Tau Volantis

Tau Volantis was a planet roughly three quarters the size of Earth, located in the HR 8799 system, where two million years ago an alien civilization sacrificed themselves to stop a Convergence Event. The world was incorrectly presumed to be the source of the Markers and the Necromorphs, first by the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces and centuries later by Ellie Langford's team. In truth it was the place where a Brethren Moon had been frozen mid-Convergence and left broadcasting a distress signal across the stars.

The frozen sacrifice#

Two million years ago Tau Volantis was the home of an unidentified race of aliens. It was a planet of water, and its inhabitants appeared semi-aquatic in nature. Much as the inhabitants of Earth would later do, the aliens discovered a Black Marker and began to create copies of the device to harvest its energy, coming to worship the artifact and falling under its thrall. The combined power of the Markers and the inhabitants who had succumbed to their control triggered a Convergence Event.

Those few who resisted the call of the Marker created a Codex meant to work in conjunction with a massive terraforming machine. Their effort was only half successful. The halt of the Convergence Event flash-froze the planet into a frozen wasteland and rendered the species extinct, but it left the final stage of the Necromorph life cycle, a sentient Moon, incomplete and semi-dormant in orbit. From there the frozen Moon used the Markers across the galaxy to broadcast a distress signal to any who could understand it, hoping to lure organic beings to the planet so they would disable the machine and let Convergence finish.

Discovery by humanity#

Two million years later, in 2311, the human government known as the Sovereign Colonies discovered that the signal carried by their own Markers came from the lost planet. Facing defeat in the Secession War, they sent an expedition to find the source of the seemingly unlimited Marker energy. By then an icy backwater, Tau Volantis was a harsh world of frequent snowstorms, where strong winds, freezing temperatures, and deep snow often stalled travel altogether. When the expedition unearthed the corpses of the aliens, changed by the Necromorph organism, it was not long before the expedition itself fell under the Markers' influence.

When Major General Spencer Mahad lost control of the situation in 2314, the Sovereign Colonies council authorized Scenario Five, a first-contact protocol that entailed the death of all parties involved with the expedition to keep any hostile force from reaching Earth. To preserve what the team had learned, the researcher Earl Serrano and his people halved the body of an alien specimen named Rosetta and hid the pieces, while Serrano's own attempts to finish the machine were prevented by Mahad and cut short by an accident that left him unable to walk. The expedition was lost, and two hundred years later the derelict Sovereign Colonies flotilla still floated above the planet in ruins, its abandoned outposts, research facilities, and way stations scattered across the frozen landscape.

Rediscovery and the end of the Moon#

In 2514 the data archaeologist Damara Carver pieced together the fragmented Marker research left behind by the Sovereign Colonies and rediscovered the forgotten planet. Her findings became a target for the Church of Unitology's Circle, and she was killed in their search for the information, but enough reached EarthGov Captain Robert Norton and Titan Station survivor Ellie Langford to guide an effort to destroy the source of the Necromorphs. Langford's push to reach the planet led Norton and Sergeant John Carver to enlist USG Ishimura survivor Isaac Clarke. From orbit they assumed Tau Volantis was the Marker homeworld, but exploration of the Sovereign Colonies' data revealed it had instead been the center of a Marker uprising that was halted two million years earlier.

The conflict over the planet culminated in the death of the Tau Volantis Moon, but the victory was incomplete. Although dead and no longer broadcasting its own signal, the Moon had absorbed enough biomass to contact its kind before it died, fully awakening the Brethren Moons. When Isaac and Carver woke after surviving their fall to the surface, the dead Moon lay largely intact atop the planet, and the Necromorphs that still roamed the frozen world remained active, now sustained by the long-range signals of the newly awakened Brethren.

A drowned world beneath the ice#

Long before the Black Marker landed, Tau Volantis was an aquatic world with vast oceans covering its surface. Beneath the caverns and cities raised by its former inhabitants ran fathomless gorges and trenches that, once the planet froze, became towering cliffs and mountains. When the aliens activated their machine, the whole world was flash-frozen and plunged into an endless snowstorm. Despite its apparent lack of trees and natural sources of oxygen, the atmosphere of Tau Volantis remained breathable to humans even in its frozen state.