Artifact Storage: S.C.A.F. Vault in the Alien Machine

The Artifact Storage was a storage section located in the area of the Alien Machine that the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces modified for their own use during the excavation of Tau Volantis. The expedition used it as temporary storage for what its researchers pulled out of the frozen city: the calcified skeletons of the extinct aliens, assorted recovered items, and, most gravely, the infected personnel of the Deep Dig Team.

Purpose and holdings#

When the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces discovered Tau Volantis in 2311, research teams under Dr. Earl Serrano worked their way into the underground of the frozen planet and found the corpses of the alien builders inside their buried city. As the teams explored the Alien Machine, they uncovered a wealth of artifacts, and the expedition converted part of the structure into working space of its own. The Artifact Storage was carved out of that modified area as a holding section for the dig's finds.

Its inventory reflected the whole arc of the expedition. The vaults held the calcified skeletons of the alien remains, the fossilized dead of a species that had been extinct for some two million years, alongside various items recovered from the excavation. The most dangerous cargo was human. The members of the Deep Dig Team, the crews sent deepest into the alien city, had come back changed by their close contact with the Markers, and the infected personnel were consigned to the Artifact Storage as well. Written and recorded logs of the expedition remained scattered through the section, left on tables, stairways, and walkways, and a document called the Artefact Manifest still sat on a desk in one of the lower chambers, cataloguing what the Sovereign Colonies had locked away.

Layout#

The section was reached from the Alien Crypts, the burial halls of the alien city. A console tucked into a narrow alleyway there unlocked a door to a lift, which descended to the underground storage area proper. The entry level held S.C.A.F. engineering equipment and connected onward into the vaults themselves.

Much of the Artifact Storage hung in open, airless space. Several of its chambers were vast zero gravity wells crossed by bridges and walkways stacked one above another, and travel between them meant flight from platform to platform. The expedition had rigged these spaces with defensive laser traps, projected beams that swept the approaches to bridges and terminals and destroyed whatever drifted into them. Locked doors sealed one chamber from the next, opened through consoles and terminals that in places had to be worked around the traps guarding them. Between the wells ran pressurized corridors and tunnels lined with lockers and stored equipment.

The deepest chambers were the holding halls. One contained rows of containment cases in which the expedition had sealed regenerating Necromorphs, the creatures also recorded as the Hunters, which were implied by the expedition's own logs to be what remained of the Deep Dig Team after their deaths. The hall with the Artefact Manifest sat among these containers, and a final lift at the far end of the section climbed back up to the alien ruins.

The translator rooms#

The alien builders of the Machine had left behind a language deliberately constructed so that a future species could read it, a warning about the danger their world contained and an explanation of the Machine they had built to halt Convergence. Inside the Artifact Storage, the Sovereign Colonies kept machines dedicated to that language. Two sealed rooms, designated the raised hall and munitions control, housed translator machines that rendered fragments of the aliens' speech into human words, producing the translations "warrior" and "final". These translators were used to open doors in the Alien City. A third translator stood in the hall holding the captive Regenerators and rendered a further word, "sacrifice". Recorded messages left near the machines preserved the translations for anyone who came after.

Infestation and rediscovery#

The expedition never reclaimed what it had stored. When the Scenario Five order was executed, the Sovereign Colonies personnel on Tau Volantis were eradicated and the planet was left silent, its facilities cut off and its records destroyed. The Artifact Storage sat sealed beneath the mountain for two hundred years while the scaffolding, construction material, and generators of the Deep Dig Team gathered dust in the halls above it.

In 2514, Isaac Clarke and John Carver passed through the section during their push into the Alien Machine. They found it overrun. Medusas, a Necromorph form found only in the zero gravity environments of Tau Volantis, drifted in the open wells among the bridges. Leapers hunted the tunnels in packs, Lurkers haunted the trapped chambers, and Crawlers infested the lower halls. Among them moved Alien Necromorphs, the reanimated corpses of the very species whose skeletons the vaults had been built to hold.

The worst of the section's cargo was still waiting in the holding halls. The regenerating Hunters at first appeared to be securely contained within their cases, but as Clarke and Carver worked through the chambers the creatures broke loose, and the two men could do no more than cripple and slow things that would not stay dead. Several Hunters pursued them through the final rooms to the small chamber at the section's far end, where the pair escaped by elevator and continued toward the heart of the Alien Machine, leaving the Artifact Storage and everything the Sovereign Colonies had buried in it behind.