F. Cadigan: Commander of the USM Valor

F. Cadigan was a Marine of the Earth Defense Force and the commander of the USM Valor, the Destroyer-class warship dispatched to the Aegis system in 2508 under Operation: WHITE LIGHT. His orders placed him at the center of EarthGov's effort to reclaim Marker 3A from the USG Ishimura, an operation spearheaded by the government agent Kendra Daniels. Cadigan never reached the artifact. An escape pod recovered on the approach to the planet cracker carried a Necromorph into his ship, and within hours the Valor's Marines were dead or transformed, the vessel was out of control, and Cadigan's command ended in a collision with the very ship he had been sent to meet.

Command of the Valor#

Nothing survived of Cadigan's record beyond his final deployment. By 2508 he held the rank of Commander in the Earth Defense Force and captained the USM Valor, a Destroyer-class warship a fifth the size of the USG Ishimura that carried firepower emblematic of its class. Under his leadership served a Marine complement of at least 64 soldiers of the 3343rd Spaceborne, organized into three teams designated Navigation, Weapons and Engineering. The ship's armory stood fully stocked for them, its racks lined with SWS Motorized Pulse Rifles and its lockers holding Advanced Soldier Suits fitted with Stasis modules.

The mission Cadigan was charged with, Operation: WHITE LIGHT, was darker than a simple retrieval. The Valor was deployed to assist EarthGov's effort to reclaim Marker 3A from the Ishimura, and for that contingency the ship carried a twelve megaton EURYDICE MOD I Guided Nuclear Missile in its torpedo bay. Under the sterilization protocol that shared the weapon's name, the warhead was to be used on the Ishimura if the Necromorph infection proved to be present aboard her, presumably once Cadigan's Marines had secured the Marker. Whatever the Commander himself knew of the operation's full intent, his ship was equipped to leave no trace of the planet cracker behind.

The wait in the Aegis system#

EarthGov could not determine the location of Aegis VII, so the Valor's instructions upon entering the system were to move to a position beyond local scope range and hold there, waiting for a signal from the Ishimura to confirm where the planet cracker lay. The silence broke when Isaac Clarke, fighting to survive aboard the infested vessel, successfully sent out an S.O.S. distress call. Cadigan's crew picked up the signal immediately, and the Valor began making its way toward the Ishimura.

On the approach, the warship intercepted an escape pod that had been launched from the planet cracker. Cadigan's ship relayed the news of the recovery, and when Isaac restored the Ishimura's communications array he and Kendra Daniels received a looped video transmission from the Commander himself: the Valor had picked up Escape Pod 47, was approaching the Ishimura, and awaited a response.

Escape Pod 47#

The pod was not carrying survivors. Sealed inside was a Necromorph Slasher, the reanimated form of Corporal Aiden Chen, which the Kellion security officer Zach Hammond had trapped in the pod and jettisoned from the Ishimura to get the creature off the ship. Daniels attempted to warn Commander Cadigan and his crew not to open the escape pod, but the warning did not save them. Exactly what happened aboard the Valor in the hours that followed was never established, yet by the time the Destroyer closed with the Ishimura, the majority of its Marines were either dead or infected.

Cadigan himself was not caught wholly unaware. He managed to alert his crew to the presence of the Necromorphs and mobilized all personnel against the rapidly spreading infection, proof that the Commander was still fighting for his ship as it came apart around him. It was not enough. Many of his Marines were in full armor with Pulse Rifles in hand when the outbreak erupted, and they died anyway, cut down or converted by the creatures their crewmates had become.

The fall of the Valor#

The infection reached the men who flew the ship. With its pilots and helm officers dead, the Valor lost control, and as an explosion tore through the vessel from the fighting aboard, the Destroyer listed headlong toward the Ishimura. The warship struck the planet cracker and lodged itself in the larger ship's hull, inflicting incalculable damage on both vessels and destabilizing the nuclear warhead in its torpedo bay.

Cadigan's personnel fought bravely in the wreck, set against Necromorphs that had been members of their own crew, but the crash opened the Valor to the Ishimura and more of the creatures poured aboard. The tide of the battle belonged to the horde. The Marines' own equipment turned against them in death: because their suits carried Stasis modules, those transformed into Necromorphs moved at many times the speed of an ordinary Slasher, becoming the breed known as Twitchers. Cadigan was presumed to have gone down with the rest of his crew, dead before Isaac Clarke ever set foot in the wreckage.

Aftermath#

Isaac boarded the ruined Valor to retrieve its singularity core, the only power source that could drive a shuttle off the Ishimura. Fighting through the Twitchers that had been Cadigan's Marines, he found almost no one left alive: one uninfected soldier who died of his injuries moments after being found, and another who fled through a hatch to an unknown fate. Hammond, who had come aboard with Isaac, was killed by Chen's Necromorph form in the ship's engine spaces, but the core was recovered, and it gave Isaac, Daniels and Dr. Terrence Kyne their chance of escape.

Daniels later folded the loss of the Valor into her own accounting. After she betrayed Isaac and Kyne on the Ishimura's Flight Deck, she attributed the warship's role to her effort to retrieve the Red Marker, stating that her mission had succeeded even with the loss of Cadigan and his crew. It was the closest thing to an epitaph the Commander received: a footnote in the report of the operation that had sent him, his ship and 64 Marines into the Aegis system to die.