Aegis VII

Aegis VII was a remote planet of key importance located in the Cygnus system, also called the Aegis system. At the end of the 23rd century it became a test site for one of the Red Markers, Marker 3A, during experiments conducted by the Sovereign Colonies. After a Necromorph outbreak and the creation of a gargantuan Nexus form known as the Hive Mind, the planet and its entire system were abandoned and restricted by the government. Centuries later it became the site of a second outbreak when an illegal mining colony rediscovered the buried Marker.

A remote, metal-rich world#

Aegis VII was the seventh planet of the Cygnus system, located an unknown but evidently great distance from Earth, remote enough for the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces to choose it as one of their secret Marker test sites. It was a small, rocky planet with a molten core, an orange-tinted sky, and an atmosphere thin enough that stars and the sparse ring of rocks around the planet were visible even during the day. Its terrain was mountainous and barren, broken by ravines and caves, with smooth plains that required a crawler or a shuttle to cross quickly.

Because the atmosphere was so thin, an engineer RIG was advised before anyone went out onto the surface, where high winds and dust storms made prolonged outside work inadvisable without sufficient protection. Even so, the air carried enough oxygen for a human to breathe. What drew the Concordance Extraction Corporation to the planet was the unusually large quantity of precious metals beneath its crust, enough to justify setting up a mining operation in the early 26th century despite the system having been declared off-limits.

The first incident#

After the Black Marker was successfully reverse-engineered by the Sovereign Colonies around the 2290s, three copies known as Red Markers were sent to three remote planets, Kreemar, Aspera, and Aegis VII; the copy sent to Aegis VII was called Marker 3A. The science teams studied the signal in the hope of understanding it and determined that the Markers were not creating the signal but receiving it from somewhere in deep space and rebroadcasting it. They also found that the three Markers could triangulate accurately and communicate with one another as one, regardless of the light-years between them.

In time the Red Markers triggered Necromorph outbreaks on their respective planets, all in unison. On Aegis VII the outbreak produced a Hive Mind, a gargantuan, telepathic creature that acted as a conduit between the Marker and the Necromorphs, with the Marker relaying orders through a signal-amplifying pedestal. Fully aware of the danger, the Sovereign Colonies abandoned the system, buried the records of the experiment, and marked the Aegis Cluster off-limits as a prohibited zone. Despite the purge, their successor government was later able to recover information pointing to Marker 3A's presence in the system.

The second incident#

In 2505 the planet became home to an illegal mining facility set up by the CEC. With the rediscovery of the Marker in 2508, the colonists began experiencing insomnia, unease, and hallucinations, and violent incidents rose. By the time the USG Ishimura arrived to begin planet-cracking, the Marker had been extracted and brought into the colony, where many Unitologists believed it to be the artifact described in their spiritual texts. As more colonists fell into dementia and heightened aggression, both the murder and suicide rates skyrocketed. On orders relayed from the Church of Unitology, Captain Benjamin Mathius had the Marker taken aboard the Ishimura over the objections of Security Chief Alissa Vincent and the questions of Dr. Terrence Kyne.

A week after the planet crack, the colony suffered a blackout and lost all radio contact, then descended into panic, murder, mutilation, and a full Necromorph outbreak. The surviving colonists tried to flee to the Ishimura by shuttle, but an overloaded passenger shuttle crashed into the bay and destroyed the remaining shuttles, stranding the survivors. Under the Marker's influence, Isaac Clarke descended to the surface and returned the artifact to its signal-amplifying pedestal, believing it would halt the Necromorph threat. The resulting pulse imprinted the Marker's blueprints in his mind and in that of the scientist Elizabeth Cross, and disrupted the gravity tethers holding a large excavated portion of the planet aloft. Kendra Daniels stole the Marker to deliver it to EarthGov, but the Hive Mind crushed her before she could escape. Isaac killed the Hive Mind and left the planet just before the excavated rock fell onto the surface.

Destruction#

Aegis VII was severely devastated by the impact, with Isaac Clarke publicly blamed for the destruction and the entire planet left seismically unstable. Its molten core rose to the surface, creating lakes and rivers of magma as the weakened gravity field allowed the structure to fall apart. Three weeks later the USG O'Bannon visited the planet to investigate and recover remnants of Marker 3A, deploying gravity field generators to stabilize it. When O'Bannon crew member Nickolas Kuttner accidentally destroyed one of the generators while recovering a Marker fragment, Aegis VII exploded into millions of chunks of debris and asteroids. EarthGov afterward established a military blockade around the Cygnus system and quarantined the planet's remains.