Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 11

Ripley, in the monitoring hub, was also in a dilemma.

He knew that, even as strong and smart as he was, he couldn’t survive a battle with the Werner thing. Patrick Duchaine, also an Alpha, had been overpowered and torn to pieces in Isolation Room Number Two.

Certain beyond doubt that he would be killed in a confrontation with this creature, he must do everything possible to avoid contact, although not because he wanted to live. The unfocused anxiety that every day tormented him for long hours — as well as the fact that he was in essence a slave to his maker — made life less of a joy than it was portrayed in the warm and cozy novels of Jan Karon, which Ripley sometimes secretly downloaded from the Internet and read. Although he would have been relieved to die, he must escape from Werner because the proscription against suicide, genetically wired into his brain, restrained him from doing battle with an adversary that inevitably would destroy him.

As the Werner grotesquerie conjured words out of an insectile mouth that should have been incapable of producing speech—“I am free, free, free. I am FREE!”— Ripley glanced at the control console and quickly tapped two switches that would cycle open the outer doors to Isolation Rooms One and Three, which at the moment contained no prisoners.

Prisoners was the wrong word, he at once admonished himself, the wrong word and evidence of a rebellious attitude. Subjects was a more accurate word. Rooms One and Three held no subjects for observation.

“Free Werner. Werner free, free.”

When the servomotors began to hum and the bolt-retraction gears to click, the Werner thing looked toward the source of the sounds and cocked its grisly head, as if considering why Ripley had taken this action.

Having seen the lethal quickness with which Free Werner sprang upon Duchaine, faster than a snake could strike, Ripley struggled to think of a way to buy time, to distract the mutated security chief. The only hope seemed to be to open a dialogue.

“Quite a day, huh?”

Free Werner continued to stare toward the humming servomotors.

“Just last night,” Ripley tried again, “Vincent said to me, ‘A day in the Hands of Mercy can be like a year with your testicles in a vise and not allowed to turn off the pain.’”

The palpi around the insectile mouth quivered excitedly at the soft sucking sound of the four dozen three-inch-thick lock bolts retracting from the architraves.

“Of course,” said Ripley, “I had to report him to Father for an attitude adjustment. Now he’s hanging upside down in a re-education box with a catheter in his penis, a collection hose up his rectum, and two holes in his skull to allow the insertion of brain probes.”

Finally, as the bolts finished retracting and the two vault doors on the transition modules began to swing open, Free Werner turned his attention once more to Ripley.

“Of course, as primary lab assistant to the Beekeeper … that is, to Mr. Helios, there’s no place I’d rather be than in the Hands of Mercy. This is the birth-place of the future, where the Million-Year Reich has begun.”

As he spoke, Ripley casually reached toward the control console, intending to tap two switches and cycle shut the doors that had just opened. If he could slip into one of the transition modules just as the door closed, before Free Werner could follow, he might be safe.

When he had been security chief, Werner had known how to operate the console. But the genetic chaos that the Beekeeper referred to as catastrophic cellular metamorphosis might have scrambled his cerebral function as much as it had wrought havoc with his body. His cognitive power or his memory, or both, might be so diminished that he would not know how to open the vault door and get at his prey.

In that gargly, hissing voice, Free Werner said, “Don’t touch the switches.”