Unknown Plasma Saw: mining cutter of the first Ishimura outbreak

The Plasma Saw was a handheld mining tool carried aboard the USG Ishimura during the vessel's final operation over Aegis VII. When activated, it projected a stream of suppressed plasma that held the shape of a blade, and it cut with a precision that pointed to careful industrial engineering rather than any martial purpose. Its makers and its model designation went unrecorded, so the tool entered the histories of the outbreak under no formal name. What was remembered instead was its work. When the Necromorph infestation swept the Ishimura, the engineering specialist Samuel Irons, a devout follower of Unitology, discovered a crate of the saws and carved a path through the creatures with one, and the security detail of Chief Alissa Vincent abandoned their issued firearms to follow his example.

Design and function#

When switched on, the Plasma Saw projected a stream of suppressed plasma that took the shape of a blade similar to a chainsaw's. Unlike a mechanical saw, the plasma edge remained active and extended for as long as the tool was powered, collapsing only when the operator deactivated it. A flashlight was affixed to the top of the housing, a practical fitting for work in the dark shafts and unlit compartments of a mining operation. In its general outline the tool bore a vague resemblance to the 211-V Plasma Cutter, the standard handheld cutter of Concordance Extraction crews, which suggested a shared lineage of plasma based mining equipment.

Little else about the saw survived in the record. No manufacturer, model number, or technical specification was preserved, and its intended role had to be judged from its performance. The clean, precise cuts it made through Necromorph tissue pointed to a tool designed for controlled carving rather than crude demolition, most likely the cutting of reasonably sized rocks that a single miner could manage alone. Whatever its designers intended, the outbreak aboard the Ishimura gave the saw a different purpose.

A divine discovery#

The saws entered the history of the Ishimura's fall through Samuel Irons, an engineering specialist and committed Unitologist serving aboard the ship. As the infestation spread, Irons came upon a crate of Plasma Saws stowed just down the hall from the place where the ship's P.C.S.I. security team made their first stand against a horde of Slashers. To Irons, whose faith taught him to read meaning into the catastrophe unfolding around him, the find was a divine discovery, an instrument delivered at the exact moment it was needed.

The security team's stand was going badly. Chief Alissa Vincent had already lost officers to the creatures, and conventional firearms were proving a poor answer to enemies that shrugged off gunfire; an earlier Slasher had required a sustained hail of bullets from the entire squad to bring down. Irons came to the team's rescue with a saw in hand and sliced the attacking Slashers apart with little apparent effort. In doing so he demonstrated the lesson that would define the fight against the Necromorphs from that day forward: the creatures died faster when they were dismembered, and a cutting tool severed limbs far more reliably than any sidearm.

Adoption by the security team#

The rescue changed how Vincent's survivors armed themselves. Seeing what the saw had done in Irons' hands, the team set aside their issued firearms and took up Plasma Saws from the crate, judging the tools far more efficient against the infestation than their service weapons. Irons himself joined Vincent's crew, and the group fought their way through the ship toward the Bridge, where they would learn that Dr. Terrence Kyne had overridden the gravitational controls and set the Ishimura on a course to crash into Aegis VII.

The adoption of the saws marked one of the earliest recorded cases of survivors deliberately rearming with mining equipment to fight Necromorphs, a pattern that recurred throughout the later outbreaks, when engineers and colonists turned cutters, saws, and other industrial tools of the Concordance Extraction Corporation against the dead.

The killing of Officer Shen#

The Plasma Saw's record aboard the Ishimura was not only one of rescue. Among Vincent's team was Hansen, a P.C.S.I. security sergeant whose mind gave way under the strain of the outbreak and, it was suspected, under the influence of Marker 3A, the artifact the Ishimura had raised from the planet below. Hansen grew unresponsive in combat, and on the Hydroponics Deck he broke entirely. Startled by a rolling barrel, he began screaming, drew his pistol on his own comrades, and drew the attention of every Necromorph in the area until Officer Shen tackled him to the ground and told him to pull himself together.

After being stabbed repeatedly by a reanimated infant, Hansen lost whatever remained of his reason. Grinning, he turned his Plasma Saw on Shen and sliced her in half vertically, a killing witnessed in horror by Vincent, Ramirez, and Irons. He then turned on Chief Vincent herself, pinning her down and forcing the saw toward her head. Vincent held him off long enough for Officer Ramirez to destroy Hansen's head with his sidearm. The episode showed the tool's terrible efficiency cut both ways: a device that let one man hold off a horde could, in a broken mind's hands, butcher a comrade in a single stroke.

Later traces and related tools#

The saws passed out of the record with the deaths of those who carried them. Irons himself died soon after the Hydroponics Deck incident, taking Vincent's place to distract the Necromorphs so that a group of survivors could escape, and was overwhelmed, killed, and remade by an Infector before the eyes of Vincent and Ramirez. When Isaac Clarke later reached the Hydroponics Deck during his own ordeal aboard the ship, the corpses of both Hansen and Shen had vanished, most likely claimed by the infestation.

The Plasma Saw did not remain unique. A similar and possibly related tool, the SH-B1 Plasma Saw, appeared later in the hands of the agent known as Vandal on Titan Station, where it served the same double duty of mining implement and Necromorph weapon. Together with the 211-V Plasma Cutter it resembled, the unnamed saw of the Ishimura belonged to a family of plasma based mining tools whose makers never imagined the work their equipment would be turned to when the dead began to walk.