I'm 90% sure I know the answer, but may as well ask now that I can.

If, after all the other junk, John goes back up to the Natha ship and does a few laps trying to see if it will talk to back to him -- would any of it answer his technopathy? He'd just be trying to get it to tell him what's going on, so would any of it give him anything? Even if it's like, unreadable error messages or garbled alarms or spooky ominous warnings.

Or just a slap to stop him trying. That's fine too. People regularly want to slap him, he gets it.