Uxor: the colony where the Circle opened its war

Uxor was a colony planet of the Earth Government Colonial Alliance and the site of Marker Shroud 4, a shielded research installation built over a Marker held in government custody. Human settlement on the world reached back to the Sovereign Colonies era, and by the twenty sixth century Uxor carried a residential population, an EarthGov garrison and a research staff whose work was never disclosed to the people living beside it. In 2514 the Unitologist splinter movement known as the Circle, commanded by Jacob Danik, destroyed the shroud in a single strike. The Marker beneath it woke, and the Necromorph outbreak that followed killed the family of Sergeant John Carver and pushed him into the expedition that would eventually reach Tau Volantis.

A world of ice and old claims#

Uxor was an unusually exact twin of the human homeworld in the crude terms that colonial survey work recorded. Its mass was measured at 5.9736x10^24 kilograms and its mean radius at 6,371 kilometers, figures that matched Earth almost precisely. There the resemblance ended. The surface was ice, broken by hard angular relief of the kind found on Tau Volantis, and colonial life on the planet was conducted inside built structures rather than out in the open.

Human presence on Uxor began under the Sovereign Colonies, the world government that oversaw the first wave of settlement beyond the Sol system. That government fell in 2314, and its holdings passed to EarthGov along with everything it had buried. Uxor therefore belonged to a category of colony that EarthGov inherited rather than founded, an older claim whose records ran back into an administration that had spent its final years destroying its own paperwork.

By the twenty sixth century the colony supported an ordinary civilian population with a residential district, alongside an Earth Defense Force garrison and a research establishment. Most residents had no idea what the government was keeping on their planet.

Marker Shroud 4#

Marker Shroud 4 was an EarthGov facility on the Uxor surface, and it existed to hold a Marker. The installation was built around a large artifact using a containment design already proven on the Luna Marker at the New Horizons Lunar Colony, a structure that governed how much of the artifact was exposed and kept its signal from bleeding out into the surrounding area. The shroud was not decoration. It was the only thing standing between the colony and the effect that had emptied every other Marker site in recorded history.

The design belonged to a wider EarthGov program. After the USG Ishimura incident at Aegis VII exposed a Sovereign Colonies era artifact, the administration restarted work on harnessing Marker energy and built shrouded test sites across its colonies. Uxor's was numbered four. Each one made the world that hosted it a target once the Circle began treating government experimentation as heresy.

Security fell to the Earth Defense Force. Sergeant John Carver of the Special Operations branch was assigned to guard the facility and moved his family to the colony, a posting that combined the tedium of perimeter patrol with the isolation of a site nobody was permitted to discuss. His temper did not survive the arrangement intact. At one point he argued with the captain of the EDF unit stationed on Uxor and smashed the officer's vidscreen, an outburst that cost him leave he had promised his family.

Damara Carver and the purged archive#

The research side of Shroud 4 was staffed by specialists brought in to study the artifact, among them Doctor Damara Carver, a data archaeologist and John's wife. The couple had met the former Titan Station heavy pilot Ellie Langford years earlier on Haven Prime, and had lived for a time on Keyhole Station before the Uxor assignment came through.

Damara's work turned quickly from the artifact to the paper trail behind it. Digging through fragments that predated EarthGov entirely, she recovered material on the Sovereign Colonies and their research into the Marker replicas, then followed it into evidence of a government cover up on a scale she had never encountered. She enlisted Ellie and Captain Robert Norton to help her gather more. What she assembled from the reconstructed files was the existence of a master Marker signal originating somewhere in deep space, and the location of the triangulation station the Sovereign Colonies had built to trace it.

She kept all of it from her husband, certain he would try to stop her, and recorded a message to be found if she died. Her marriage suffered for the secrecy and for John's inability to settle into civilian life, and their son Dylan grew up largely in her care while his father worked.

The strike on the shroud#

The Circle came to Uxor in 2514. Danik's operatives moved through the colony without being detected by Carver or by the EDF units posted there, and their preparation was methodical. A scanner covering the approaches was sabotaged. Carver found it during patrol, and shortly afterward found a long sight laser triangulated on the Shroud 4 test site.

The designation was being run for a strike from orbit. The USG Perseus, a Planet Cracker class mining vessel stationed above the planet, had been taken over using Danik's own user identification, and from it Danik observed the colony and painted the target. The missile that followed destroyed the shroud and the structures around it, stripping the containment away and leaving the Marker standing open on the surface. Carver tried to warn his wife and son before the impact and did not reach them in time.

The outbreak#

The exposed Marker activated moments later and released a surge of electromagnetic energy across the colony. Electronics, machinery and communications went down together. The surge was strong enough to kill the flight control system of a ship in orbit, which fell out of the sky and destroyed most of the residential sector where Damara and Dylan lived. Carver, on the ground and without a working transmitter link to his family, could do nothing to stop it.

A Necromorph outbreak followed the activation and turned on the survivors. Sheltering from the creatures, Carver came upon Danik arguing with his own men about their plan, and was betrayed by his position when Damara's voice came slurring over the transmission calling his name. The Circle knocked him down with concussion rounds, tortured him, and learned from his records that his wife was one of the Marker scientists they had come for and that the couple had a child. Danik made no secret of intending to kill them both. Carver broke free when the Necromorphs reached the building and fought his way to the room where his family had been. He found Damara and Dylan already reanimated as Slashers, and killed them himself.

What Uxor set in motion#

Carver was preparing to end his own life when a communications device in the room began calling for Damara. He answered it, and Ellie Langford told him what his wife had spent her final months uncovering. Both Carver and Norton came off the planet alive, and within a short time the three of them were following Damara's reconstructed data outward from the colony.

For the Circle, Uxor was a demonstration. Its method of stripping a shroud rather than assaulting a garrison became the template for the campaign that followed, and colony after colony went dark as the movement breached containment sites the way it had breached this one. For EarthGov it was a failure that could not be explained away, since the outbreak had been caused by the government's own artifact sitting under a government facility on a civilian world. For the small group who left it, Uxor was where a data archaeologist's private research stopped being an academic matter and became the only surviving map to the source of the signal.