Tau Volantis Debris Field: graveyard of the S.C.A.F. flotilla

The Tau Volantis Debris Field was a vast band of wreckage hanging in low orbit above Tau Volantis, all that remained of the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces flotilla dispatched to the frozen planet in 2311. The fleet was not destroyed by an enemy. It was scuttled by its own command under the Scenario Five directive, its ships shattered or crippled by hundreds of thousands of homing mines released from within the flotilla itself. For two centuries the field drifted in a surprisingly stable orbit, its mines still armed, until the ships of Ellie Langford and Isaac Clarke blundered into it in 2514.

A fleet built to be destroyed#

The Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces flotilla arrived at Tau Volantis in 2311 to investigate the source of a Marker signal traced to the ice planet. From the outset, the expedition's planners understood that setting foot on an alien world carried the risk of infection by an unknown contagion, and they treated their own ships as one of the most dangerous possible vectors for its spread. A fleet that carried the infection home would be worse than a fleet that never returned at all.

The S.C.A.F. therefore built a failsafe into the expedition itself. In the event of a full scale, uncontrollable outbreak, the most prudent course of action was judged to be the disabling or outright destruction of the entire fleet. To carry out that order, the flotilla was accompanied by a battleship designed for mine warfare, a vessel with the capability to destroy every other ship in the formation. Its standing duties included monitoring the rest of the fleet, presumably watching for signs of contagion among the crews it might one day be ordered to kill.

Scenario Five and the scuttling of the flotilla#

The failsafe was invoked in 2314. The declaration of Scenario Five, the Sovereign Colonies directive covering an extinction level outbreak, set the destruction plan in motion. The mine warfare battleship released its full complement into the flotilla, hundreds of thousands of homing mines loosed among the ships it had spent three years escorting. Most of the vessels were destroyed outright. The rest were damaged so badly that they were rendered useless as interstellar craft, stranded in orbit with no way to carry the infection beyond Tau Volantis.

The mines served a second purpose beyond the initial slaughter. Left active in their thousands, they deterred any future visitors from nearing the infected fleet, ensuring that salvagers or rescuers could not board the wrecks and become carriers themselves. The quarantine was designed to outlive the people who ordered it, and it did.

Among the vessels connected to that final order was the CMS Shackleton, left in the field under the Scenario Five command and believed to have been a warship armed with tracking and homing mines. So little of it survived that it did not even register on the navigational guides of the field's transit stations, its presence marked only by scattered sections of hull plating adrift at the field's edge.

The wrecks that remained#

The field that formed from the scuttling was of substantial size and settled, unexpectedly, into a stable low orbit rather than raining down onto the planet below. Amid the drifting spacecraft parts, a number of damaged but relatively intact vessels endured. The largest was the CMS Roanoke, the orbital command platform that had served as flagship of the Galactic Expedition, which came through the mining largely whole and hung derelict among the wreckage of its fleet. Near it drifted the CMS Greely, a research vessel known to the fleet's transit network by the alias "Think Tank", and the CMS Brusilov, aboard which S.C.A.F. researchers had been studying a Red Marker recovered from the planet's surface before Scenario Five ended the work, disabled the ship's life support and left the artifact abandoned with its dead crew. The CMS Terra Nova also lay within the field for a time.

The wrecks were not the field's only contents. A number of SK-1P stations remained functional two centuries after the fleet died, small transit points that still allowed movement between the scattered zones of the flotilla. Flight recorder satellites drifted among the debris, preserving fragments of the expedition's final records. And threaded through all of it were the mines, a large number of them still active and still homing, patient sentries over a graveyard.

The arrivals of 2514#

For two hundred years the quarantine held. Then, in 2514, the field claimed its first new victims. Ellie Langford's expedition, following the Tau Volantis trail in search of a way to end the Marker threat, emerged from shockspace close to the debris field and fell victim to the mines. With their ship lost, Langford, Austin Buckell and Jennifer Santos were forced to find refuge aboard the most intact vessel available to them, the derelict CMS Roanoke, where they hid among the wreckage with Buckell and Santos nursing injuries.

Weeks later the USM Eudora followed. Carrying Isaac Clarke, Robert Norton, John Carver and the crewmen Mark Rosen and Locke in pursuit of Langford's last known position, the Eudora exited shockspace close to the field and was almost immediately set upon by tens, if not hundreds, of automated mines. The ship was damaged beyond saving and destroyed, a demonstration of both the sheer number of mines the battleship had deployed and the lethality of such small weapons against a full sized vessel. The survivors escaped the Eudora's destruction and took refuge aboard the Roanoke, searching the dead flagship for Langford's team and for any means of reaching the planet's surface.

The field, in the end, gave up the road down itself. Aboard the Roanoke the combined survivors located the CMS Crozier, a scrapped S.C.A.F. transport shuttle that had once served the crew of the Terra Nova, and restored it for the descent to Tau Volantis. The minefield that had guarded the dead fleet for two centuries had destroyed two more ships, but it failed in its final purpose: the survivors it stranded went down to the frozen world the quarantine had been built to seal away.