Ptolemy Station: the triangulation post of the Sovereign Colonies

Ptolemy Station was a space station built by the Sovereign Colonies to trace the master signal that the Markers were receiving from deep space. Its research established where that signal came from, and the expedition to Tau Volantis was commissioned on the strength of it. When the Sovereign Colonies Council invoked Scenario Five in 2314 the station was abandoned along with everything else the government had touched, and it hung dark and unlisted for two hundred years until Doctor Damara Carver reconstructed its coordinates from purged files. In 2514 Ellie Langford, Captain Robert Norton and Sergeant John Carver boarded it, ran its pylons one last time, and then destroyed it so that the Circle could take nothing from it.

A station built to answer one question#

The Sovereign Colonies had been working on the Markers for decades before Ptolemy Station was raised. Reverse engineering the recovered alien artifact had produced replicas, and the replicas had produced a problem the program could not resolve from any one site. The Markers were not generating the electromagnetic signal that came off them. They were receiving it from somewhere else and rebroadcasting it, and the artifacts at scattered test sites demonstrated accurate triangulation with one another across distances measured in light years.

Ptolemy Station was the government's answer to that. It was a dedicated facility whose entire purpose was to find the origin of what the program called the master signal. Nothing else the Sovereign Colonies operated was configured for the task, and the station was placed under the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces rather than any civilian research arm, which set the tone for how its findings would later be handled.

Pylons in the lower decks#

Little of the station's construction was ever documented in surviving material, and what is known comes mostly from the layout encountered by the crew who reboarded it. The upper part of the structure held the research spaces where the analytical work was carried out. The lower part stored the Marker Pylons, the instruments through which the triangulation itself was performed.

The pylons were the working heart of the place. Running them produced a triangulation sequence that fixed a bearing on the source of the master signal, and the equipment remained functional two centuries after the last technician had walked away from it. Everything above the pylon deck existed to interpret what they returned.

The station was large. When the USM Eudora later came alongside, the Earth Defense Force vessel was dwarfed by it, and destroying the structure required the heavy munitions the ship carried for larger targets rather than its light plasma batteries.

The findings that launched the expedition#

The date of the station's construction was never recorded, but it must have preceded the Tau Volantis expedition by at least a few years, since the expedition was commissioned only after the triangulation work was complete. What Ptolemy Station produced was a location, and that location sent a fleet into deep space.

In 2311 the Sovereign Colonies dispatched a Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces flotilla under Admiral Marjorie Graves, with Major General Spencer Mahad commanding the Legionary forces and Doctor Earl Serrano heading the science effort. The government was not chasing an abstraction. Its resources were failing, its public support was collapsing, and the Council believed the Markers held limitless energy that could be harnessed if only its origin could be understood. The bearing Ptolemy had produced pointed to a frozen world, and the flotilla went there.

What the expedition found on Tau Volantis was not an energy source. It was the Brethren Moons, and the ecology that served them.

Scenario Five#

In 2314 the Sovereign Colonies Council concluded that the discovery could not be contained by any ordinary means and invoked Scenario Five, an emergency directive reserved for an extinction level outbreak arising from a first contact event. Under it, all equipment connected to the Marker program was to be disabled and all personnel with knowledge of the artifacts and the test sites were to be sought out and terminated. Test worlds were blacklisted, ships were left to die in orbit with their crews aboard, and the record itself was purged.

Ptolemy Station was abandoned as part of that execution. Its work had commissioned the expedition, which made its archives among the most dangerous material the government held, and it was left sealed and dark rather than dismantled. The Council did not long outlive the order it gave. The Sovereign Colonies dissolved in the same year, and the Earth Government Colonial Alliance took its place over a record that had been deliberately hollowed out.

The return in 2514#

Two hundred years later the station reentered human knowledge through the work of a single data archaeologist. Damara Carver, assigned to study the artifact held at Marker Shroud 4 on Uxor, reconstructed enough of the purged Sovereign Colonies files to learn that a master signal existed and to identify the triangulation station that had chased it. She was killed on Uxor when the Circle destroyed the shroud, but she had left a recording of her findings.

Ellie Langford and Robert Norton had assisted her research, and after her death they recruited her widower. The Eudora carried the three of them and a detachment of Norton's soldiers to Ptolemy Station. They arrived to find that the Circle had reached the place first and that the interior was infested with Necromorphs. Even so, the pylons were brought back into service and the triangulation sequence was run, giving the group a fix on the source of the signal the Markers had been answering all along.

The fix on its own was not enough to act upon. Reaching the source required a shock beacon and a station capable of deploying one, which set the group's next destination as Keyhole Station.

The last shot#

Ellie Langford did not leave the station for Jacob Danik to inherit. As the Eudora pulled away, she used the ship's heavy ordnance against the structure and destroyed it outright, ensuring that the Circle could extract nothing from the pylons or the research decks above them.

The decision closed a circuit that the Sovereign Colonies had opened. The Council had ordered the station buried to keep the source of the signal from being found, and two centuries later the last people to use it destroyed it for exactly the same reason, only with the opposite intent. Ptolemy Station had done its work twice, and both governments that owned its findings concluded that the safest thing to do with it was to make certain nobody could read it again.