Humanity's Greatest Mecha Warrior System

Once the first group was hired and put in charge of finding more staff for the world ship, the number of requests from refugees aboard freight vessels to remain on board skyrocketed. Nearly everyone had taken in some survivors of a destroyed ship during the most recent battles, and the freight vessels were made for a spartan crew of twenty or fewer members. Even taking in a dozen was a major strain on their resources, unless they could be held in a cargo hold, which wouldn't be much of a living if they had arrived with nothing but what was in an escape pod.

That was making it both effortless and incredibly difficult at the same time for the recruitment team. They didn't want to turn away anyone, but not all the people who wanted on board had skills.

"Are we accepting refugees and secondary personnel, or just the thousand that we are hiring, Commander?" One of the Giants asked Max, holding a clipboard in his hand.

"We might as well take whoever wants to stay. While it is still a military focused vessel, having families here, and unskilled workers for the odd jobs that normally go to androids is still fine. The Androids are incredibly skilled, but they also don't complain about menial tasks, so they're just all around good staff.

That doesn't mean we can't take the others who want to come, just put them on a secondary list for residents and not top staff." Max decided.

"Any limit?" The Giant asked.

"Don't fill more than a third of the ship. Leave us room to move refugees, in case a planet needs a complete overhaul. We're equipped with the latest terraforming technology now, and Creeping Darkness will be able to make over an entire planet in under a month, no matter how bad of shape it's in.

So, we will have to house huge numbers of refugees from time to time. There is a plan in the files for that, actually, dense rack bunks with common eating areas to put a hundred times the crew complement into the cargo bays.

It would be an incredible drain on the ship's resources, but it is feasible, and it would let us move entire planets if their world became uninhabitable." Max explained.

Just the thought of hundreds of millions of people crammed like sardines into the cargo holds was enough to make the crew members shudder in revulsion. But if the options were that or a dying planet they couldn't survive on, they would gladly take in everyone they could.

Once they spread the news that they had ten million empty spaces, plus the thousand top skilled places for official crew members to join the Terminus Trading Company, the communications net went wild. The thousand official member spots were an impressive draw, but millions of permanent homes aboard a new World Ship were far more important at the moment.

The fact that it wasn't some no - name crew that managed to stumble upon a world ship, or find the funding to obtain one, made it even more incredible to the Reavers.

Max did his best to hide his amusement at the chaos that the team had unintentionally caused for themselves, as they were left in charge of the entire process, with Sylvie helping them out as requested.

They had no experience with the true capabilities of an AI system, so they were underutilizing her skills by quite a bit, but that was also part of the learning process. Either they would get it soon, or they would hire someone who did.

While they spent every waking hour trying to sort through applications, Max focused on the renovation of the ship. Sylvie had originally intended for the vessel to be more military based, but if they were going to bring so many regular civilians on board, that was going to have to change to make Creeping Darkness one large city.

"Focus on shops and amenities. These people might not have trade skills that will do well for a ship's crew, but they can run or work at shops, restaurants and such. Your ship can be a tourist destination while we work, filled with unique shops that we can use to resupply damaged worlds. Plus, that will give you countless people to observe, if you've inherited Felicity's tendency to study the lives and interactions of those aboard." Max suggested to the AI avatar.

"Will do. I am not as interested in the study of human interactions as Felicity is, but I am greatly interested in logistics and supply. Getting that many shops set up and ready to run will be a monumental task, and assigning people to operate them will be even more interesting as an efficient use of resources study."

Max almost felt bad for the people who were about to be assigned tasks based on their personal history and not some aspirational dream, but Sylvie was right. That was the most efficient way to get things going, and then they could change up later.

Her thinking was still very militaristic, as that was how her initial programming had started, and in the military there was no unemployment, no slacking or laying about unless you were physically or mentally incapable.

So, once they were here, Sylvie would find work for every single person, and she would make sure that all the tasks got filled.

That part of the recruitment Max had left entirely to her. The few dozen members who were already here were only in charge of getting the people on board, with a minimal background check to make sure that they weren't blacklisted or tagged as undesirables.

The easiest way to do that was to check their documents. If there was no secondary verification of their history, the documents were likely forged. It wasn't a hard task for hackers to get information into the system to make a new identity, but once the AI started to interact with other computer systems, the lack of supporting evidence for the altered documents was a big red flag.

Unless the whole planet was lost, or they were very young, there should be something, somewhere, that mentioned them.