USG O'Bannon

The USG O'Bannon was a First Responder ship that was dispatched to Aegis VII three weeks after communications were lost with the planet and the USG Ishimura.^{[note 1]} Their mission was secretly to investigate and acquire any surviving fragments of Marker 3A for EarthGov.

The O'Bannon confirmed that it was in orbit of Aegis VII, followed by a confirmation from the landing party that a fragment of the Marker was recovered after which all contact with the O'Bannon was lost. It was later destroyed by the USM Abraxis after only four survivors were recovered. Eventually, all four survivors were either executed or imprisoned.

Mission to Aegis VII[]

Prior to the mission to Aegis VII, Nolan Stross had been working as the Chief Research Scientist aboard the USG O'Bannon for a little over a year. During that time, he was also clandestinely a part of EarthGov's secret investigation into the Markers. As Stross was already a part of the O'Bannon's crew, the government arranged to have the First Responder sent in after the loss of the USG Ishimura; Stross was secretly tasked with retrieving pieces of Marker 3A with the help of a team of engineers and conduct research on the recovered fragments.

After the O'Bannon launched several stabilizers onto the planet, search teams were sent to the surface to seek out any remaining fragments of the Marker. One of the team members eventually found a shard of the Marker and started hallucinating about his lost daughter. Moments later, he had a psychotic breakdown and took the other team members to be monsters harming his daughter, causing the destruction of one of the stabilizers in the struggle. As a consequence, the unstable Aegis VII exploded, killing almost all of the planetside teams. The resulting shockwave and debris hit the O'Bannon, severely damaging the ship and disabling its ShockPoint Drive.

Untitled-1 — The damaged *O'Bannon* in a debris cluster left from Aegis VII.

As the O'Bannon's crew focused on damage control and repairing the ShockPoint Drive, the Marker shard recovered from Aegis VII manipulated Nolan Stross into using the body of a deceased crew member in his study of the shard. The Necromorph infection quickly spread to the entire ship, leaving only a handful of survivors fighting for their lives.

Led by the ship's Captain, Caleb Campbell, the survivors reached a temporary safe spot and were at a loss about what to do next. During the discussion, Stross postulated that the only way to destroy the shard was to cast it into the heart of a star or a reactor core. The group decided to fight their way into the engine room and throw the Marker shard into the ShockPoint Drive. They eventually succeeded with only four crew members remaining. All of the Necromorphs onboard ended up being destroyed by a discharge of energy emitted from the shard when it was thrown into the reactor core.

Shortly thereafter, a Marine rescue team from the USM Abraxis found the remaining survivors and took them into custody. They would later be interrogated to determine the effect of their exposure to the Marker, while the USG O'Bannon was destroyed by the Abraxis.

Dead.Space.Aftermath — The *O'Bannon* shown in the cover story of the Aegis VII disaster.

One of the survivors from the O'Bannon, Dr. Isabel Cho, refused to cover up the incident and join the research on the Marker. She was subsequently lobotomized and portrayed as a terrorist responsible for the series of "attacks" on the USG Ishimura, the O'Bannon and the mining colony on Aegis VII. Nolan Stross was put into stasis for further study while Nickolas Kuttner, the man who experienced delusions about his daughter on Aegis VII, died when the hallucination of his daughter led him into the vacuum of space. Another team member, Alejandro Borges, was shot in the head after his interrogation as he provided no further value in the research on the Marker.^[1]

Trivia[]

The ship's name is most likely a reference to Dan O'Bannon, a screenwriter working primarily in the science fiction and horror genres, whereupon he wrote the script for the horror classic Alien.