Andrea Rollins: Weyland-Yutani Handler On New Galveston

Full name: Andrea Rollins
Species: Android (confirmed by James A. Moore, not stated in the novel)
Affiliation: Weyland-Yutani
Role: Company handler for the New Galveston expedition
Known for: Kidnapping Alan Decker · the Ripley debt · the strike on the Sea of Sorrows
Setting: The Kiangya, in orbit over New Galveston
First appearance: Alien: Sea of Sorrows (2014)
Status: Alive, aboard the Kiangya as it left New Galveston

Andrea Rollins was a Weyland-Yutani handler in James A. Moore's 2014 novel Alien: Sea of Sorrows. She forced Alan Decker onto the New Galveston mine expedition by naming him heir to Ellen Ripley's debt and threatening his children, then ran the hunt from orbit and left with live Xenomorph specimens after the Sea of Sorrows was burned. The novel never states what she was, but Moore later confirmed that she was an android.

Biography

Groundwork On New Galveston

Rollins prepared the expedition through Lucas Rand, the ICC engineer who had worked beside Decker on New Galveston, the terraformed world once listed as LV-178. After Decker's accident on the black sand of the Sea of Sorrows, Rand sent her a message about old mine workings at the site, and she arranged his consulting post with the company. She asked him to blame Decker for the accident when the time came and to plant extra company devices around the mines while he inspected the site. Rand never asked what the devices did. Her people questioned him at length about Decker, and she told Rand that his friend could look after himself.

Abduction And The Ripley Debt

Mercenaries under Manning beat Decker unconscious in his apartment and carried him aboard the Kiangya, where the crew called him Rollins's acquisition. When he woke from hypersleep, she had Manning feed him and bring him to the medical station, introduced herself as his handler, and checked whether the capture had injured him. She told Decker the company had taken him because he would have refused an offer, and that his report on New Galveston was not the reason. Company filters had flagged the words he spoke during seizures after the accident, and she played those recordings, in which he talked about spiders and blood that burned through steel.

Rollins told him the records of the Nostromo had been sealed long ago, then said company genetic research placed him in the line of Ellen Ripley and Amanda Ripley-McLaren. In her account both women had blocked company efforts to capture and study the creatures, at great cost to Weyland-Yutani, and the company had found no trace of the species for a very long time before Decker. She told him tests showed low-level telepathic ability, that the company had used people like him before, and that he might be the one person who could lead them to the creatures on New Galveston.

Blackmailing Decker Into The Mission

When Decker refused, Rollins told him the company owned him and that he owed it a debt. She had Manning state that he had been hired to escort Decker and recover biological samples to repay his family's debts, and that Decker had come willingly. She claimed thirty-five people aboard would back that story, held papers with Decker's signature showing he had signed on for pay to avoid a blackmail lawsuit, and had statements from three witnesses blaming the accident on his negligence. She then named his children Bethany, Ella, and Joshua, warned that Ripley's debts would pass to them if he failed her, and suggested the company could test whether his traits were inherited.

Decker agreed to cooperate. His empathy picked up nothing from Rollins while she made those threats, and even Manning gave off a trace of fear as he watched her. After Decker left, she wrote a report and sent it before the ship reached orbit. When her superiors answered, she read the reply and deleted every record of the exchange from the ship's computers. Manning later told Decker that protecting her was part of his contract.

Briefing The Freelancers

Before the drop, Rollins briefed Manning's freelancers on New Galveston: breathable air, gravity about 88 percent of Earth's, and the city of Rutledge about fifteen miles away by rail. She told them the company had restarted an old trimonite mine on the Sea, which it needed because the colony had filed large claims over the failed terraforming, and that workers had found a ship of non-terrestrial origin in the mine. The company held full rights to the land and anything found there, and the dig had stopped until the team arrived.

When Manning asked whether anything down there might be alive, Rollins answered him truthfully and spoke of the Xenomorph XX121 and "the 260 years we've spent trying to capture one." She described the creatures as adaptive and aggressive, with a fluid that might be toxic or caustic, and tied much of the pay to live capture. The company supplied foamers, bulky canisters whose fast-hardening foam could fix a captured creature in place without killing it. Dead specimens would pay well if the bodies came back intact, and less if they did not. Afterward she told Decker the ship had been withheld from him to give him time to adjust, and she promised a generous payment if he delivered.

On the surface, company man Tom Willis told the arrivals that Rollins had passed him her briefing, then put the camp under a communications lockdown and barred travel to the cities. Decker warned that the order left them without backup if anything living waited below. Rollins answered him in front of the mercenaries, saying the freelancers had been brought to handle every possibility, and the mercenaries backed her.

Watching From The Kiangya

In her office on the Kiangya, Rollins summoned the pilot Eddie Pritchett, read him his own file, and told him his actions might have endangered the mission. She reminded him that the drop ship belonged to Weyland-Yutani and was worth more than he was, and she threatened his pilot's license if his next landing was anything less than perfect. She also told him her rank let her reassign the company contracts his family depended on. When he stepped toward her with his fists clenched, she asked whether he meant to attack her, and he backed away and left.

Probes in the mine sent their data up to Rollins hidden inside artificial static, a company-patented signal that only her computer aboard the ship could decode. From her desk she mapped the tunnels, followed the life signs of every team member, recorded each death, and located a number of the Xenomorphs whenever they moved. She shared none of it with the people below. She expected heavy losses and wanted them, because the miners and other credible workers were the witnesses she feared, and she treated the mercenaries as hired hands who would bring her the specimens.

When Willis called asking for the pilot, Rollins let him wait before answering. She reported to L. Bannister at Weyland-Yutani, whom she addressed as Lorne. Her messages said the company would probably get the biomechanical data it had sought, that extracting the trimonite would likely cost too much, and that the creatures were more aggressive and widespread than expected. She judged that the raw data alone would boost the company's Biological Technology Division, hoped Decker would survive so his link could be used again, and decided not to rescue the personnel below because a rescue might endanger the mission.

Willis And The Ship Samples

Willis climbed the mine stairs and reached Rollins by comm near the top. She told him a drop ship was waiting, said the company was considering sterilization, and reminded him to collect the samples from the alien ship that he had locked in his office safe. She told him she looked forward to meeting him in person. Then she called Pritchett on the drop ship, sent him a schematic of the offices and the safe's combination, told him she had overridden its retinal and DNA locks, and ordered him to take the samples himself and to go armed.

Pritchett found a biohazard container of tissue vials in the safe, and Willis caught him in the office. After a Xenomorph slashed Willis and its acid burned him, Pritchett shot him through the head and ran for the landing pad, where he met Manning's survivors. Another creature got into the drop ship as the door closed and killed Pritchett, and Manning foamed it and caged it alive because the contract paid more for a live specimen.

Burning The Sea Of Sorrows

When a short message from the home office arrived, as she had expected, Rollins told Captain Cherbourg to prepare the Kiangya to leave and to be ready to deliver his payload. She met the returning drop ship with four security staff. Manning handed over Decker, bound at the wrists and ankles, and the mercenary Adams with a Facehugger clamped to her face. Rollins had the caged Xenomorph locked into cryogenic suspension, and Adams and the second host, Elway, went into hypersleep chambers in stasis.

On the bridge Manning told Rollins the creatures would take the planet within a year if they lived and urged her to wipe out the mine. She had Cherbourg launch four plasma warheads at the Sea, enough to destroy everything to a depth of about twenty thousand feet, and she privately judged the creatures close to perfect soldiers. Two days earlier the company had ordered the area cleared, telling the colony that a viral strain had been found in the mines, and the Sea had been declared a biological hot zone. She offered Manning sympathy for his losses. He asked her to keep his remaining people alive and honor their bargain, and she answered that she always did.

Closing The Debt

Rollins visited Decker while he was strapped down and sedated after he tried to shoot the infected Elway. When he warned her about the creatures, she said he would never see them again, because he was going back to Earth and they were going somewhere isolated for careful study. She stopped smiling when he asked about Adams and Elway, ended the questions, and told him his family was safe and his debt was paid. Two armed escorts later took him to the hypersleep chambers and sealed him in before the ship left orbit.

Rollins then sent Bannister her final report, calling the operation a success. The team had captured one adult Xenomorph alive and brought back two parasites attached to hosts, and she judged that both had implanted embryos only hours from hatching. She noted that the parasite on Host Two, the female, seemed to carry more than one embryo. Afterward she walked past the hypersleep chambers, counted the empty ones as lost assets, and stood at ease in the darkened, silent ship.

Personality And Traits

Rollins was cool, exact, and businesslike. She dressed for function, wore her hair in a severe bun, and struck Decker as a woman who befriended no one on the ship. She rarely raised her voice, and the one time she snapped at Decker as he began to object, the outburst startled even Manning. Her smiles carried no warmth, and when she softened her tone to name Decker's children, he knew the gentleness was false. She watched Manning beat Decker in the medical station with what looked like mild amusement.

She controlled people through what they depended on rather than through force of her own. She aimed at Decker's children and at Pritchett's pilot's license and his family's company contracts, and she had paperwork and witnesses ready before she needed them. She held back facts, such as the alien ship from Decker and the mine data from the team below, until sharing them served her. She could play to a crowd of mercenaries, told the truth when the truth was useful, and relied on her memory more than on the printed files she produced for effect.

Weyland-Yutani's goals came before any life in her reckoning. She treated the expedition's people as expendable, counted the deaths of credible witnesses as a benefit, and saw the empty hypersleep chambers as lost assets rather than lost people, though she honored the bargains she struck. Decker's empathy found nothing in her, not even guilt while she threatened his children, and he judged her evil while dismissing her as a desk worker no different from himself. Manning called her heartless with something close to admiration and showed fear of her, and Rollins herself was at ease with darkness, silence, and secrets.

Behind The Scenes

James A. Moore created Rollins for Alien: Sea of Sorrows, which Titan Books published in the UK on 25 July 2014 and in the US on 29 July 2014. In the novel her nature is left open, and Decker's empathy read nothing from her in any scene they shared. On The Aliens Legacy forum on 10 August 2014, Moore asked readers to guess which character in the book was an android. A reader named Andrea Rollins, and on 22 August Moore answered that the guess was right.

Audible released a full-cast audio drama of the novel on 26 April 2018, Alien Day, directed and adapted by Dirk Maggs. Stockard Channing voiced Rollins opposite John Chancer as Decker. AudioFile Magazine's July 2018 review of the drama printed her name as Andrea Rawlings, and the novel and its audio editions are her only appearances.

Conclusion

Andrea Rollins was the Weyland-Yutani handler who turned Alan Decker's seizures into a recovery mission on New Galveston. She arranged Lucas Rand's company post, bound Decker with paperwork claiming he had volunteered and with threats to his children, hid the mine data from the people dying below, and had the Sea of Sorrows burned once the specimens were aboard. She left New Galveston alive aboard the Kiangya with one caged adult Xenomorph and two infected hosts in hypersleep.