Jacob Danik

Jacob Arthur Danik was a high ranking member of the Church of Unitology and leader of the militant Unitologist organization known as the Circle, active before and during the rediscovery of Tau Volantis in 2514. He and his followers attacked EarthGov's Marker test sites to free the artifacts from government control, then pursued Isaac Clarke and his allies to the frozen world of Tau Volantis, where Danik's belief in Convergence brought the Brethren Moons one step closer to waking.

The Circle and its crusade#

Danik was an active proponent of the Unitologist movement to overthrow the Earth Government Colonial Alliance, working with his brethren to compromise and attack its strongholds. Drawing on the vast fortunes the Church had accumulated, he built his Circle sect into a sizable fighting force and launched what he called a crusade to liberate humanity by freeing the Red Markers that EarthGov held in test labs on various colony worlds. He held that building Marker replicas from the original Black Marker was an intrinsic part of being human, but that it had to be done with respect for the Markers and for what he called the natural evolution of the universe. EarthGov's experiments on its captive copies he saw as perversions of nature, and when his followers faltered at the horror of the Necromorphs, Danik told them the creatures were the necessary consequence of the government's disrespectful tampering.

War on EarthGov#

Danik staged an attack on the planet Uxor to destroy the Marker test site known as Shroud 4. Using his own user ID, his operatives commandeered the USG Perseus to set up a long-sight laser marker that guided a cruiser's missiles to the exact location of the site. The strike destroyed the Marker's shroud and loosed an EMP that knocked out power across the area. As his men entered the Science Block in search of the Sovereign Colonies Marker research uncovered by the archaeologist Damara Carver, they captured John Carver, who had stumbled onto them by accident, and interrogated him. Danik, set on killing Carver, learned that the soldier was married to the very woman he was hunting.

Carver escaped, but Danik reached Damara and her son Dylan first and killed them both. He set a trap for Carver near the cargo dock, only for Carver to use Ellie Langford as bait and spring it, escaping aboard the USM Eudora. Danik followed the group to Keyhole Station and ordered an attack on the Eudora, but his pursuit of the coordinates to Tau Volantis was foiled when Robert Norton destroyed the ShockRing Ellie had used to reach the planet. With his ship heavily damaged by the combined fire of Keyhole Station and the Eudora, Danik was left drifting. Some time later, after crash landing on Tau Volantis, Norton secretly made a deal with him, offering the planet's coordinates in exchange for the safety of the rest of the crew, Isaac excepted.

Pursuing Isaac Clarke#

Danik broadcast an automated speech from an airship over the New Horizons Lunar Colony on Luna, preaching that the end of mankind had come and that humanity's glorious rebirth was at hand, all while preparing to assault the colony in search of Isaac Clarke. He first met Isaac as the engineer tried to reach Norton's ship, forcing him to watch as his men destroyed the shroud of a Marker test facility in the heart of the city and ignoring Isaac's warnings of the deaths the creatures would bring. Death, Danik told him, was only the beginning, and Isaac could not be allowed to interfere with Convergence. Before he could kill the engineer, Isaac deflected his weapon and fell into a garbage dump, and the Eudora crew's combined efforts kept Danik from cutting him off as the Necromorph outbreak spread across Luna.

Danik and his followers reached Tau Volantis to the bewilderment of Isaac's group. While Isaac caught Norton secretly contacting Danik during their work with the Nexus, the captain dismissed it as nothing. After the scientist Jennifer Santos located the Machine that worked in concert with the Codex, Danik apprehended Isaac, Norton and Carver, reneged on his deal with Norton, and announced that he meant to kill them all, only to be driven off in the ensuing firefight. He later cornered them again after the alien remains were assembled in the Rosetta Facility, where Isaac unknowingly revealed the true purpose of the Machine: the Moon above the planet was a vast Necromorph, and the Machine was holding it back from a Convergence the alien race had begun two million years before.

Awakening the Moon#

Convinced that the Moon was the divine embodiment of the Markers' will, Danik resolved that the Machine had to be deactivated so the creature could become whole. He escaped the Rosetta Facility with the Codex and a handful of men as Isaac triggered the room's decontamination protocol, sealing the chamber and assuming the others would die in the fumes. As he descended into the underground alien city where the Machine resided, his men reported that Isaac and Carver still lived and were on his trail; he gathered his remaining troops to slow them, only to find most of his forces dead by the time he reached the bottom. Isaac tried to warn him of the Moon's true nature as they pursued him through the caverns, but Danik dismissed it as fear of the unknown, and in a struggle for the Codex he lost it to the two men as they fell to the lower levels.

As Isaac and Carver prepared to use the Machine, Danik revealed his last advantage: Ellie was alive and in his custody, and her life was the price of letting him shut the Machine down. Carver, believing there were other ways to do right, surrendered the Codex to save her. Danik used it to deactivate the Machine, triggering Convergence and freeing the Moon from its frozen prison; as he gazed up at the monstrosity in awe, a massive shard of debris impaled him, killing him instantly. In the aftermath, the Unitologist cult born from the survivors of the Circle declared him the "saint and savior" of their faith aboard the CMS Terra Nova, for his final act had fully awoken the Brethren Moons, and a recruiting video of him played on a loop at one of the ship's worship altars.

A man of science and faith#

Danik thought of himself as a reasonable man taking extreme measures to save humanity from a perceived enemy in EarthGov, and he was generally polite to Isaac, if in a passive-aggressive manner. Though plainly a religious zealot, he defended his beliefs by calling himself a man of science, holding that Unitology's reverence for the Markers rested on fact, reason and logic. He pointed to the Markers' power over organic life and to the presence of the Black Marker on Earth long before humanity as proof that the species owed its very evolution to the artifacts, and that Convergence was its sole destiny; he used this argument to press Isaac to stop resisting what he called the natural evolution of the universe. Usually calm and boastful, Danik fell into angry rants as the tide turned against him, and for all his claims of reason he reached for religious invective when enraged, branding Isaac a "filthy heretic."