Core Extractor: heavy duty core sampling tool of the Sprawl

The V101 Core Extractor was a heavy duty industrial tool designed for extracting core samples, rated as able to penetrate 65 percent of all known elements. Like the Plasma Cutter and the SH-B1 Plasma Saw, it belonged to the family of engineering equipment that was never meant to be aimed at anything alive, and like them it found a second life as a weapon when the Necromorphs overran Titan Station, the orbital city known as the Sprawl. There the saboteur Vandal added one to the collection of tools and firearms she carried through the dying station, reserving its plasma beams for the largest and most heavily armored creatures the infestation produced.

Design and purpose#

The Core Extractor was built for one of the oldest jobs in deep space industry, pulling clean core samples out of whatever material a survey crew needed to assess. Rock, ore bodies, and structural metal all fell within its remit, and its makers rated the tool as capable of penetrating 65 percent of all known elements, a figure that placed it among the most powerful handheld cutting implements in service. Where the Plasma Cutter sliced with a flat blade of energy and the Ripper ground through material with a suspended saw blade, the Core Extractor bored, projecting plasma beams down a single axis to punch a sampling channel through the target.

The name of the firm that manufactured the V101 went unrecorded in the surviving accounts of the Sprawl outbreak. What survived instead was a picture of the tool in use, a heavy, slow cycling instrument that traded speed and endurance for raw penetrating power, and that demanded a deliberate, patient hand from anyone who carried it.

The diamond lattice and the focused stream#

The Core Extractor discharged in two configurations. In its primary configuration the tool fired four separate plasma beams at once, arranged in a diamond pattern with each beam set at 90 degrees to its neighbors. The lattice expanded as it traveled, so that a discharge which left the emitter as a tight diamond of energy spread into a far wider pattern downrange. The beams did not stop at the first thing they struck. A well placed discharge passed through multiple bodies in a line, and during the outbreak a single shot was enough to fell several Necromorphs at once when they came crowding down a corridor.

The alternate configuration compressed all four beams together into one continuous stream. This was the precision setting, a sustained lance of plasma that the operator walked onto a single point and held there while it burned through. The stream rewarded steadiness and punished interruption. If the operator was struck while the beam was discharging, the stream collapsed at once and the charge that fed it was spent for nothing, a failing the tool shared with the Ripper's suspended blade. Survivors who relied on the focused stream learned to pair it with a stasis field, slowing a target to a crawl so the beam could do its work without the wielder being knocked off aim.

Service on the Sprawl#

During the Necromorph outbreak on Titan Station, the tool passed into the hands of the Unitologist agent known as Vandal, the engineer whose sabotage had helped trigger the infestation and who then fought her way across the station as it died around her. She acquired the Core Extractor in the later stretch of her run, by which point the creatures she faced had grown too large and too resilient for lighter equipment to handle alone.

The tool never became her everyday weapon, and its economics explain why. The Core Extractor ran on self contained charges called Cores, and on the Sprawl a single Core sold for a thousand credits, the highest price commanded by any individual charge on the station. Only the Plasma Cutter's plasma energy, sold at twelve hundred credits for a pack of six, cost more per purchase. Combined with the tool's small capacity and slow rate of discharge, the expense meant that every shot had to count. Vandal treated the extractor as a reserve instrument, carried for the moments when nothing lighter would serve.

Against the largest Necromorphs#

Those moments came. Against the Brute, the massive armored Necromorph built from several fused corpses, the Core Extractor was one of the most decisive answers available, and two or three sustained discharges were enough to bring one down. The focused stream in particular let a survivor reach the yellow, exposed tissue on a Brute's arms, the weak points in an otherwise armored mass that shrugged off most fire.

The tool's most demanding service came in the Titan Shard reactor core, where an immense creature known only as the Boss had nested and driven the reactor toward a catastrophic overheat. The creature's vulnerable tumors and eyes were small marks on a vast body, precisely the kind of target the focused stream had proven itself against, and when a drilling mechanism wounded the creature and exposed the final weak point on its head, the extractor's concentrated beam was among the few instruments capable of burning it out. Vandal destroyed the exposed tissue and sent the creature falling into the reactor shaft, and the Core Extractor, a sampling tool built to take pieces out of planets, ended its recorded service having helped take apart the largest Necromorph the Sprawl ever produced.