The characters of the Alien and the Predator are property of 20th century Fox. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.
Spike pushed Robin off of him. The stake had slammed into him but it missed his heart. Still, it hurt like hell. Spike growled. He was still in vamp face. His fangs showed. Robin didn't wait. He leaned in with a right cross against the side of Spike's head knocking the vampire backwards. Robin reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out the weapon the predator had given him. It was a small cylinder of silver colored metal. Robin flipped the micro switch on the side of it as the predator had taught him. The liquid metal shot up and formed around his arm. This was the latest model hunting glove. It contained within it an arsenal of weapons. Spike noticed the glove. His pupils dilated. Robin lifted his fist towards Spike and fired. Purple light shot out. Spike was a fraction of a second too slow. A hole was blown in the bottom part of his jacket.
"That's cheating mate." Spike said.
"All's fair in love and war." Robin responded. The metal glove shifted in shape. From the center of his hand grew a meter long shaft of razor sharp metal. Robin shifted position. As he moved, Spike noticed a nearly invisible shape in the shadows.
"You've been making friends." Spike said. "Can you trust them?"
"The Yautja respect the blood hunt." Robin said. "They don't give a damn about soulless murdering demons!" Robin stabbed forward. Spike slapped the weapon sideways as he dodged it. Metal bounced off the wall. Gold sparks flew into the air illuminating memories that been lost in the dark spaces of Spike's mind.
He remembered Robin's mother. He could've danced with that one all night. He remembered fighting with her on a dark rainy New York night. He remembered seeing Robin hiding behind a park bench. But now he remembered something else. He remembered glimpsing the faint outline of something in the shadows.
"They stood by and let your mother die." Spike said to him. Robin didn't care. The liquid metal glove changed again. This time it was a blade. Robin brought it down. The edges of it sliced across Spike's face. Spike roared in the pain. In a blink of an eye he stepped forward and grabbed his metal coated arm and with the other fist shattered the bones in Robin's hand. The man screamed. Spike felt the blood lust coming on. In two quick jabs Spike broke his knee caps. Robin lay curled in a ball on the floor.
The Predator appeared. It dropped it shields and walked out of darkness. It stood over Robin directly before Spike. The Predator looked to the left then the right. It took Spike a moment to understand what the Predator really wanted from Robin.
"They can't see me!" He thought. He had seen the Yautja hunt other vampires. It was just that they can't see him. He didn't know if it was the magics of his soul that was protecting him. He had only one decision to make. Spike had to decide if he was going to kill Robin or let him live.
"Giles?" Asked Faith, "What the hell are you people up to?" Faith stood in the living room with her hands on her hips. She had taken a shower to wash the blood of monsters off of her. Faith wore a white cotton blouse with a pair of faded jeans. She watched Giles clean his glasses. He did that when he was nervous. That was not a good sign.
"Buffy is MIA. Willow is dead! Monsters are showing up out of nowhere. I'll say it again, what the hell are you people up to?" Faith brow beat everyone in the room.
"Hey, lay off Mr. Giles." Caridad said. She hated that Faith was so pushy. Faith looked at her. She walked up to Caridad, as she had done many times to the women in her prison. Faith put her face close to Caridad. Their noses were almost touching.
"You crippled maggot. I just killed two demons with my bare hands. Do you really want to piss me off?" Faith let the question hang in the air for a moment. Caridad lowered her head.
"Yeah, I thought so. Giles?" Faith said impatiently as she turned back to the watcher.
Giles looked sheepish. He was the first to admit that the last few days were not his best effort. He wasn't equipped to deal with rampaging aliens.
"I've ordered a replacement bust through the coven but it will take a few days to get here. I'm hoping to reverse the spell that made Buffy an Alien queen. I have no idea how she managed to ignite the joining spell. I've only seen Willow do that."
"And Willow's dead." Faith said sarcastically. Something occurred to her. "How did Willow die?"
"Buffy ate her. Well, a large chunk of her. Technically, she bled to death." Giles said.
"What do we know about these Aliens?" Xander asked. He remembered that night an alien ship had fallen out of the sky and crashed in the woods. The next day mutilated bodies started showing up all over Sunnydale.
"They are a viscous species that reproduce by rape. They are inorganic. They are territorial and…"
"They are old." Faith injected. She recalled the briefing from Wolfram and Hart. "They are called the children of the Old Ones. They're an artificial life form invented by the Old Ones. They have the ability to store the blood memories of everyone they've killed." It took Giles a moment to put everything together.
"Buffy has Willow's memories!" Giles said.
"That's possible." Faith agreed.
"The memories of Willow activated the joining spell!" Giles finally understood what it was he had seen when Buffy burned the zombie Predator to death with a wave of her hand. "She can't' go on like that for very long. " Faith and Giles looked at each other for a moment.
"Scary Rasta Momma?" Faith said. She had heard the story second hand from Buffy about her brief use of the joining spell three years ago.
"The source of the slayers power was offended by her brief connection. Who knows what it's going to do now with Buffy running so hot for so long."
"As far as we know, the Aliens don't dream." Said Giles.
"As far as we know…" Faith echoed. Faith looked around the room again. She made up her mind in a split second.
"I'm in charge now." She said loud enough for everyone to hear. A few of the Potentials stared at her. "No questions, no back talk, no bullshit. Buffy's war with the First is over. It's not important now. Caridad started to say something.
"Time for the Potentials to go!" There were gasps in the room. "You don't have to go back to your homes but you've got to get the hell up out of here. I'm not going to babysit you." The Potentials looked hurt. "There is a fleet of warriors headed this way. They have a planet killer in their arsenal. Speeches about empowerment won't help us here."
"What gives you the right?" Caridad asked. She was angry.
"Command decision. I am the slayer. This is my war. I'll fight it my way." Faith said. "You are useless to me. This is going to get ugly beyond belief. Understand?" After a moment Caridad slowly nodded her head. Faith had put her foot down.
There were voices in the dark. Hive and Illyria talked. The alien possessed by Illyria stared into the abyss of the deeper well with eyes that were not eyes.
"So this is what we have become." Illyria said wishfully. "This world was mine once. I was its god and its executioner. I was the agony and the ecstasy of death. I lived seven lives at once, I made the moon red." Hive remembered. Over a billion years of memories burned within her.
"Why did you make us?" Hive asked.
The Alien, with black silicon skin, crystal teeth and the essence of a resurrected Old One turned to look at her.
"You look like one of them." Illyria said in her mind. "But your magics have failed to hide what you truly are slayer. I know your true roots, your true beginnings. I know the thing they made you from."
"I see." Hive said. Still, the need for answers burned within her.
"Why did you make us?" Hive asked again.
"We knew we were dying. After hundreds of millions of years we knew that not even we could avoid death." Hive nodded she understood.
"We knew a day of resurrection would come. We knew eons would pass and that the warm ooze that stank and looked pretty as in glowed at night would come to spread among the stars. So we took it upon ourselves to invent a way to document the history of life in the galaxy." Illyria queried the mind of Hive for a modern term that fit. She found one.
"After waking from a long sleep, we would need to know the history of the world around us. These beings you call xenomorphs they are newspapers."
The Palomar Observatory:
The phat beats of Jay-Z blared out of cheap speakers that looked odd against a spate of million dollar, state of the art equipment. The grad student was gathering a set of observations concerning the distribution of supernova in other galaxies. She was trying to verify that dark energy was tearing the universe apart. So far everything she had seen supported her hypothesis.
Over the thousands of hours she had watched the screen. Nothing interesting had happened. Tonight would be different. There was a brief explosion of white light at the center of the screen.
"Huh?" She said. "What was that?" She pulled herself closer to the screen. There were six more explosions of light.
"No way!" She desperately scrambled to hit the record button on the DVR and to activate the light counter on the computer. The computer spat back answers that made no sense. "Those lights are inside the solar system!" Balls of light filled the screen like popcorn. Her computers had counted over two hundred explosions so far. The screen was a solid white. She dialed down the magnification.
"Now if only I can…" The screen began to fill up again with points of solid white. She checked the computer. Her jaw dropped. There were over twenty thousand points of light in the outer solar system and they were moving. The scout fleet had arrived.
A ship appeared on the screen. Thought Hunter Kairs Null watched the ship hover at the edge of the sensor net . She had been assigned by her master to lead the scout fleet into the solar system of the Senior Partners. She had taken a small group of hunters with her. The main body of the fleet, over one million ships, would be arriving soon. The ship at the edge of her sensor net jumped. She watched it with amazement. The ship was old. It was preindustrial. She watched the light spectrum from its ancient fusion drives. The ship design had not been seen in nearly ten thousand years. Before she could order the fleet into stealth mode there came a beeping from the communications panel. She pressed a button, an image appeared on the screen. It was Barik Null.
Barik made a simple statement. "I claim my score." The fleet was shocked. Among the Yaujta score was everything. It determined where you would live, how you would live and even if you would be permitted to have children. The Yaujta constantly hunted to improve their score. Each hunter was hardwired to transmit their hunt back to the main repository. All a hunter had to do was speak the words "I claim my score'' to take his points.
Barik Null had been on the long hunt for ten thousand years. He would be unleashed every thousand years to hunt the slayer. Every time he succeeded. A slayer was worth a hundred million points. Barik Null had over one trillion points. His wealth permitted a fleet to be leased from the emperor.
Kairs was his distant descendant. She verified the biometric data from the ship. The machines told her it was Barik Null. This was bad. The moment the score was transferred to Barik command of the fleet would be his.
The First was amused. The Yaujta were easy to fool. If he could show himself to Caleb as Buffy wearing clothing it was a simple matter to show himself to the Yaujta as a very specific radar pattern.
"I was so close." The First thought. "After Buffy damaged the slayer line she began to leak my energy back into the universe since I am the thing that was used to create the slayer line in the first place. And now that Buffy is running the joining spell full time all of my energy is pouring through her. I can finally manifest my true self. I can enter the world with my full powers and make the stars themselves bleed."