Amazon Apocalypse 8: Chapter 5 (Patreon)

Sometime throughout the day, the other stalls had all edged away from us, leaving us alone in a clearing. The people walking the streets seemed to step around us as we passed, as though an invisible barrier had formed.

I could have overcome it all by putting a big mountain of gold on the table, but that would have gone against our objective to build a small organization from grassroots and scale it into something worthy of an Architect House. Hiring hundreds of people here and now would only hurt things.

Most of the people we took in were young, weak, and desperate. They weren't exactly quality candidates for the upper management of a new Architect House either, but that was alright. I would find out what these people were made of by putting them to the test.

Jalen was the first person who signed on to our crew. He was followed by several dozen others, which was eventually enough to make a crew.

By the time we closed up shop, I was satisfied with our numbers. I didn't choose the biggest or the toughest crew I could find. Instead, I picked people down on their luck but with a lot of potential.

"I can tell a lot of you are curious why I selected you. Few of you are qualified for the positions I'm going to give you. That's alright, because nobody on this station is qualified for the roles you will hopefully someday fill." I looked out over all of them.

The group was about a hundred strong, both men and women, and mostly young. Some still had pimples on their faces or looked like they'd run away from home just last week.

"What exactly did we sign up for? Nothing in the paperwork we signed said what we'd be doing, other than that it involved being crew aboard a ship," Jalen asked.

His nervousness had died down somewhat after my display of strength, but it was obvious that he wanted to get off this station as soon as possible. He had slept aboard the ship, which made others assume he was already a crew member, which in turn had made him something of a spokesman for all the new hires.

I shared a glance with Seraphyne before replying. "That's a good question, Jalen. But it isn't one I'm going to answer yet. Not until some of you prove yourselves worthy of it. Now, here's your signing bonus. A full month's pay. Buy yourselves whatever you need for a lengthy stay aboard a ship, but be at the docks tonight! Oh, and a word of advice to all of you. Stick close to your new crewmates to avoid getting robbed. Good luck."

I distributed a single adamantium coin to each of them. This hadn't been anywhere in the paperwork, and it came as a surprise to all of them. If I'd mentioned a signing bonus, I would undoubtedly have gotten ten times the number of new hires. But I'd held it back for that same reason.

I'd made plenty of the magically saturated tungsten coins back in Crownhill, so it was nothing to me. But to someone at E-Grade or C-Grade, it was the fortune of a lifetime dropping into their hands.

I had no doubt that most of these guys would be fleeced of their newfound wealth by a slick shopkeeper or an alleyway mugger. Others would realize they'd just been given enough wealth to fix whatever problems they had and still have change for the teleportation ride home.

But those who made it back to us would have been tested for the first time. There would be many more to follow.

***

Jalen was naturally the first to return, mostly because he never left. He was too nervous about whoever or whatever was after him and so stayed close to us the whole time.

"You don't have any personal supplies to pick up? Or items to purchase?" I asked curiously.

Jalen shook his head. "There's nothing I need here."

I shrugged and closed my eyes, but I kept my extradimensional senses open and realized one of the rings on Jalen's finger contained a spatially expanded pocket.

That was interesting. Cultivators preferred storage rings. Bags of holding sewn into pockets were the extradimensional storage solution of choice through most of System space.

It wasn't enough to pin him as a cultivator, though. Enough storage rings had been taken as war loot that wearing one was fashionable in some circles.

I'd been ignoring the young man who'd come to us for safety until now, but he must have had a story about how he ended up in this backwater station.

"I suspect you've got a story. Want to share?" I asked Jalen.

I cracked an eye open again to see him biting his lip and shifting uncomfortably.

"Oh... it's just... uh, some gambling debt. I racked up quite a bill at the casinos here," Jalen replied shiftily.

"Yeah, you and half a dozen of your crewmates. Why didn't you run to pay it off with your signing bonus?" I eyed him suspiciously.

"It was a lot of money." Jalen's fingers twitched as he watched me carefully.

"Fair enough."

I shrugged. It was a lie, but I wasn't going to pry. Sometimes it was more fun to let a story unfold in due time.

I turned my attention to our other crew members from afar. Even halfway across the station, if I focused, I could still hear them.

"Just give me a fix! This coin has to be worth something," one of my new crew members begged as he scratched his arms anxiously.

Interesting. If the voice was the one I remembered, it wasn't one I'd identified as an addict. He'd had none of the usual signs.

"Can't. The cargo ships still haven't arrived. But I'm told the next delivery will be a big one with plenty of sacrifices. Just be patient and wait for them to be processed. I'll hang onto this shiny little coin of yours in the meantime," replied a shifty-sounding voice. Just hearing it was enough to tell that the speaker was untrustworthy.

I shook my head at the drug deal turned robbery. It was bound to happen to at least a few of them.

A few hours later, most of the crew returned. Some came back in good spirits with their arms full of bags and more travel supplies than would fit in the crew cabins of an ordinary ship. Thankfully, the crew cabin aboard the Orraculum was generous.

Others hadn't been quite so fortunate in their shopping trip. They were returning empty-handed after being robbed or scammed out of their newfound fortune. A few wouldn't have returned at all if Seraphyne hadn't kept an eye on them. Those who should have died in an alleyway with a slit throat or caved-in skull woke up thinking they'd just been knocked unconscious.

The crew boarded the Orraculum with considerably less grace than I'd hope for in the long term, but we got everyone aboard and settled into their rooms without issue, then departed the space station. I returned to the living quarters I shared with Seraphyne as soon as we were clear of the asteroid field.

"What's that?" Seraphyne asked as she leaned against her door wearing a light white lounge dress.

"The sign for the first mate's chambers. I ripped it off the door and am swapping it with the cabin boy sign," I explained as I fixed the new sign where I wanted it to be.

"Smart, I suppose. Though the ship could have swapped the sign just as easily. I just added an office to your chambers, by the way. But before you see it, I'd like to hear your plan again. Why did we go to the trouble of recruiting a bunch of low-level people to crew this ship? The Orraculum is fully capable of flying itself."

I let myself in and sat down before answering Seraphyne's question.

"We don't need a ship crew. Not pirates, not bounty hunters, not soldiers, or anything like that. But we do need people. The fastest way to get your house up and running again would have been to just lend you some of my people, and I still plan to do that for more technical roles. But you need at least a few people both loyal to you and who know their way around the place. That's where these guys come in."

"So the whole hiring a crew thing is just cover, then? What are we even going to be doing with all of them while we figure out who's worth keeping?" Seraphyne asked.

I leaned back and smiled.

"Whatever we want. And I already have a few ideas on how to fix this place up a bit."

These pirates, that planet, and everyone else didn't know it yet, but their future had already been decided.

***

"Rise and shine, one and all! Today's your first day as space pirates!" I shouted over the intercom, instantly waking our entire crew from a sound sleep.

There was much moaning and groaning as half-awake crewmen opened doors.

"Space pirates? There are other kinds of pirates?" Jalen asked as he rubbed bleary eyes.

Fortunately, nobody seemed overly concerned at being labeled a pirate. Given where I'd picked them up, they had a good idea of what they were in for when they signed up to join this crew.

"Who are we robbing?" asked another new crew member.

"Good questions one and all. And the answer to that is nobody. Not yet. The ship needs a proper pirate makeover first, followed by the rest of you. This here is a bucket of paint. And these baggy things next to it are space suits. We're going to paint the ship black. Everyone's getting a turn going spaceside!"

I handed out brushes like issuing rifles, and soon did the same with space suits. The recruits reluctantly put the uniforms on, stretching out the arms and legs and moving around awkwardly in the puffy suits.

"What about you, sir?" Jalen asked.

I shook my head. "Don't need one. First group, get to painting! Nobody's allowed back aboard until they've emptied their paint bucket."

What followed was the sorriest, saddest excuse for painting I'd ever witnessed. Most of our new crew spent their time clinging to the hull with terrified expressions on their faces as they barely spared a moment for one nervous brushstroke here and there.

A few were bold and daring enough to get the job done. Others simply dumped their buckets out when they thought I wasn't looking. Or at least they tried to. Dumping out a bucket of paint was easier said than done without the help of gravity.

I was watching carefully, and what I didn't catch wound up on the ship's cameras or under Seraphyne's careful gaze. We wanted to see who kept working to the best of their ability, even when they thought nobody else was watching.

When all was said and done, Seraphyne used the Orraculum's own technology to finish the job. I'd let the crew think they did it, but I didn't want something that looked half-assed, even if the fresh paint was only temporary.

It wasn't long before I had another challenge for the crew.

"Alright, crew, next up we need to learn to board a ship! It just so happens there's a dead junker off our starboard bow. I want you all running spaceside and storming the place like it's our next target!"

"What's starboard?" asked one of the new crew.

"In space? Who knows! Anyway, get to it!" I shrugged and pointed randomly in different directions. With the spatial compression aboard the ship, it was impossible to know where the sides were from within it. Looking at Seraphyne's console, I suspected they wrapped around the ship's core, making outside upward in any room.

The crew by now knew how to zip up their space suits for a spacewalk, and soon most of them disembarked. Getting off the ship was tricky business for most of them. While painting, their boots had been magnetically locked to the hull. Now, though, the crew had to freefloat toward another vessel.

It was dicey work, and I was certain there were a dozen better ways to do it. Using the Orraculum's onboard teleporter would have been by far the easiest. But technology so good it really was magic felt unfair, and I didn't want it ruining my fun.

I had to save about half the crew as they missed the wreck I had them targeting, but after giving them an extra chance or ten, I got most of them onto the derelict.

"Alright, crew, if there's anything useful aboard that ship that isn't nailed down, grab it and bring it home! And if there's valuable stuff that's nailed down, take out the nails and bring it home too!" I said directly into the minds of the entire crew on currents of mana.

I knew from experience that it was disconcerting. If any of the crew were well versed in what higher grades were capable of, the demonstration would have been enough to peg me as an A-Grade. But if they'd had such knowledge and hidden it until now, they deserved a leg up on the rest of the competition.

"Why are we practicing boarding a ship manually?" Seraphyne asked me in a whisper.

"It's building character!" I replied like a proud parent. "Also, I loaded the derelict ship with valuables. I want to see who takes what and whether or not they're going to report it. In the future, members of your house might have access to considerable funds. We don't want anyone prone to embezzling them."

The derelict ship had clearly been abandoned long ago, but I had reconstructed one room in the back to make it look like an old vault. It wasn't long before a group of crew members found it.

"This looks like a vault! We should tell the others!" said one crewman.

"Not so fast. Let's tell the others after we've cracked the thing open. I figure we deserve a little finder's fee. The captain and first mate don't need to know," replied another. There were eager nods all around.

I shook my head. When I'd used Seraphyne's replicators to build their space suits, I had made the radios in them as intuitive as possible. The radios seemed to work through proximity, and I'd let the crew believe they were short-range.

In truth, all radio signals were sent back to my cellphone before being rebroadcast to whoever's headset was nearby. Which meant I could snoop on what everyone was saying without issue.

I caught a dozen conversations discussing how to hide loot from Seraphyne and me when they returned to the ship. I noted down the names of all involved parties.

"Why is one list named 'XP fodder'?" Seraphyne asked me.

"Just in case..."

I continued training the crew in this manner for several days at what they no doubt thought was a grueling pace. I had planned to keep things up a while longer, but after the fourth training exercise, I'd already ruled out more than ninety percent of our new recruits for refounding Seraphyne's house.

Part of our problem was probably hiring from a known pirate den, but I figured there'd at least be a few honest people caught up in dirty business. And there were, but there were far fewer of them than I would have liked.

I thought back to my own people and how we'd forged Crownhill through blood and struggle. And suddenly I realized that was the key. These tests of mine were too artificial to forge bonds of brotherhood. They needed something more intense.

And if what I'd heard was what I thought it was, I could check two things off my list with one raid. With any luck, I would be tempering this crew and picking up my next one at the same time.

"Seraphyne, prepare the ship for orbit around that planet. I heard a rumor back on the station that I want to follow up on. If it's true, we have our first pirate raid."