Alien: The Cold Forge - Titan Books

[Local Trouble]

All those specimens and not one queen?  Is that maybe why Bishop II was obsessed with Ripley?  The company found a cache of eggs somewhere, but they're unable to produce more and the aliens either can't or won't breed in captivity (e.g. a controlled environment like the Cold Forge).

Seems to me that a baby queen would be their ultimate golden goose.

[Corporal Hicks]

Not all the captivity stories have a Queen. I don't think Labyrinth did either.

[Local Trouble]

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.

[Corporal Hicks]

That said I don't think they'd even be aware of the Queens by this point. It's pretty much concurrent to Aliens.

[Local Trouble]

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.

What sayeth SM?

[SM]

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.

[Local Trouble]

Is it generally assumed that Bishop II was in the know?

[SM]

Possibly not quite at that point, but he would be shortly after.

[Local Trouble]

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.

[SM]

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.

[Local Trouble]

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.

[SM]

He would've been better informed based on data transmitted back during Aliens and Alien 3.

[Local Trouble]

As 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.

Do you no longer believe that?

[SM]

It's a possibility.  Should I not?

[Local Trouble]

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?