Aspera: Penal Colony and Marker Site

Aspera was a small, mostly uninhabitable world that became a vital site in the Sovereign Colonies' Red Marker experiments. Possibly located in the Gliese 581 System, it held a remote penal colony for political prisoners and, later, one of the secret installations built to recreate the Black Marker. When the site's own Marker activated, Aspera fell to the Necromorphs and was struck from the records.

The world#

Aspera's air was non-breathable, and its surface was described as mostly sandy and rocky. It was a flat world with only minor elevations and no tectonic activity, its surface broken at irregular intervals by sandstorms. Blue crystals could be found just below the ground, which were at first thought to be connected to the site's Marker 2A, though that idea was quickly disproven.

The first human outpost on the planet was a penal colony for political prisoners. Seen from outside it was an enormous reinforced concrete dome divided into three rings. The outer and smallest ring held the area for security personnel and their equipment; the second, a narrow band, contained the prisoners' quarters and mainly served to stabilize the dome; and the inner ring was the prisoners' common area, with a dining room connected directly to the security section.

A site for the Marker experiments#

Aspera was first selected for the penal colony precisely because it was so remote and so poor in natural resources that there would be little reason for anyone to explore it. That same isolation later made it useful for darker work. In the 2290s, about eighty years after the Black Marker had been exhumed from Earth, Aspera was chosen as one of three sites for new military installations meant to investigate and recreate that artifact. The research facility was raised near the penal colony so that the prisoners could be used as test subjects when needed.

Not more than a decade after the station was built, Istvan Sato was transferred to Aspera after killing the politician Tim Fischer on Vindauga.

The activation of Marker 2A#

Soon after Istvan's arrival, the site's Red Marker, Marker 2A, activated, and the destruction of both the penal colony and the research station became inevitable. The penal colony was overrun by Necromorphs, and only Henry Wandrei survived, by locking himself inside a control room. He was eventually reached by Jensi Sato, Istvan's brother, and the two made their way to the research station. That facility was infested as well, but a number of scientists and researchers were still alive there, and it was there that Jensi and Henry, together with Dr. Callie Dexter, confronted the Marker.

It is unclear whether anyone on the surface survived. Before departing, a Sovereign Colonies gunship began deploying mines into orbit around the planet. Aspera was ultimately blacklisted during the execution of Scenario Five, the order meant to leave no evidence of the experiments on the Markers. The world was afterward remembered only in scattered records, named in Sovereign Colonies text logs recovered long after and noted again on a paper left on the medical deck of the USG Ishimura.