Keyhole Station: EarthGov Marker Research Station

Keyhole Station was a research space station located in the Carina Nebula and governed by EarthGov. One of the government's major Marker research facilities, it was home to more than four hundred military and technical personnel and served the Marker Ops program as both a laboratory and a military outpost. It was the former home of Damara and John Carver, and in 2514 it became the last waypoint on Ellie Langford's road to Tau Volantis, destroyed in the fighting between her party and the forces of the Unitologist leader Jacob Danik.

A Marker research outpost in the Carina Nebula#

Keyhole Station hung in the Carina Nebula as one of the principal Marker research facilities of the Earth Government Colonial Alliance. More than four hundred military and technical personnel lived and worked aboard it, and the station carried a double mandate: it was a Marker research center for the government's secretive Marker Ops program and a military outpost in its own right. Its equipment reflected that importance. The station maintained a ShockRing and a ShockGate facility, the apparatus of faster than light travel, which made it a gateway for traffic into and out of deep space as well as a laboratory.

The people posted there came from across the government's scientific and military arms. Jennifer Santos served aboard the station as a technician under EarthGov, working within the Marker Ops program. Austin Buckell, a scientist recruited out of the Corps of Engineers of the Earth Defense Force, belonged to an EarthGov Marker Ops research team on the station and carried an unusual depth of knowledge about the program and about military history, particularly the involvement of the Sovereign Colonies that had come before. The station was also, for a time, a home rather than a posting. Doctor Damara Carver, a data archaeologist, lived aboard Keyhole Station with her husband, the Earth Defense Force sergeant John Carver, before the couple was reassigned to the planet Uxor, where Damara was set to studying the Red Marker held there.

The outbreak#

Like every facility built around the study of a Marker, Keyhole Station lived beside the thing it examined, and the Marker aboard the station eventually did what Markers did. At some point before 2514 it started a Necromorph outbreak among the station's population. No account survived of how the infestation ran its course through the crew, but its end state spoke for itself. By the time outsiders next set foot aboard, the interior was overrun by advanced stages of the Corruption, the growth that spread across walls and decks wherever the dead had been remade, and the environment was deserted. Four hundred people had been reduced to an empty, transformed hulk drifting in the nebula, with only scattered bands of survivors, among them Santos and Buckell, still alive inside it.

The expedition of 2514#

In 2514 the station received its last visitors. Ellie Langford, the EarthGov captain Robert Norton, and John Carver came to Keyhole Station in the course of completing the mission Damara Carver had died for. Their triangulation work had located the master signal being received by the Markers, tracing it to Tau Volantis, but reaching that world required a shock transmitter and a station to jump from, and Keyhole Station still had its ShockRing. In transit, Ellie worked at decrypting the remainder of Damara's research and found that some of its script was the writing of the Markers themselves. She suggested contacting Isaac Clarke, though the idea found no favor with Norton.

What the party found on arrival was the aftermath of the outbreak: a silent station choked with the Corruption. Necromorphs attacked them almost at once and forced them deeper into the structure. Then Danik arrived. The Unitologist leader had followed the group from Uxor, where Carver had sprung his trap near a cargo dock and the three had escaped aboard the USM Eudora, and he ordered an attack on the Eudora at Keyhole Station. A surprise strike from his ship compromised the station's hull, and the breach triggered the emergency seals, trapping Ellie alone on the far side of the bulkheads while Norton and Carver pressed on without her.

Cut off from her companions and hunted through the infested corridors, Ellie was rescued from a swarm of the creatures by the group of survivors gathered around Jennifer Santos and Austin Buckell. The technician and the Marker Operative guided her through the station back to the hangar deck while Norton and Carver fought their way to the control room on the bridge. From there, Norton turned the station's armament against Danik's ship, covering the escape of Ellie, Santos, and Buckell aboard the survivors' Sub-Light Flyer. He then activated the station's ShockRing, and Ellie's small crew jumped out of the nebula, bound for Tau Volantis. Buckell had judged the situation correctly: Danik's bombardment and attack on the station were never going to stop, and the only way out was forward.

Destruction#

With Ellie away, Norton denied Danik the road she had taken. The ShockRing was destroyed after her jump, foreclosing any pursuit through it and any recovery of the route to Tau Volantis. The station itself was by then beyond saving. Battered by the exchange of fire and coming apart around them, it began to crumble as Norton and Carver ran for their ship, and the two boarded the USM Eudora just as Keyhole Station was destroyed in an explosion. The station did not die passively. The combined bombardment from Keyhole Station and the Eudora left Danik's ship heavily damaged, and the vessel was left seemingly adrift in space while the Eudora escaped.

The station's end scattered its last people across the road to Tau Volantis. Thirteen days after their departure from Keyhole Station, Santos, Buckell, and the others of Ellie's small band were found sheltering inside the CMS Roanoke above Tau Volantis, Santos and Buckell both carrying injuries from the loss of their ship or from the creatures they had fought. John Carver, who had once lived aboard the station with his wife, left it as a survivor of two outbreaks, Uxor and Keyhole Station both, and carried Damara's mission on to the frozen planet. Of the facility itself, one of EarthGov's great Marker research centers, nothing remained in the Carina Nebula but wreckage.