Chapter IIa: Absolute Disaster

Cass scans the report Marbo forwarded and her heart leaps. Their away team has only been missing for hours, well under the two day limit for easy separation of the slugs from host bodies. If any of them have been implanted, their doctors could remove the slugs with relative ease. And the five day extended window means they stand a chance of saving other victims they might come across.

She comms the medbay. "Put in place whatever preparations and safeguards are needed in anticipation of receiving patients who have been infected by the parasites. I want to save anyone that we can, but make sure that you have failsafes in place. I don't want the Potential to be taken over from within."

She shifts in the command chair from the pirate ship. Since it's private Consortium ship, the bridge and its components are mostly similar to what she's used to, but still strange. It's not her bridge. She blinks in surprise at the unthinking use of a possessive pronoun. Either she's growing into the role of captain, or her ego is swelling.

Sitting at the helm and also manning communications, Mezron diligently monitors their course and listens for hails and chatter. Handling engineering and security is Davis, looking solid and focused. She'd decided to leave Kendall on the Potential leading a security team that would deploy if the parasites managed to breach the ship. It was a natural decision, since Kendall had been the only one of them to take down the parasite in the cargo bay.

Cass had given explicit instructions that all bridge and security personnel and senior officers wear sidearms, set to the highest setting. On the pirate ship, all three of their little skeleton crew are armed. Cass waits for word that they are close enough to the location of their away team's distress call to drop out of warp and begin their ruse.

"That's an excellent idea, Doctor. Dr. Belka, set up a specialized, secure medbay in cargo bay three for treating any infected people we bring on board."