Jennifer Santos

Jennifer Santos was a technician working under EarthGov at Keyhole Station as part of the Marker Ops program, who joined Ellie Langford's team in the attempt to reach Tau Volantis. A scientist rather than a soldier, she led the effort to find the alien Machine that held the frozen world in check, and her work brought the expedition close to its goal before she was killed in the fall of a cargo cage on the mountain.

Keyhole Station#

When Keyhole Station was overrun by the Necromorphs, Jennifer Santos and Austin Buckell were fighting off a group of the creatures when they encountered Ellie Langford. Separated from Robert Norton and John Carver, Ellie at first mistook Santos for a soldier, but Santos corrected her, explaining that she was a technician. The two cleared the station's hangar deck but remained trapped, with no way to reach Carver or Norton.

Ellie chose to press on toward Tau Volantis without the Earth Defense Force soldiers. Santos and Buckell prepared a sub-light flyer to make the jump through the ShockRing using coordinates Ellie provided. The blind jump succeeded, but soon afterward they lost contact with Norton and the USM Eudora.

The expedition to Tau Volantis#

Thirteen days later, Norton and Carver, now accompanied by Isaac Clarke, made their own jump to Tau Volantis and located Ellie's distress signal aboard the Sovereign Colonies ship CMS Roanoke. When they reached the others, Santos and Buckell were found injured. Santos was relieved to meet Isaac at last, believing the mission far more likely to succeed with him present, and she guided his work through the ruins of the Sovereign Colonies flotilla by RIG transmission as the team gathered the parts needed to repair the CMS Crozier and descend to the planet.

The descent damaged the shuttle, which broke apart and separated the survivors from Isaac in the crash. Pressed by the storms that plagued the planet, Santos and the others reached a bunker by following flares, where they found that there were not enough snow suits for everyone and Buckell chose to stay behind. The remaining group pushed on to a research facility, and there Santos examined the written logs left by the Sovereign Colonies dig teams and learned of an experiment that had been used to locate the Machine, coming to believe that replicating it could find the Machine again.

The search for the Machine#

Santos spearheaded the scientific effort, drawn forward by the discoveries made with the frozen corpse of the creature known as the Nexus. She explained that the creature had been used to triangulate the Machine's signal with a sensor, and as she worked she decrypted more of Earl Serrano's logs, learning of an individual called Rosetta who was a key part of the Codex that Admiral Graves had mentioned. After Isaac rebuilt the sensor the experiment required, Santos used the thawed corpse to locate thousands of signals beneath the surface. To reach them, the team would have to climb to a second dig site higher up the mountain.

As the situation closed in, Santos began to feel that their predicament was hopeless. Carver reminded her that the mission was all that mattered and that she would be left behind if she became a liability, while Isaac insisted that no one would be left behind. Santos comforted a distraught Ellie and acted as a go-between for the two for a time.

Death on the mountain#

While Santos, Carver, and Ellie waited for Isaac to lower a cargo cage, they were attacked by Necromorphs, and Ellie shielded Santos through the assault. After Isaac found the winch and restored power to the cage, he spoke with Santos to keep her steady as it rose. When the cage reached the top, the beast that had hounded the group since their landing attacked the structure, trapping those inside. Santos begged Isaac for help. Before he could act, Carver chose to cut the cage's wire rope from its base. Despite Isaac's best efforts to save her, Carver severed the line and Santos plummeted to her death in the cage. Her death shook Isaac badly, but it was not in vain, for he went on to kill the beast that had taken her.