Sterling: The Engineer Who Answered a Cry for Help

Sterling was an engineer of the Concordance Extraction Corporation stationed on Aegis VII, and a member of the Extraction Dig Team that lifted Marker 3A from its pedestal in 2508. In the hours before the operation he spoke as a skeptic, brushing aside the Unitologists' stories of a Black Marker buried on Earth. In the hours after it, he walked through a colony already sliding into violent madness, left his crew to answer a voice calling for help, and died at the hands of his own teammate Sam Caldwell, who looked at Sterling and saw only an enemy.

An engineer of the dig team#

Nothing survives of Sterling's life before Aegis VII. By 2508 he was one of the Concordance Extraction Corporation's engineers assigned to the Aegis VII Colony, the illegal mining settlement raised over the deposits of the Aegis system, and his name was on the roster of the Extraction Dig Team, the crew tasked with the most delicate operation in the colony's history. Deep in the crust, CEC survey teams had uncovered an artifact unlike anything on record, a twin spiraled monolith that the colony's logs catalogued as Marker 3A. The find electrified the settlement, and the corporation resolved to pull the object from the ground intact.

The extraction was run by Cooper, the CEC manager who served as chief of the dig team and supervised Sterling alongside Sam Caldwell, Egan, Banks, and Bear. When the operation was ready to begin, Sterling was called in with Sam and Egan to assist at the excavation itself. The three arrived late, to Cooper's brief frustration, and the chief cautioned his engineers to treat the artifact carefully, warning that Dig Foreman Colin Barrow would not take kindly to any damage done to the find. Like the rest of the crew, Sterling went to the site in a standard miner's RIG, carrying a 935 Bonder Rivet Gun, the ordinary tool of an ordinary working day.

The skeptic and the Black Marker#

The journey to the excavation produced the only record of Sterling's own convictions. Looking over the newly uncovered artifact, Egan remarked that it looked just like the Black Marker, the relic the Church of Unitology taught had been found on Earth centuries before. Sterling was unmoved. He replied that the Black Marker, and the claim that it had ever been located on Earth, was more of a fanciful story told by the Unitologists than a matter of record, and he added that even if such an object were real, a Marker on Earth was far more plausible than one buried on a remote rock like Aegis VII.

It was the reasoning of a practical man, and it was wrong on every count. The object waiting in the pit was exactly what Egan feared it resembled, a copy grown from the Black Marker's own pattern, and Sterling was standing on the remote rock where it had been hidden. Within hours the artifact would answer his skepticism directly.

The shock wave and Megavent 24#

When the dig team hauled Marker 3A off its pedestal, the artifact flashed brightly and released a powerful shock wave through the colony. The pulse destabilized Gravity Tether 16, one of the great anchors of the mining operation, and threw the settlement's systems into disarray. Cooper split his crew to contain the damage. He kept Banks and Bear with him to move the Marker indoors to proper storage, and he sent Sterling, Sam, and Egan down into Megavent 24 to repair the failing tether.

The three engineers descended into a colony that was no longer the one they knew. En route to the tether they ran into miners and engineers gripped by a violent state of dementia, colonists who attacked on sight and could not be reasoned with, and the crew was forced to kill several of them simply to keep moving. The Marker's signal was already working through the settlement, and the men and women it touched first were becoming the maddened attackers later remembered as the crazed colonists of Aegis VII. Sterling's own name would come to stand among them.

A voice in the dark#

On reaching the level they needed, the crew heard someone who appeared to be trapped. Sterling separated from Sam and Egan to assist whoever was calling, and the team never stood together again. Sam and Egan pressed on toward Gravity Tether 16 alone, and the descent broke them both in different ways. Egan sank into paranoia, insisting that death itself was calling to them, and eventually turned on Sam, who shot his friend to survive. Sam repaired the tether, but by then he was seeing vanishing Unitology script on the walls and hearing voices, among them that of Lexine, and he could no longer tell the living from the phantoms his mind supplied.

Whom Sterling found in the dark, and what became of the trapped voice he went to answer, was never recorded. What is known is where he ended up. Near the lift that Sam was fighting toward, a lone figure crossed the hallucinating engineer's path. Sam saw a hostile and put him down, and only when the fight was over did the attacker resolve into someone he knew. The man he had killed was Sterling.

Death and the answer#

Sterling did not die instantly. With his last breaths he spoke to the teammate who had shot him, and his words made plain that the Marker had reached him too. "Death... is the answer, Sam... you'll see... we can't... stop it..." he managed before he died. The skeptic who had scoffed at Unitologist scripture ended his life speaking like a man converted by the artifact itself, echoing the fixation on death that had already consumed Egan and so many of the colonists around them.

Whether Sterling had truly attacked Sam, or whether the dying engineer was simply one more figure that Sam's hallucinations painted as a threat, the record does not resolve. Both men were under the influence of Marker 3A, one seeing enemies where friends stood, the other whispering of death as a doorway. Sterling's death was among the first in the catastrophe that followed, the chain of madness and slaughter that ran from the extraction site through the colony and up to the USG Ishimura, where the Necromorph outbreak born of the same artifact would consume ship and settlement alike. He was a working engineer who went down into Megavent 24 to fix a tether and stopped to help a stranger, and the colony's history recorded him as it recorded so many others of that day, as one of the deceased of Aegis VII.