I don't do fanfiction, but I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring. This is a DEAD SPACE fic that takes place prior to the game setting.

If I weren’t drifting aimlessly through space I would start this story with “It was a dark and stormy night.” But alas, here I am, bleeding all over my cockpit and out of fuel. Really, I didn’t expect the ship to die before I did. So I sit here, no light for my cigarette. It’s my last one, well, ever probably and I can’t even savor it. Holding it between my lips I wonder how long the oxygen supply will last and why I’m not frantically looking for a way to fix my situation. Oh yeah, my situation. Someone should probably know what happened, even if it is whoever loots my stuff. I can only hope they’re all dead, that I killed them all.

This is where the dark and stormy would be fitting, but there are no storms in space. At least not the kind that add to a story’s atmosphere. There is, of course, the occasional solar storm or electrical cluster… The blood loss is getting to me. Working on the USG Ishimura was never ideal but couldn’t be called terrible, or even bad in most cases. My name is Liam Murphy. I was a maintenance engineer, so I am pretty sure I had it better than the miners. They had to shuttle back and forth to the planet all the time. I hate shuttles. It’s ironic that one is going to be my coffin. As an engineer, I stayed on board. I had nice quarters, but I preferred to stay in the engine room often. That’s probably why I stayed alive to die here.

My mind is wandering again. Just yesterday the ship erupted with celebration. I thought they’d found a mother load on the planet. One that could have justified the illegal mining we all knew about. It was, of a kind, to someone. Those damn Unitologists, claiming that their Marker had been found. What would a relic from an Earth religion be doing so many light years away? Whatever, I thought let the sheep have their Marker if it makes them happy. I just had to devise storage for the damn thing on the ship. Before it was even towed all the way to the Ishimura we were already receiving distress calls from the planet. They were indecipherable screams, nothing human left in them except the pleading and panic.

I devised a lock down for The Marker that was airtight but the Unitologists demanded it be viewable. When I took my concerns to Captain Matthius he sided with the zealots. My team went into overdrive to redesign the chamber. The Marker would still be locked down, no one would be able to get in, but they would be able to see it. We were going to finish just in time for the arrival when that bastard Kyne decided the chamber was unacceptable. He wanted the science team to have access to it. He claimed to be coming with orders from the Captain, I wish I would have double checked that. So we built a hasty airlock. All for nothing, I tell ya. There was something in the tow shuttle. There had to be. We didn’t hear from them before their arrival. When I say arrival, I mean when they slammed into us.