as a new weapons system is brutal. When Wilks's team departs on their mission, a trained assassin trails them. And what follows is no less than guerrilla warfare on the aliens' planet - and alien conquest on Earth!

Wilks, Billie, and Bueller were the last survivors of a devastating assault on the aliens' home planet. But once their retum to the solar system made them refugees once more, fleeing Earth and its alien infestation in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Now, in an otherwise unmanned military transport, they hurtle through space. Destination: unknown.

Little do they know that the cargo they carry with them is a legacy of death that they will ultimately have to face. Nor do they know that they head toward a remote colony and military outpost. This pocket of humanity at the very edges of space is at the mercy of a general names Spears with an agenda all his own. Now Billie, Wilks, and Bueller face a new nightmare, and it is nothing they could ever have imagined: a gift of madness from an alien world, unbalanced mind, and the experiences of a mysterious pilot named Lieutenant Ellen Ripley.

Billie only wanted what all children want -- the warmth and security of family, the human connectedness that comes from belonging. What she got was a nightmare without end.

Ripley is a leader of humanity's forces against a new invasion where aliens have overrun the Earth--and the human population has been abandoned to alien appetites.