ARRIVAL

Thakur Cross began as an EU-controlled service hub on Mercury’s equator in southern Catullus. Indian raiders later seized the station — but they evacuated the western staff rather than risk open war. The Solar Rail corridor is Russian turf in all but name, and retaliation from state forces (and from the corporate giant who feeds on treaty loopholes — UAC) was the one outcome the raiders refused to invite.

Mercury’s first colonists were Russian. That influence never left: earlier SAK mega-projects raised both the Solar and Northern Railway grids. The MAGLEV Solar Railway grew from a single equatorial track into six parallel lines so heavy freight can always run side by side. Along the same corridor, the high-speed SolarJet passenger system usually moves people — until a power outage at nearby Rudaki Power Station knocks it offline.

Security on site was never a single story. Escort mercenaries who remained after the EU evacuation spiked the station’s supply with a foreign toxin — volatile argent essence meant to trigger mutation. The “experiment” tore through the Indian crew: mummified bodies in non-drying fluid pools, demonic tissue feeding a tree-like growth anchored by a beating heart, an overhead anomaly beaconing toward Hell. Most of those guards fled through EM-blind tunnels under the docks; a few stayed out of desperate humanity. Not every badge on the roster was party to the crime.

S. Holmes is one of the exceptions. Before leaving Thakur for the private sector, he befriended Amar, with no idea that Amar would die not long after Holmes’s farewell. The player finds the aftermath of that departure: a station already dead before the killer wagons dock, then lockdown when an eastern-bay car brings unknown attack and the Slayer’s 610-meter Russian behemoth fills the North Service Bay’s eight docks (five quarantined on arrival). With SolarJet down, the Slayer continues on foot across the surface toward Rudaki.