If you’ve seen one interstellar slave market, you’ve seen them all.

  Can’t really believe that I just thought that. This game is too real, and yet too different from real life. Makes it easy to get lost in things, and just go with the flow. And I guess that’s what I’ve been doing, except for a couple times when I took preemptive action to make sure I had cards to play if I needed them.

  At any rate, the statement wasn’t false. The slave market on Charybdis Station was remarkably like the one on Choson Ring. The auctions were postponed because of the volatile situation (no one wanted to draw more people to the station when it took time to carefully check every passenger and piece of cargo offloaded), but the market itself was still open for business. I just hoped we would be able to find enough skilled crewmen to man the Shadowdancer. Of course, I’d settle for a handful of skilled crew, and a group intelligent enough to learn.

  Now, instead of paying for the slaves, I could always have gone out hunting and ‘found’ enough freshly collared slaves from some of the local ships that I could crew the Shadowdancer, but the Confederacy was stricter with who could be made a slave than the Empire. Part of the way they enforced those restrictions was by mandating that slaves be registered, and part of the registration included a requirement to have a licensed slave trader sign off saying the slaves were legally collared. You could get around it, sure, but that was annoying to have to jump through the hoops, and it drew the wrong kind of attention. ESPECIALLY when bodysnatching nanite plagues were running around.

  With that thought in mind, Cali, Carissa, Nyna, and I entered the slave market the morning after I purchased Shadowdancer. I’d paid for the ship out of my own funds, but the slaves were going to be bought out of the Corporate account. Mainly because I’d spent the majority of my personal funds getting the damn ship, and I wanted to keep a heady reserve, in case I really needed something. Call it Murphy Insurance.

  The first eleven purchases rounded out the crew of the Shadowdancer nicely, when one counted Nyna’s abilities in the mix. Some of the purchased slaves were of questionable provenance (I would have to have a talk with that merchant about the illegal nanites before he got on board), but the collection of victims and rogues was somewhat to be expected given where they were and the current situation.

  A quick conversation with the former Marine, and his wife and two children were loaded onto the Raven, once they’d been cleared of nanites, and we’d set them up someplace on Dimiya. That made the Shadowdancer’s new security chief and chief gunner very happy. He was also the only Indentured rather than Enslaved person I picked up for the crew, but I counted it as my good deed for the day. He’d be mine to command for five years, after which he’d be free and we could renegotiate his service at the next port of call.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Jeffery Blue would be the XO of the Shadowdancer. Nyna had my trust, and she might have the title, but she wasn’t a seasoned starship captain. Blue would help her along, and take care of the logistical nightmares one might not immediately consider as a new captain.

  The knelfi doctor was apparently a rising star in her medical practice, back before she’d picked up a nasty opioid habit. Doing surgery while under the influence was a bad thing, and when someone had died on her table because of it, she was picked up and enslaved by her insurance company. She was actually serving her enslavement on a corporate ship until pirates captured her, and sold her to the market.

  The rest of the group was filled out either by captured pirates, those captured by pirates, criminals, or a young boy who had been sold by his mother after she remarried to a younger man. Of course, that probably saved his life, since he used to live on the main continent. Kid had the Hotshot title, as well as pilot training, so I was looking forward to see what he could do.

  Of course, if I was going to have a raider in my group, I needed some raiders! Or at the very least a team that could do all sorts of jobs for the Shadowdancer while she was away from me and my crew. These were all criminals, of one stripe or another, but I figured I’d give them a chance to prove themselves. I promptly named this group my Valkyries.

  All this cost 172085 credits for the crew, another 437000 for the Valkyries, and an extra 50000 to kit out all of them with ship suits, armor, and weapons, so they’d be ready to fight in the very likely event that we saw combat with someone or something that didn’t care for us. Only reason the equip cost was so low is that Spacey, as an Indenture, still had his own gear, which was as good as anything sold on the station.

  Since the ship was crewed entirely by slaves and indentures, that meant the profitsharing went a little different from normal crews. For the Shadowdancer, I decided that it would split four ways. As the Owner, I would get a share. Another share would go to the Ship, for repairs and resupplies. A third share would go to the Company directly. And the fourth share would be for the Crew. Spacey would be entitled to 5% of that share as part of his indenture, held in escrow until his indenture was up, but the rest would be under the control of Nyna, to manage as she saw fit, though she would have to send expense reports to Raven, just to keep her honest.

  Now, however, I needed to make some money to get my mind off the literal millions of credits I just dropped on all of this. And what better way to make money than by picking up some jobs at the bar? With two ships headed to the knelfi world of Dimiya, we were able to get quite a few jobs set up, for both the Raven and the Shadowdancer. There were a couple cargo hauls, with expensive items people didn’t want to be caught up behind the quarantine, and a couple evacuation jobs for Raven, but Nyna and I were pleased to see several bounty hunter and pirate hunting jobs, which the Shadowdancer gladly took.

  Naturally, I was going to scan the hell out of any of the packages or people I brought on board the Raven, but this looked to be a very profitable trip to Dimiya, if we could just escape the quarantine, and not get infected by the Legion. And with Shadowdancer watching our backs as we played bait for pirates, this would be a good chance for the crews to work together, and see the full potential of my new ship.

  If we didn’t die horribly, that is.

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