Aliens: The Lost Civilization of Tau Volantis

The Aliens were a sapient, semi-aquatic species that once ruled the ocean world that human explorers would later call Tau Volantis. More than two million years before the Markers reached human space, they discovered a Black Marker of their own, replicated it across their planet, and were destroyed by the Necromorph outbreak it brought. Their final act, the construction of a world-freezing Machine, left behind both a frozen tomb and the only weapon that could halt the Brethren Moons, a legacy that human survivors would reach for two million years later.

The Black Marker and the outbreak#

More than two million years before the 26th century, a technologically and socially advanced species inhabited the vast, water-covered surface of Tau Volantis. At some point in their history they discovered a Black Marker, an artifact much like the one humanity would later unearth on Earth. The Aliens began to replicate it, drawn both by the religious fervor its signal induced and by its promise as a source of limitless energy, and they raised copies of the Marker across their planet.

The outcome mirrored what would befall humanity. A Necromorph outbreak began and spread, converting enough of the population that a Convergence Event was triggered. The Markers drew billions of corpses and reanimated Aliens into orbit, where the biomass began to assemble into a newborn Brethren Moon.

The Machine and the freezing of Tau Volantis#

At least one faction of the species understood what was coming and had prepared for it. In an act of mass sacrifice, they constructed an enormous Machine that instantly froze the entire planet along with the Moon forming above it, ending the Convergence and leaving the colossal Necromorph incomplete and inert. The Machine was meant to do more than freeze: a second function would have dragged the Moon down to crash into the planet and kill it. The Aliens never finished configuring that phase, and so the Moon was halted rather than destroyed.

Frozen in orbit, the incomplete Moon could not call to its distant brethren, but it continued to broadcast through the Markers still scattered across the galaxy. That signal carried a message left by the dying civilization, a plea to any who might one day understand it: "Turn it off."

Anatomy#

What was known of the Aliens came almost entirely from the studies of Dr. Earl Serrano, drawn from the frozen body called Rosetta and from the calcified remains found in the underground city that circled the Machine. They were fish-like creatures with gills and collapsible fins, which led Serrano to conclude that Tau Volantis had once been a vast ocean rather than a frozen waste. They were hexapods, with a primary pair of clawed forelimbs, a smaller pair beneath the torso, and a pair of backward-facing hindlimbs, and they had flat, elongated skulls marked by grooves and bone-like crests. Their young resembled the adults in miniature, roughly the size of a human infant.

The species varied enormously in size, ranging from individuals four meters tall to others as large as a twenty-story building, and dozens of these building-sized remains lay calcified around the Machine. According to Serrano, the Aliens communicated through six holes in their skulls that produced harmonic sounds, but he believed this was not their natural language. Instead it was a system devised to carry information across species, a way of speaking to whoever might find their culture long after their extinction.

When infected, the Alien Necromorphs split open at the torso to hurl their reanimated young at prey, while tusk-like growths burst from beneath the skull to let them ram and gore. As with human Necromorphs, their flesh was left mottled and decaying.

Rediscovery and legacy#

Two million years later, in 2311, the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces discovered the planet and the remains of a preserved Alien they named Rosetta. Studying the body, Dr. Earl Serrano uncovered the truth of the species and tried to complete their unfinished work, using the Machine to destroy the Moon. The Machine would respond only to pure Alien DNA, which made the uninfected, frozen Rosetta indispensable to building a working Codex. In 2314, before Serrano could secure that Codex, General Spencer Mahad received orders to purge all personnel, information, and assets on Tau Volantis.

Two centuries on, in 2514, an expedition led by Isaac Clarke and pursued by Jacob Danik and his Unitologist fanatics rediscovered Rosetta and recovered the knowledge of the lost species. Isaac used it to fulfill the aims of both Serrano and the Aliens, finally killing the Tau Volantis Moon with the Machine. The effort came too late to save Earth: the remaining Brethren Moons had already begun their journey to consume its population.