Chapter III: Reunited

Lorq, Marbo, you go into the lab together and Lorq looks over the massive amounts of data sent over by the parasites as well as the attempts at formulating a vaccine that Marbo has already done before the meeting. He hadn't been able to get it to work but Lorq sees some small areas for improvement and the two spend an hour or two working out the best possible vaccine they can come up with.
Unfortunately, what you manage to come up with does not work as you had wished it would. You can basically flood your bodies with poison that is mostly harmless to most humanoids. The toxins will stay in your body for a day and if a slug enters the body of someone infected by these toxins, it should get poisoned and die before being able to link up to the host's nervous system. However, these toxins are not completely harmless to the humanoid hosts. There are a lot of side effects that can occur to the hosts, especially if taking them multiple days in a row. Those go from light nausea which can conceivably already occur during the first time using it all the way to death if the toxins are ingested too often in a row

"None of your crewmembers, commander. A scientist we captured on another ship. I do not know her name but if you want, I can find out and let you know."

Cass:

The captain seems to notice your discomfort with this but does not comment on it. "She is Second Generation, a direct offspring of the queen. That might not mean much to you but it does to our people."

"That is unfortunate", the captain responds. "but given your initial experiences with our people, understandable. If we want to find a permanent agreement between our races, this step has to be taken eventually. But maybe not today and maybe not by you." After listening to your proposal, he say: "That seems reasonable. If you could have your chief engineer send over the details of this procedure before we initiate it, I would appreciate that very much. If you wish to have the exchange take place in this system, I will have a ship bring in our captives and we can proceed as soon as they arrive."

"Understood" He does not seem like this information is particularly surprising or relevant to him. "We will stand by for the time being. If the orders from your superiors affect our deal, please inform me as soon as possible."
Unless you want to add anything else, he is going to end the connection.

A few uneventful hours pass, giving the crew some time to relax or continue working on their projects. Although you're in space and there is no real day and night cycle here, the internal clocks of the Potential show that it is way past the regular end of all of your shifts by this point and you can feel yourself getting exhausted. Some of you might want to sleep during the wait for the other ships to arrive, some might push their way through the exhaustion and keep working.

The parasites do not contact the Potential, even after a second ship, almost identical in design to the Four arrives in the system. You can see shuttles going back and forth between the two ships and you can pick up encrypted communications between the ships.

Eventually, Cass receives a message from the bridge, informing her that the Consortium spaceship USS Dove will arrive shortly in the system and that its captain has already sent out a communications request, something which should not be necessary since you would be assumed to talk to him as soon as he arrives anyway.

Not expecting anything major to happen until the new Consortium ship arrives, everyone lies down to get some rest. Cass, Alex and Lorq go to sleep immediately. Moira stays up for a while to work out the last flaws with their ship linking plan but when she can't get any results, she also decides to take a break for now. However, she takes a big sip of "vision inducing" liqueur before going to sleep, hoping it can provide her with some insight into the situation.

.

Moira wakes up, drenched in sweat and disoriented for a moment until she realizes where she is. She feels lightly hungover but nothing she can't handle.
It feels like she hasn't slept at all but according to the shops clock the period of rest is almost over and she has to get ready to return to duty.
The others also wake up and return to duty.