Maybe someone else looked at the enquiry and Ripley's deposition and got the same result as Burke, then also found out contact had been lost with the colony. Confirmation in the form of data from the marines came en route.
If I'm understanding your post correctly, it would seem to be at odds with the notion that Bishop II didn't know anything until the Sulaco reached LV-426 and confirmed that the aliens were real. Otherwise, why would he and the Patna set off in pursuit unless he already had knowledge of their existence?
Quote from: SM on Sep 22, 2016, 10:13:16 PMAs for the Patna, I always assumed someone got wind of Burke's plans after he left and they set off in pursuit, so by the time the EEV crashed, the Patna was already en route.
I can accept that Burke didn't know, but I find it hard to swallow that Bishop II didn't. He and his cohorts seemed much better informed and resourced than Burke was. Did TCF rule out the possibility that they were agents of whomever was pulling the strings at that point in time? If so, I must have missed that part.
As hinted at in Cold Forge and something we ran with thereafter - many parts of the Company don't have the faintest idea about what other parts of the Company are doing. Burke had no idea what was happening on Cold Forge; nor did Bishop the Second. WY is very big and very siloed.
Just seems odd to me that he'd regard Ripley's queen as "the chance of a lifetime" only to learn a little while later that the company already had one of them for years.
IMO, it'd be better if Bishop II was a long-standing member of the cabal and the acquisition of a live queen had been their elusive Holy Grail for decades.
It may also be advantageous, continuity-wise, if the aliens turned out to be resistant to cloning via whatever means were available to the company at that time.
It's not a priority in Cold Forge. The Company wants to harness the hugger ejaculate to do more than just make Xenomorphs and Blue wants to find a cure for her condition.
It's been a while but I think it's assumed the Company - or at least this particular arm of the Company - has a supply of eggs. Given the events of Defiance and Rescue it's not also unreasonable to assume that one silo or another in Company knows about Queens. Possibly whoever is supplying Cold Forge with eggs actually has one.
I'm sure they'd have at least theorized the existence of queens, even if they'd never seen one. After all, I highly doubt Ripley was the first person in the universe to ask "so who's laying these eggs?"
The question would then be how to test that theory and hopefully obtain one. It's possible that the researchers deemed the aliens too dangerous, too rare and/or too valuable to gamble on unleashing them within a less restrictive environment just to see what would happen. Thus, no queens.
I'd imagine Church didn't need a queen given the abundance of wild aliens throughout known space in that continuity. He just needed enough adult aliens to serve as guinea pigs for his particular field of study.