Answers to Two Questions from The Second Ship.

A fan recently asked two excellent questions from The Second Ship.  I answer them here:

1. What exactly happened when Donald Stephenson stepped into the first ship?” I know he assimilated himself into the Kassari Collective mission after that day but how? There were no headbands that we know of, that being the competing tech, or was he blasted or injected with nanites by the ships damaged AI?

ANSWER: This is total backstory, but when Donald Stephenson went inside the Rho Ship for the first time, despite being badly damaged, the ship’s neural net activated the stasis field generator and used it to inject Stephenson with the Kasari form of nanites … a much more advanced version than what Stephenson was later able to reverse engineer and test on Priest Williams and Raul, prior to releasing it for distribution in Africa. Those nanites gave him the ability to interact directly with the ship’s neural net. It’s also why he was able to override Raul’s commands at the end of Immune.

2. How was the crew sucked out of the second ship yet their headbands were not on their heads? If they were piloting the ship attacking the first ship it seems like they would have had their headbands on …

ANSWER: Very good catch on the headsets and I probably should have explained this bit of backstory in The Second Ship. The Altreian crew didn’t actually need the headsets to tie into the ship while they were on board. However, whenever they left the ship, they put on the headsets to allow them to tie into it remotely. That is why they weren’t wearing the headsets when they were sucked out into space when it depressurized.