USG Ishimura

The USG Ishimura was the flagship of the Concordance Extraction Corporation and the first Planet Cracker-class ship. Commissioned in the mid-25th century, it was the first vessel of its size to be fitted with a ShockPoint Drive for large-scale commercial and deep space mining, and it was named after Hideki Ishimura, the astrophysicist who invented that drive. For more than sixty years it was the pride of the CEC fleet, until its mission to Aegis VII in 2508 brought a Marker aboard and a Necromorph outbreak destroyed its crew.

The pride of the CEC fleet#

Commissioned in 2446, the Ishimura was considered a symbol of mankind's innovation. As one of the first capital starships outfitted with a ShockPoint Drive, which made faster-than-light travel almost trivial, it was designed to mine and process asteroids and even small moons with remarkable efficiency. It was the first ship capable of the pioneering "scan and catch" technique for harvesting mineral-rich asteroids, using enormous gravity tethers to lock onto a body and pull it into the ship's collection bays for smelting. Without the resources the Ishimura gathered, Earth and its colonies would still have been embroiled in the Resource Wars.

Sixty-two years after its launch, the ship remained in remarkable condition, its equipment upgraded and its interior spaces retrofitted over the decades. It was still the largest planet cracker the company operated and the first ship called whenever a difficult deep space project required skill and experience. Even so, the CEC had come to consider it somewhat obsolete and planned to decommission it in 2509, after its thirty-fifth and final planet crack and sixty-three years of service.

The Aegis VII mission#

In 2508, after the CEC learned that its illegal mining colony on the resource-rich planet of Aegis VII had accidentally discovered Marker 3A, the Ishimura was dispatched to crack the planet and recover the artifact. News of the discovery also reached the Church of Unitology, one of the CEC's majority stakeholders, which used its influence to post high-ranking Unitologists in key positions aboard the ship and secure the Marker for itself. Benjamin Mathius, a member of the Church, was chosen as the ship's new captain, and the CEC's Executive Director of Colonial Mining Operations, Warren Eckhardt, joined the crew to oversee the mission.

Upon reaching Aegis VII, Mathius ordered the Marker, all related data, and the corpses from the wave of dementia-driven violence in the colony moved to the Ishimura. With the artifact secured in the Cargo Bay and placed under study by Chief Science Officer Terrence Kyne, the crew began planet crack operations. As the crack proceeded, the ship briefly lost all contact with the colony, and when contact returned the crew found the colony being slaughtered by unknown attackers while a strange fleshy growth began spreading across the Ishimura. Survivors who fled the colony by shuttle were fired on by the ship's defense cannons for violating a no-fly order, and only two shuttles reached the ship.

The outbreak#

Unknown to anyone, an Infector had stowed away aboard one of the surviving shuttles and infected a corpse it carried. The newly created Necromorphs escaped into the ship's ventilation system and overwhelmed the Flight Deck crew before security could respond, and an Infector reached the Morgue and converted at least twenty corpses. The creatures spread through the vents while extensive communication failures kept word of the danger from reaching most of the ship, leaving deck after deck unprepared and almost devoid of life. A blanket lockdown on the tram system did little, since the Necromorphs traveled freely through the vents, and it only made it harder for survivors to move between decks.

Order collapsed. The most heavily contested areas became the Engineering and Medical decks, but with the security force dead, organized resistance disintegrated. Chief Security Officer Alissa Vincent sacrificed herself to launch a distress signal into space, unaware that the Marker had manipulated her into luring more people to Aegis VII with a hallucination of one of her teammates. An unknown force jettisoned the ship's complement of escape pods after Captain Mathius was killed, trapping the survivors aboard, and Dr. Kyne disengaged the engines to keep the ship from carrying the Marker back to the Church, which sent the Ishimura into a slow, fatal descent toward the planet. By the late stages of the outbreak, the only significant group of survivors was a cluster of Unitologists on the Crew Deck gathered around the Marker under Dr. Challus Mercer.

The Kellion and the Valor#

It was at this point that the USG Kellion arrived in response to the distress signal. With much of the ship covered in Necromorph biomass and its life support, automated systems, and artificial gravity failing, a malfunction during the automated docking sequence sent the Kellion crashing onto the Flight Deck and stranded its repair team aboard. The Ishimura's offline engines had let the planet crack load begin pulling it toward Aegis VII, but Kellion engineer Isaac Clarke prevented its destruction by reactivating the engines and the Asteroid Defense System cannons, all while uncovering the truth behind the outbreak and the Church of Unitology's involvement.

The ship then survived a second disaster when the USM Valor, a Destroyer-class warship sent by EarthGov to cover up the incident and retrieve the Marker, was boarded by Necromorphs and crashed into the Ishimura's underside, lodging itself in the Ore Storage Deck and demonstrating the planet cracker's durability. The Ishimura was last seen in the Aegis system as Isaac departed for the planet's surface with the Marker aboard the ship's Executive Shuttle USG-09.

Wreck, recovery, and final fate#

After the destruction of Aegis VII, the Ishimura was thrown out of orbit into deep space. EarthGov falsified the ship's fate, claiming it had been lost to a terrorist attack, and both the government and the CEC commemorated it to keep the public from panic. The derelict drifted within the Aegis system for weeks until an illegal salvage group known as the Magpies, transporting minerals with a ShockRing, accidentally caught the ship in its event horizon. The salvagers stabilized and boarded the Ishimura, finding it ravaged by asteroid impacts, leaking oxygen, and coated in the soupy sludge left when the destruction of Marker 3A had dissolved the Necromorph infestation. When the salvagers recovered shards of the Marker embedded in the hull, the artifacts' influence drove them to madness and violence, and as EarthGov forces closed in the Necromorphs reanimated and slaughtered nearly all of them.

EarthGov eventually secured the Ishimura and took it to Titan Station, where it was docked while crews carried out a thorough cleanup and refit meant to erase all evidence of the outbreak. The infestation dissolved once more after the Marker shards were removed. Over the three years that Isaac Clarke was held on the station, the technicians cleaning the ship reported strange noises and the sense of being stalked, with one believing the ship was cursed. During the 2511 outbreak on Titan Station, Isaac returned to the still-incomplete ship to use its gravity tethers to drag the station's Government Sector back into reach, restoring the Gravity Centrifuge and crossing the heavily infested Medical Deck to reach the Bridge before escaping by pod. When the Sprawl was destroyed by a reactor meltdown shortly afterward, the Ishimura is presumed to have been destroyed in the blast.

The ship itself#

The Ishimura was a vast vessel organized around its mining function. Its Mining Deck, the largest on the ship, was where asteroids and planet fragments were broken apart and smelted, while the Ore Storage Deck below Hydroponics held the extracted minerals. The Hydroponics Deck served as an internal farm that fed the crew and produced oxygen, the Engineering Deck maintained the ShockPoint Drive and the Gravity Centrifuge that kept the ship stable, and the Bridge controlled navigation and communications from a holographic atrium. The residential Crew Deck housed sleeper bunks, a mess hall, and the Executive Shuttle, while the Medical Deck contained research labs, a Morgue, and the offices of its scientists. A single-rail tram system linked the decks, and a complement of escape pods and mining shuttles served the ship until the outbreak left it stranded. Standing over a mile from stern to bow, the Ishimura was deliberately built to resemble an industrial structure of exposed ironwork and creaking steel, the look of an oil rig adrift in space.