Chapter IIa: Absolute Disaster

Marbo enters the airlock, once the robot and the solitary infected stasis field are in place, he will have the airlock sealed from the inside, one of the security officers waiting, phaser ready, and prepared to hit the PURGE AIRLOCK button that they were told to never ever ever press.

"Greetings, slug man. I am a fish boy" Marbo introduces himself to the alien in the most relatable way possible. It isnt the most friendly, but it gets the facts laid out and gets the hardest part of conversation done.

I will be transferring you into this robot, as an expiriment. If it works, your species will have a body that requires no slaughter of civilized races. If we do not succeed, then your legacy will be written down in the Textbook of Medical Discovery, popular amongst all space fleet doctors. You will be famous either way! What great news. When i lower the stasis field, are you ready to... uhh.. burst from the chest... or however you get out of there, and get into this robot?"

"Marbo does not believe a dead octopus would provide necessary resources for the parasites to thrive. Live octopus perhaps, but not a dead one.

Cass sighs. It had seemed a little too good to be true. "Okay - other options," she says to both Marbo and Moira. "Is there anything else we can offer this species that doesn't have a likely end result of turning them into a super-race that enslaves the universe?"

I'm just combining your LF with your success to give you a bunch of information:

Your scan shows the following results: The parasite is around 30cm/1ft in length with powerful mandibles and retractable nerve-like tentacles that it can use to link into a host's nervous system. Their bodies are generally slow and weak but have the ability to launch themselves by burning a huge amount of energy at once. They can eat into a host to infect it and then heal the target's wounds before it dies to take over the body. This appears to be their original mode of doing infecting other creatures but you suspect that by now they would have invented a way to do it by surgery which would be much less stressful on both the host and the parasite.

You also realize that even without a host, the parasite is able to communicate, even if only in clicking noises, which, however, can be translated by the computer.

Space Carp, anybody?