Warning: The following contains spoilers for Alien #3 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Salvador Larroca, Guro-eFX and Clayton Cowles, on sale now.
The Alien franchise is synonymous with the image of xenomorphs lurking in the corridors of almost abandoned spaceships, and Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Salvador Larroca put the trope to good use in Marvel's first Alien series. Their versions of the xenomorphs appear to be particularly bloodthirsty and have already taken over the Epsilon Space Station by the time the series lead Gabriel Cruz even gets there. But, new revelations in Alien #3 make the xenomorphs seem almost reasonable compared to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation's behavior.
Gabe Cruz, a retired security chief who worked on Epsilon Station, is forced to travel back into space after his estranged son and a group of anti-corporate rebels broke into the station and inadvertently freed several xenomorphs. Gabe's old bosses at Weyland-Yutani give him the undesirable job of retrieving the "alpha" specimen from the ship. Gabe knows it is likely a suicide mission, but it is also his only chance to save his son, so he and two young agents head into space. Once aboard the Epsilon, they find a young woman who claims to be a scientist and discover that the alpha specimen has escaped its high security confines.
The third issue opens with the gruesome death of one of the agents accompanying Gabe at the hands of a xenomorph and gets bleaker and bloodier from there. But when the surviving agent suggests that he and Gabe turn back while they still can, Gabe cryptically warns him that returning to Weyland-Yutani empty-handed would ensure a fate worse than whatever may be in store for them on the alien-infested Epsilon. The fact that Gabe, a grizzled veteran, is more intimidated by the wrath of his employers than the brutal aliens is quite telling. In previous issues, higher-ups at Weyland-Yutani have threatened him with jail time if he refused to take the mission, but Gabriel's fear implies that a much harsher set of consequences are on the table.
Later, the woman that Gabe and the surviving agent are with reveals herself to be Iris Humphries, the leader of the anti-corporate rebels. She and Gabe argue at gunpoint, each of them representing a different side of the ideological divide while an alien bursts out of a man's chest behind them. Iris insinuates that the alpha specimen Gabe is looking for is in fact a bio-weapon. This means that Weyland- Yutani has been doing more than just researching the xenomorphs. They've been breeding them to use against others. While they certainly hadn't planned for the rebels to board the Epsilon, the xenomorphs' destructive behavior is exactly what the company was working to develop. As scary as the murderous aliens are, they pale in comparison to the horror of a corporation deliberately manufacturing monsters for a profit.
In a way, Weyland-Yutani is responsible for all of the death that has occurred so far in the series. Not only did they send Gabriel Cruz and two young agents on a suicide mission, they intentionally bred the nearly unstoppable monsters that pose such a threat to Gabe and humanity as a whole.
A company with resources like Weyland-Yutani must surely be capable of having more than one space station full of hazardous monsters, but the true scope of their research and their general intent remains unknown, making them all the more frightening. Regardless of the corporation's goals, it seems certain that more people will die in their pursuit.