Turning, Boggs advanced a few cautious steps. Sure enough, the line of flickering tapers was clearly visible, stretching off into the distance.

?Damn. We must’ve cut through an accessway. We ran in a circle. We’re back-?

He stopped, steadying the light on the far wall. A figure was leaning there, stiff as anything to be found in cold storage.

Rains.

Staring not back at them but at nothing. His eyes were wide open and immobile as frozen jelly. The expression on his face was not a fit thing for men to look upon. The rest of him was … the rest of him was …

Boggs felt a hot alkaline rush in his throat and doubled over, retching violently. The torch fell from his suddenly weakened fingers and Golic knelt to pick it up. As he rose he happened to glance ceilingward.

There was something up there. Something on the ceiling. It was big and black and fast and its face was a vision of pure hell. As he stared open-mouthed, it leaned down, hanging like a gigantic bat from its clawed hind legs, and enveloped Boggs’s head in a pair of hands with fingers like articulated cables. Boggs inhaled sharply, gagging on his own vomit.

With an abrupt, convulsive twist the arachnoid horror jerked Boggs’s head right off his shoulders, as cleanly as Golic would have removed a loose bolt from its screw. But not as neatly. Blood fountained from the headless torso,

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splattering the creature, Rains’s body, the staring Golic. It broke his paralysis but in the process also snapped something inside his head.

With ghastly indifference the gargoyle tossed Boggs’s decapitated skull to the floor and turned slowly to confront the remaining bipedal life-form. Its teeth gleamed like the platinum ingots which had been torn from Fiorina’s bowels.

Howling as if all the legions of the damned were after him, Golic whirled and tore down the tunnel. He didn’t look where he was going and he didn’t think about what he’d seen, and most of all he didn’t look back. He didn’t dare look back.

If he did, he knew he might see something.

Bishop’s remains had been carefully laid out on the worktable. Bright overhead lights illuminated each component. Tools rested in their holders, ready to be called upon. The profusion of torn hair-thin fiber-optic cables was staggering.

Some Ripley had simply tied off as best she could. Her experience did not extend to making repairs on the microscopic level. She’d spent a lot of time wiring the parts together as best she could, sealing and taping, making the obvious connections and hoping nothing absolutely critical lay beyond her limited talent for improvisation.

She wiped her eyes and studied her handiwork. It looked promising, but that meant nothing. Theoretically it stood a chance of working, but then theoretically she shouldn’t be in the fix she was in.