Katie Evans: Nurse of the Aegis VII Colony

Katie Evans was a nurse on the Aegis VII Colony and the personal assistant of Doctor Tom Sciarello, the settlement's Chief Medical Officer. She worked at his side for five years, through the routine of an ordinary planetcrack operation and into the wave of insomnia, depression, and violence that swept the colony after the discovery of Marker 3A. Her death at the hands of the deranged miner Brant Harris was among the early killings that signaled how far the Marker's influence had already spread, and she did not entirely leave the colony even then. In the weeks that followed, her image returned to Sciarello as a hallucination, speaking with a voice that served the Marker rather than the woman he had known.

Service on Aegis VII#

Katie Evans served as Doctor Tom Sciarello's assistant for five years, following him into his posting as Chief Medical Officer of the Concordance Extraction Corporation colony on Aegis VII. For most of that time the work was the ordinary business of a mining settlement's surgery. That changed when a survey team under Jennifer Barrow uncovered Marker 3A on the planet, a copy of the Red Marker buried in the Aegis soil. In the period that followed, colonists flocked to Sciarello's clinic in growing numbers, complaining of depression and sleeplessness that no treatment could touch.

The clinic where Evans worked stood at the center of the colony's deterioration. Sciarello, a confirmed atheist bewildered by what he was seeing, came to suspect that the Marker itself lay behind the wave of paranoia and violence, and he was attacked more than once by hostile patients under its influence. His appeals, made alongside P-Sec Sergeant Abraham Neumann, to abandon the mining project went nowhere with the colony's manager, Hanford Carthusia, who refused to halt the operation despite the mounting count of violent incidents. Evans remained at her post through all of it, a working nurse in a surgery that was filling with patients whose sickness had no name.

The Harris incident#

Among those patients was Brant Harris, a miner suffering from insomnia and what appeared to be dementia after the Marker's discovery. Sciarello's treatment did nothing for him, and as his condition worsened Harris began to experience vivid hallucinations. He came to blame the doctor for his suffering.

Harris returned to the clinic after hours, assaulted Sciarello, and held him hostage. Evans notified P-Sec immediately, and despite the danger she remained at her station until officers arrived to deal with the situation. Sergeant Abraham Neumann and Detective Vera Cortez answered the call and attempted to talk the miner down. Harris instead opened fire with his line cutter, a mining tool never meant to be turned on a human being. The discharge missed both officers and struck Evans, cutting her in half. She died at the post she had refused to abandon, and the officers took Harris into custody in the aftermath.

Funeral and the fate of her killer#

Evans was mourned by the colony's medical community. At her funeral, Sciarello rose to deliver the eulogy, but it was cut short when he was seized by a hallucination of the dead woman herself, and the psychiatrist Jonn Welland, a fellow physician who had worked beside Sciarello against the colony's spreading psychological crisis, stepped in to apologize to the gathered crowd.

Harris was arrested for the killing and transferred to the USG Ishimura in orbit above the colony, a removal that spared him from the Necromorph invasion that later overran Aegis VII. Aboard the ship he was placed under extensive watch. According to the report of the vessel's Chief Psych Officer, Doctor Warwick, Harris never denied murdering the nurse, but he expressed no regret and insisted that what he had done was not wrong, claiming that Evans "wasn't a nurse" when he killed her. His care passed to Doctor Nicole Brennan, under whom his condition seemed to improve, before the Unitologist doctor Challus Mercer had him transferred into his own hands, judging the miner's delusions religiously significant. Mercer's experiments upon him were held by some accounts to have produced the creature that stalked the Ishimura as the Hunter. During the ship's infestation, a woman named Eileen Fisk, trapped alone in a room aboard the vessel, recognized the man who approached her as the one who had killed the nurse on the colony, moments before her cries were cut off.

The apparition#

Evans herself did not rest quietly in the colony's memory. Some time after her death, she appeared to Sciarello as a hallucination, pleading with him to protect the Marker. The vision wore the face of a woman who had served him faithfully for five years, but its purpose belonged to the signal that was unmaking the colony's mind, the same influence Sciarello had begun to suspect and had secretly tested for radiation.

Her likeness came to him once more at the end. Following the planet crack and the near total blackout that fell across the settlement, Sciarello went looking for the backup generators, and the apparition of Evans interrupted him to tell him that it was too late. It was. The colony was already under attack, and when Sciarello and several other doctors withdrew to the medical labs expecting survivors to seek help there, they were ambushed in the morgue by Slashers, one of which killed the doctor with a blade through the forehead.

Evans's own body had been placed in that same morgue after her death, awaiting transport up to the Ishimura. Whatever became of it in the outbreak that consumed Aegis VII was never recorded. What survived of Katie Evans was the account of her final duty, a nurse who called for help when her doctor was taken and who stood her ground until help arrived, and the crueler afterimage the Marker made of her, a borrowed face urging the living to serve the thing that had caused her death.