USG O''Bannon

The USG O''Bannon was a First Responder ship dispatched to Aegis VII three weeks after communications were lost with the planet and the USG Ishimura. Behind its public role as a stabilization vessel, the O''Bannon carried out a covert EarthGov operation to recover surviving fragments of Marker 3A. The mission ended in catastrophe: a Necromorph outbreak born from the recovered shard, and the deliberate destruction of the ship and most of its crew.

The covert mission#

For just over a year before the mission, Nolan Stross had served as Chief Research Scientist aboard the O''Bannon while secretly working for EarthGov''s investigation into the Markers. Because he was already part of the crew, the government arranged for the First Responder to be sent in after the loss of the Ishimura, with Stross tasked to recover pieces of Marker 3A and study the recovered fragments. The planetside crew and engineers were briefed first on a public mission to stabilize Aegis VII, and only afterward told of the true objective to recover the Marker.

The Aegis VII disaster#

The O''Bannon launched several stabilizers onto the unstable planet, and search teams descended to seek out remaining fragments of the Marker. One team member found a shard and began hallucinating about his lost daughter. In the grip of a psychotic break, he saw his companions as monsters threatening her and destroyed one of the stabilizers in the ensuing struggle. With its stabilization compromised, Aegis VII exploded, killing nearly all of the planetside teams. The resulting shockwave and debris struck the O''Bannon, severely damaging the ship and disabling its ShockPoint Drive.

The outbreak#

As the crew focused on damage control and repairs, the recovered shard manipulated Nolan Stross into using the body of a dead crew member in his study of the fragment. The experiment produced the first Necromorph aboard, and the infection spread rapidly through the ship until only a handful of survivors remained. Led by Captain Caleb Campbell, the survivors reached a temporary safe point and concluded, on Stross''s theory, that the only way to destroy the shard was to cast it into a star or a reactor core. They fought their way to the engine room and threw the shard into the ShockPoint Drive. A discharge of energy from the shard destroyed every Necromorph aboard, leaving four crew members alive.

Destruction and the survivors#

An EDF Marine rescue team from the destroyer USM Abraxis boarded the O''Bannon, recovered the survivors, and took them into custody to study the effects of their exposure to the Marker shard. The O''Bannon was then destroyed by the Abraxis''s cannons. Chief Medical Officer Isabel Cho refused to cover up the incident and was lobotomized and publicly cast as a terrorist responsible for the attacks on the Ishimura, the O''Bannon, and the Aegis VII colony. Stross was placed in stasis for further study. Nickolas Kuttner, the man who had suffered delusions of his daughter on the surface, died when another hallucination led him into the vacuum of space, and Alejandro Borges was shot in the head after his interrogation yielded nothing further of value to the research.

Notable spaces#

The O''Bannon''s bridge survived the destruction of Aegis VII but was badly damaged, and its crew held out there for a time before being overrun. Stross''s laboratory, set above the morgue, was where he secretly studied the fragment and created the first Necromorph; corpses in the morgue below soon began turning under the Marker''s signal. The cavernous engine room, vital to any escape, was crippled in the impact and later became the site where the shard was destroyed and the survivors were captured. The captain''s cabin held the shard early on and was where Campbell, succumbing to its influence, began to question the mission.