Conning Tower

The Conning Tower was a compartment aboard the CMS Terra Nova, one of the Sovereign Colonies ships left derelict in the flotilla orbiting Tau Volantis. When the Scenario Five purge order came two centuries before Isaac Clarke reached the planet, the Tower became the refuge and the tomb of a single soldier who refused to die, and it remained a sealed trap long after every other crewman was gone.

Purpose and the Scenario Five order#

Little was recorded of the Conning Tower's original function aboard the Terra Nova. During the Sovereign Colonies expedition to Tau Volantis, it was repurposed as a holding space for the bodies of the "infected soldiers" the crew had quarantined. When the Scenario Five contingency was enacted, ordering the death of all personnel to contain the outbreak, most of the crew complied. Two of the ship's Navy servicemen did not: the pilot, Private Tucker Edwards, and the commander, Captain Valery Dietz.

Edwards did not grasp the protocol or what it demanded. Dietz tried to explain that everyone aboard, including the two of them, had to die, or others would come to carry it out, and she raised a weapon against him. Edwards pleaded with her not to fire. In the struggle he shot her instead, vowing that anyone who came for him would be sorry.

Edwards and the trap#

With Dietz dead and himself the only survivor, Edwards turned the Conning Tower into a fortress against the SCAF legionaries he expected to pursue him. Using the Necromorphs stored in the chamber and the resources at hand, he rigged a web of defenses: quarantine lockdowns that sealed survivors in with the creatures, electric barriers, overloaded gravity plating, and the awakening of the dormant Necromorphs themselves.

At first he was willing to do anything to keep living. As time wore on, the weight of having killed Dietz and outlived everyone else turned to guilt and remorse. Eventually he resolved to "take one for the team." He recorded a final farewell that would, on playback, release the Necromorphs in the Tower upon any survivor who reached it, then ended his own life with a gunshot.

Two centuries later#

The flotilla drifted in orbit over Tau Volantis for two hundred years. When Isaac Clarke restored power to the Terra Nova and reached its tram line, he learned that a quantity of useful tools and salvage had been signed out from the Tower's storage by Edwards and never returned. Recovering Edwards' cache meant entering the trapped chamber.

Isaac found the key in a nearby control station, beside a warning against going in at all. Inside, he met the traps Edwards had left, the quarantine lockdowns, the electric barriers, the gravity hazards, and the roused Necromorphs, while Edwards' pre-recorded messages played over the speakers, urging whoever heard them to turn back and lending the eerie impression that the long-dead pilot was still alive. Isaac disarmed the defenses and climbed to the top of the Tower, where Edwards' corpse still sat in a chair beside his stash. As Isaac took the cache and moved to leave, the last trap triggered, detonating the Tower's remaining explosives and loosing the Necromorphs they freed. He fought his way clear and pressed on toward the aft section of the Terra Nova.

By the time Isaac and John Carver later returned to the Terra Nova to reach Earth, the ship had been claimed as a place of worship by a Unitologist cult, and Edwards' body had vanished from the chamber.