Chapter IIa: Absolute Disaster

It takes you a long time but eventually you're able to crack the code that the pirates' computers use. It appears to be written in a trinary code that corresponds to their clicking language. Using the data from the universal translator, you are able to uncover the following information:
- The location that has been travelled to the most that you have found is an old abandoned Consortium research station that now serves as the Pirate Queen's palace and center of operations.
- You find what appears to be hierarchical charts outlining a simple command structure. The top position is named as "The Queen" with no name given. Other positions are ordered by importance but there are no ranks given, only names. The computer was unable to translate names so they are still given as trinary symbol combinations.
- You see lists of minerals, metals and other resources as well as names. Some of these names you recognize as traders, some regular ones, many black market.
- There don't seem to be any security logs or recordings of positioning on the ship at any point.
- The code they use is not able to interpret non-trinary code, meaning that it would not be able to detect a foreign virus or malware that is introduced into the computer if it is written in your language. However, such a virus would also not be able to influence the workings of this code.
- There are no medical files on the parasites on board this ship but you do notice that the parasites are always referred to as the crew while the hosts are referred to as meatbags, hosts or feeders.
- You find old logs by the real captain and his crew but they end a few weeks ago and the pirates apparently have not kept logs.
- One old file mentions something about "Unstable creatures, shifting their appearance, unsuited for attachment" as well as a location tag of a star system outside of explorer space, far beyond the pirates' main base of operations which is already far from Consortium civilization. There are no further details that relate to your search however.

While your search does not yield any direct hits on sentient parasitic species, you find information about the Grall, a symbiotic species where humanoids are joined with a symbiotic life form. The two combine into one person and after the death of the hosts the symbiote lives on in the next host. While the relationship between host and symbiote ja very different there than it appears to be with these parasites you can still draw some parallels: The symbiotes' lives are valued much higher than the hosts because they live through many lifetimes. Similarly, the parasites do not seem to care too much about their host bodies. The symbiotes are also able to perform changes in the way their hosts' bodies operate, from changing hormone levels and organ operations, to over longer time even manipulating bone structure. It is reasonable to assume that the parasites would be capable of similar things, possibly even more than the Grall symbiotes.