Released just a few months after Roche Limit concluded, but set 75 years after the end of that mini-series, Roche Limit: Clandestiny is focused on a disparate crew of hired to deliver a mysterious cargo to what is supposed to be the abandoned colony of Dispater.
And when I say "disparate", I mean it. Elbus is a professional soldier, same for Lee, Maggs, and Colt (most of whom don't live long enough to demonstrate much in the way of personalities), who seem to have worked with Elbus for a while. But Kim is some sort of botanist or biologist, Sasha is a scientist (I can't really discern her area of expertise beyond that), and Stockton. . . I have no idea what he brings. He and his twin brother had some sort of business about giving people back dreams, which I suspect means they were able to replicate Recall without Ford's help. But the brother is dead, and some rich uncle sent Stockton on this delivery run. I think the scientists were requested or recruited by Moiratech, but under what pretext is unclear. "We have a ship delivering. . .something to a colony that's been abandoned for decades. Want to ride along and poke at stuff?"
As it turns out, Dispater had changed a lot in 75 years. There are trees now. An entire forest on a planet that couldn't support life, and at least one animal, vaguely boar-like, though Charles draws it like it's exterior is made of shifting plates or interlocking pieces. The city is abandoned, save for massive shadow things that swirl and shift like liquid and seem generally unconcerned by bullets. Don't care for fire, though.
And in a small compound on an isolated edge of the colony are two beings. One is an AI constructed from the memoirs of Langford Skaargred (although there's a flashback that suggests Langford's body drifted into the anomaly, but it shows him with his helmet on, and Roche Limit showed him removing it as his air ran out, so maybe that was just a broader example of people being chucked into the Anomaly) and placed in a robot body. The other is the first artificial human, Danny, or "Hello Danny," since that was his answer when asked for his first words (he was looking in a mirror at the time.) Danny supposedly killed the child of the Moiratech CEO and was to be executed, but was sent here instead.
Which I don't really get. OK, the people running Moiratech have long since been either co-opted or replaced by the shadow-things from the other side of the Anomaly. Danny is, due to his lack of a soul, immune to the corrosive effects proximity to the Anomaly or the materials of Dispater (which I assume are irradiated or otherwise altered by radiation from the Anomaly.) But if he was sentenced to be executed, why send him to someplace which is theoretically no danger to him, but puts him close to the center of your plan?
There's also the fact the forest apparently shows people what they want, which Danny says is the worst thing possible, because people almost always want more. As he puts it, he's seen dozens (because this is the 13th cargo run) of people enter the forest, and not one ever wanted the cure for cancer. They want wealth, they want power, they want revenge on their perceived enemies.
I was going to say that was a bizarre turn after the first mini-series, where Recall sent people's minds back to a particular memory and let them relive it, while rotting their soul. But if the things everyone wants are based on what they perceive as past injustices or mistakes, then it's still them being wrapped up in their past. Only now, the desire manifests in the physical world, somehow. Stockton sees his dead twin (and is killed by him.) Kim sees the wife and child she lost, Sasha sees the husband and child who died in a car accident while she was off working. They regret, they want to do it over, do it right this time, but all they can really get is a facsimile. Which both of them acknowledge and ultimately reject, to the creatures' displeasure.
The Skargred-bot wants them to focus not on trying to escape back to Earth, or even destroying the ship they've unwittingly brought the final piece of with them, but on killing the monster. Which he says will definitely get them all killed in the process. It feels like, with how he describes each past crew as trying to have circumvented this "truth", that it's related to what the forest does, granting people what they think they want or deserve, based on their perception of reality.
But if, as Danny says, humans shift reality to fit what we want it do be - and boy does that feel accurate - why is Skargred-bot's "truth" anything more than the reality he wants to make happen? You could say he's a machine, and not prone to the foibles of humans, but he's an AI based on the memoirs of one particular human. His base is human, specifically an idealistic human who bankrupted himself trying to build this colony, then killed himself rather than fight to fix it. Skargred was definitely a person who saw what he wanted in the world around him, and couldn't deal with what happened when his blinders finally fell.
As it turns out, Sasha must agree, because she stays on the planet to try and confront the monster, while Elbus, Colt and Danny swipe the fresh spaceship. Sasha appears to die, and the others ditch a plan to return to Earth in favor of, attacking another ship that appeared from somewhere. None of this is aided by the fact Charles seems particularly rushed. The art gets rougher and simpler, linework thicker and jagged in places. Characters' faces begin to get oddly elongated or barely visible. Battaglia colors things like the light is being filtered through a kaleidoscope, strange streaks that almost overwhelm the page.
The comic ends with Elbus, Colt and Danny piloting a ship into the Anomaly and the last panel is a bunch of outlines of ships, colored the same as the surrounding sky, flying, somewhere. Towards the cast? Away from the cast? Are the yellow streaks engine trails or weapons? No idea. Especially since Danny theorizes the monster they're contending with is the Anomaly, then they fly into the Anomaly, and come out in the place with all the ships. Which would seem to suggest the shadow creatures come through the Anomaly, not that they're part of the Anomaly.
But there's still one more mini-series to get through. Will it help everything make sense? If my vague recollections of reading 10 years ago are anything to go by, no.
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