Facility Two Marker: the caged Red Marker of Tau Volantis

The Facility Two Marker was a Red Marker of apparently human manufacture held in the Marker Containment area of Facility Two, the research compound the Sovereign Colonies Science Division built atop the mountain on Tau Volantis. Unlike the frozen alien obelisks scattered across the planet's surface, this Marker appeared identical to Marker 3A of Aegis VII, and it became the instrument of the cruelest psychological assault of the 2514 expedition, when it dragged Sergeant John Carver into his own mind wearing the face of his dead wife.

A caged Marker among the frozen obelisks#

Tau Volantis was littered with Markers. Frozen, alien made Red Markers stood trapped in the walls, the ground and even the elevator shaft of the mountain the Sovereign Colonies designated Mount Olympus, remnants of the extinct civilization that had once inhabited the planet. When the SCAF expedition traced the Marker signals to the Alien Machine buried beneath the mountain, it raised Facility Two, the Research Compound, on the peak above it. Within the compound's Biology Sector, the Science Division set aside a storage hall, the Marker Containment area, a warehouse where it kept all of the Red Markers it found.

The Marker held in the final section of that containment area stood apart from the rest. Where the other Red Markers encountered on Tau Volantis had been made by the planet's alien civilization, this one appeared to be man made, identical in form to Marker 3A, the Red Marker the Sovereign Colonies had grown from the Black Marker's replication data and planted on Aegis VII for study. Its exact origin was never recorded in the surviving expedition material, but its resemblance to the government's own manufactured Markers suggested that the SCAF had brought its handiwork with it to the very planet where it hoped to silence the signal.

Two hundred years in the dark#

The Marker outlasted its keepers. In 2314, under Scenario Five, General Spencer Mahad ordered the expedition's research incinerated and its personnel terminated, and Facility Two was left abandoned on the mountaintop with the lift cables to Facility One destroyed. The containment hall and its prisoner remained, sealed in the dark and the cold, while the planet and everything the Sovereign Colonies had learned there passed out of history.

Two centuries later, in 2514, Isaac Clarke and John Carver scaled the cliffs to Facility Two in pursuit of the source of the Marker signal, having lost Jennifer Santos on the ascent. They came to recover the pieces of "Rosetta," the intact alien specimen the Science Division had studied, and their search for the scattered remains took them down into the Biology Sector's warehouse, into the containment area where the Marker had waited undisturbed since the purge. It was still pristine when they found it.

The voice of Damara Carver#

The Marker had been working on Carver long before he reached its cage. From his first hours on Tau Volantis the sergeant had suffered visions of his wife Damara, bloodied and shaking in the cold, and of his son Dylan, their eyes gouged out in defiled photographs. Damara, a data archaeologist who had uncovered the Sovereign Colonies' buried Marker research on Uxor, had been killed along with Dylan when Jacob Danik's Unitologists came for her findings, and Carver had been forced to put down what the Necromorphs made of his family. The planet's Markers turned that wound into a weapon, filling the compound's warehouse with tin soldiers, birthday presents and party streamers scrawled with accusations as Carver and Clarke fought their way through it.

At the final section of the Marker Containment area, the artifact took him. Carver was pulled into a vision inside his own head, a red and hazy world of jagged stone, presents and photographs of his family, the same kind of dementia domain in which Isaac had once confronted the Site 12 Marker on Titan Station. There the voice of "Damara" told him it was time for sacrifice, that he had "nothing left" to live for, "no wife," "no son" and "no soul," and beckoned him to join his family in death so that they could be made "whole again." When Carver approached the apparition, hunched on a couch beside a Red Marker, she screamed at him with glowing eyes and mouth, the same corrupted visage the "Nicole" apparition had shown Isaac.

In the physical world, Carver stood defenseless, trapped inside his own mind while Necromorphs closed on his body. Isaac held them off alone, protecting his catatonic partner through each assault. Clarke told Carver, each time he surfaced, that he did not need to face the Marker, but the sergeant refused to walk away. He had come to finish his wife's work, and he went back under again and again, battling the shadow creatures the Marker summoned and enduring the taunts of the thing wearing Damara's voice, until at last he got close enough to shatter the imaginary Marker with his weapon and break the connection.

Cracked but never silenced#

When Carver came back to himself, he and Isaac were standing before a changed artifact. The once pristine Marker was cracked and damaged, seemingly wounded by the battle Carver had fought against it inside his own mind, yet it remained functional. Where Isaac's victory over the Site 12 Marker on Titan Station had ended in that Marker's outright destruction, Carver's triumph showed the narrower limit of an unaided will: a strong enough mind could sever a Marker's hold over it and scar the stone in the process, but it could not, by itself, destroy the artifact.

For Carver the broken connection marked a turning point. The man who had carried his guilt to Tau Volantis as a reason to die came out of the containment hall carrying it as a reason to finish the mission, telling Clarke that he would see the price of what had been done "paid." He grew steadier and more open in the days that followed, entrusted Isaac with completing the work should he fall, and stood with him through the descent to the Alien Machine. The Facility Two Marker, cracked in its cage, was left behind on the mountain, the only Marker on Tau Volantis ever beaten by a man with nothing but his own will.