Anne Wexler: Cold Forge Security Chief

Full name: Anne Wexler
Species: Human
Affiliation: Weyland-Yutani, former Colonial Marine
Role: Chief of security, RB-232
Known for: Refusing the last escape pod, then left as bait for an adult Xenomorph
Family: Father (suicide), mother, estranged sister in New York
Setting: RB-232 / Cold Forge, July 2179
First appearance: Alien: The Cold Forge (2018)
Injuries: Beaten with a chair by Dorian Sudler: jaw, fingers, knee, and feet
Status: Dead, left for an adult Xenomorph in the SCIF, 28 July 2179

Anne Wexler was chief of security on Weyland-Yutani station RB-232, the Cold Forge, in Alex White's Alien: The Cold Forge. She had served in the Colonial Marines until a dishonorable discharge, then shared export control of the classified wing with Commander Daniel Cardozo. She had been geneticist Blue Marsalis's lover and ended that relationship because Blue was dying. After the kennel break she refused auditor Dorian Sudler's plan to take the last escape pod, cut his cheek with a boot knife, and died when he left her in a hallway for an adult Xenomorph.

Biography

Early Life On The Gulf Coast

Wexler grew up on the flooded Gulf Coast, where hurricanes and tornadoes were part of ordinary town life. Her father died by suicide while she was in high school, and she joined the Colonial Marines after that. Her mother lived with an opiate addiction, and an estranged sister worked at an advertising firm in New York. She attended Purdue and briefly dated a professional ballplayer. High-school classmates had labeled her a synth fetishist, a preference that later matched her relationship with Blue. The Corps discharged her for public intoxication during a siege.

Chief Of Security

By July 2179 she was chief of security on RB-232, in orbit around the dwarf star Kaufmann, about ten parsecs from Earth. She and Cardozo met arriving auditors at the dock and required the usual hazard, materials, and escape-vehicle clearances. She described the station as a forge for adaptive weapons in biology, artificial intelligence, and software, and she walked visitors along the central strut between the crew quarters and the vibration-isolated SCIF. Nothing classified left that wing without clearing her and the commander as export control under TS/SCI Mountain rules. The last two hundred feet before the bulkhead was the killbox, a chain-link corridor covered by USCM autoturrets loaded with caseless ammunition that did not distinguish a coworker from an intruder.

She held one of the paired keys for the half-yard-thick SCIF door, along with a code and a hand-and-face scan. Inside, she pointed out the glass room for the classified computer Juno and the extra watch that computer maintained on the kennels of project Glitter Edifice. The wing covered about 130,000 square feet of labs, with a half-mile of corridors joining a hundred small rooms, and the crew moved between the three projects rather than staying in one lab. When the neural-network virus Silversmile crossed the air gap and contaminated Juno, she was the one who called the digital staff into the server cage and confirmed that general quarantine locks had held.

Blue And Dorian

Anne and Blue had been lovers. They used the male synthetic Marcus because Blue's own body was failing under Bishara's Syndrome. Anne preferred that synthetic body. She ended the relationship when Blue wanted to be close in person, because Blue's illness was terminal and Anne did not want to watch that decline. Vice president Elise Coto had placed Blue on the station despite the illness, and Anne defended her in front of Dorian as a leading researcher in her field. Blue hid an unsupervised kennel server from Anne until the Silversmile outbreak forced the admission.

Dorian sketched her in his quarters, asked about the Gulf Coast, and slept with her the same night. She regarded the night as a mistake, because an auditor was not supposed to fraternize with station staff, and she then asked how the three projects would fare. He explained that Blue would not survive the trip to Earth if the company dropped her medical care. Anne named the hidden server on the condition that he not fire Blue. Blue saw her leave his room and took the night as a betrayal.

The Hidden Server

Cardozo brought Blue to the SCIF in the night cycle after Anne's report. Dorian repeated the charge in the corridor: an unlicensed server that no one else on the crew had heard of. Anne looked away while Blue took the blame and claimed the research had died with everyone else's files. Lab assistant Kambili Okoro had given them the location of the boxes behind a wall panel. Dorian ordered Anne to bring techs from Rose Eagle and Silversmile so the files could be packed for Earth by the next day.

When she asked whether locking out Marcus had been the right way to handle Blue, he answered that every egg and every caged adult Xenomorph was the reason the other projects existed. Anne then asked whether he meant to fire the whole crew, the same question Blue had raised. He answered with transfers and offered her Tokyo, where he claimed her talents would be better used. The transfer was a lure. He intended to remove her with the rest of the crew because she had withheld the server. The techs set up folding tables at the opened wall and worked through the files with reheated food from the lounge.

The Kennel Break

Someone opened the kennel cells by hand. Anne was inside the SCIF when the creatures reached the makeshift lab around Blue's server. She saw Josep Janos among the dead, took a shotgun loaded with an incendiary round, and shut herself in a network closet. When Dorian knocked, she pulled him inside and kissed him, then turned to a way out of the kennels. The closet held cleaners and a power washer, so she pulled the cover off a man-sized cable run and led him toward climate control, where a sealed lab comm could reach Lucy Biltmore.

The surviving crew later gathered in the Rose Eagle rooms, with no food that would last a week and a decaying orbit that would soon keep a rescue ship away from Kaufmann. Anne and Dorian took charge of bedding, medicine, and supply runs, and she set the timing for how the techs moved in the corridors. One man was taken when he failed to follow that timing. She would not accept Dorian's claim that Blue had opened the cells for Seegson, or that Blue wanted the crew dead. She agreed to a first run with him, barefoot, for ration bars he claimed were in the break room near the front of the wing.

Death In The SCIF

They used the cable runs. An adult Xenomorph was asleep in one shaft, and another crossed the grating over Dorian while Anne was behind him in the tunnel. She checked the next hall, crossed an open stretch to a fuse box, and credited him with saving her life on that crawl. The break room held no ration bars. He had brought her there to argue that two thousand packets of powdered creamer were ten days of food for ten people, and that the two of them should suit up, cross the docking area on the hull, and take the last escape pod to Gateway Station.

She refused the pod. Titus and Juno were online again, and she intended to equalize pressure in the maintenance tubes and crawl toward the crew quarters for food. When she turned back to him he struck her in the face with an aluminum chair, broke her jaw, shattered her fingers, crushed a knee, and beat her bare feet and shins. A last blow between the shoulder blades dropped her. He dragged her into the hall, set her in the chair, and described her as the closest he had come to loving someone.

Her ring finger worked well enough to free the boot knife. She hooked the back of his neck with her ruined left hand and slashed with the right. The blade skipped off his cheekbone and drew blood, the cut he carried for the rest of the outbreak. He left her in the corridor. An adult Xenomorph dropped from the rafters, and she raised the knife as it charged. Blue, searching the security feeds through Juno, later watched the beating and the drag into the hall, and found only the chair and the blood.

Personality And Traits

Anne ran the dock, the killbox, and the export rules in a flat, practical voice, and she did not relax those checks for a visitor. She preferred fitness and synthetic bodies, and she was physically stronger than Dorian. She used the night with him to ask how the audit would treat the three projects. During the outbreak, crewmates who had known her for years saw her worry when he was late returning from the corridors, which was new for her.

She had left Blue because she could not watch a terminal illness at close range. During the kennel break she stayed with the techs in Rose Eagle and would not leave them for a week of sleep and a flight to Gateway. The boot knife was the first time she had used a blade on a person. Marine training covered the throat, the femoral artery, and the gut, and the cheek cut was the only strike she landed after the chair.

Behind The Scenes

Alex White wrote Alien: The Cold Forge for Titan Books. The mass-market paperback went on sale on 24 April 2018. The 1986 film Aliens does not mention Wexler, RB-232, or the Cold Forge, though the novel is set in the same year. White's later novel Alien: Into Charybdis follows Blue after she left the station and does not bring Anne back.

Conclusion

Anne Wexler was the Cold Forge chief of security, a discharged Marine who held the kennel keys with Cardozo and had left Blue Marsalis rather than watch her die. She gave Dorian Sudler the hidden server, stayed with the Rose Eagle survivors after the cells opened, and refused the last pod when he offered her Gateway Station. He beat her with a chair in the break room and left her in the SCIF hall, where an adult Xenomorph killed her on 28 July 2179.