Medusa: Zero Gravity Necromorph of Tau Volantis

The Medusa was a Necromorph form found exclusively in the zero gravity environments of Tau Volantis, a drifting mass of grasping limbs and swollen yellow sacs that haunted the weightless voids of the frozen world. Unlike the forms raised from human dead, the Medusa belonged to the small group of Necromorphs that seemed to be built from the planet's own native life, alongside the Alien Necromorph, the Snow Beast, and the Nexus. Survivors who crossed the spaces it inhabited learned quickly that the creature was better avoided than fought, for its reach was long, its blows were lethal, and its wounds answered gunfire with projectiles of their own.

Leavings of a drowned world#

Long before any human ship reached it, Tau Volantis was an ocean world, home to an advanced alien race and to the marine life that filled its seas. When that civilization fell to its own Necromorph outbreak, Convergence began above the planet, gathering the dead toward the mass of a newborn Brethren Moon. The survivors of the native race activated an enormous Machine that turned their once oceanic world into a frozen waste, halting Convergence and leaving the half formed Moon dormant.

Among the horrors of that first outbreak were Necromorph forms raised not from the aliens themselves but from the planet's wildlife. The Medusa appeared to be one of them. Its drifting bulk, its trailing limbs, and its strict confinement to weightless spaces all suggested an animal shaped for water rather than land, and it was thought possible that the Medusas served their purpose best in the oceanic terrain of Tau Volantis during the original outbreak. The specimens that persisted into the planet's frozen age may simply have been encased in the ice when the world flash froze, preserved alongside the rest of the buried dead of the drowned biosphere.

Anatomy and behavior#

The Medusa bore little resemblance to the human derived forms catalogued aboard the USG Ishimura or Titan Station. Its body was a floating central mass from which four limbs extended, each carrying swollen yellow sacs, with a larger main sac seated at the core. The whole arrangement recalled a stationary polyp of the deep ocean, an organism whose shape still answered to the water it had once inhabited, and the creature was never found anywhere that gravity held sway.

At close quarters the Medusa was devastating. A single sweep of one of its four limbs could kill outright, and a suited survivor caught in open flight could be torn apart by the blow, the remains drifting onward while suit thrusters still burned. At range it was scarcely less dangerous. The creature fired projectiles that homed in on their targets, tracking a moving survivor through the void, and the yellow sacs along its limbs were the source of that arsenal. The main sac was the most volatile part of the body; when it was destroyed, it discharged two or more projectiles at once. Even a dead Medusa carried a final hazard, for one brought down with its limbs intact and its main sac unbroken would convulse violently until the sac detonated on its own.

The weightless hunting grounds#

The Medusa never walked the frozen surface or stalked the corridors of the wrecks. It belonged entirely to the open voids of Tau Volantis, the weightless spaces that survivors could only cross by suit thruster, and there its drifting bulk, long reach, and homing fire made it the master of its ground. Isaac Clarke and John Carver passed through such spaces during the later expedition to the planet, roughly two centuries after the Sovereign Colonies expedition there had ended, and met Medusas among the many Necromorph forms loose on the frozen world.

The doctrine that emerged from those encounters was simple. A Medusa was best avoided altogether, with ammunition conserved and the creature maneuvered around rather than engaged. When a fight could not be escaped, the sound approach was to strike from long range and destroy the creature before its limbs and projectiles could come into play, aiming for the yellow sacs on its limbs while treating the rupture of the main sac with caution, since its destruction loosed a volley of its own.

Among the alien born forms#

The Medusa's place in the record of Tau Volantis lay less in any single encounter than in what its existence revealed. Most Necromorph forms known to human survivors, from the Slasher to the Leaper, were recombinations of human dead. Tau Volantis carried a second catalogue of forms drawn from another biosphere entirely: the Alien Necromorph raised from the bodies of the planet's builders, the Snow Beast from what was likely an ancient ocean crustacean, the Nexus from one of the largest of the native organisms, and the Medusa from some drifting creature of the vanished seas.

Together those forms showed that the infection behind the Markers was never bound to humanity. It took whatever dead a world offered and reworked them to its purpose, in the water, on the ice, or in the vacuum between. The frozen wastes of Tau Volantis still held the buried remains of an entire drowned ecosystem, and the Medusa, adrift in the weightless dark, was among the few of those resurrected natives that human eyes ever saw.