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territory. Illegals were inclined to feel cornered when they were threatened near Billingate; therefore they were predisposed to fight back.
    This shipyard did not need secrecy to protect it.
    So pirates with enough credits went to Billingate to purchase vessels — or recreations. Illegal gap ships went to Billingate for repairs. And any brigand who could get there went to Billingate to fence his or her loot. Thanks to its location, Thanatos Minor provided an ideal clearing house for the raw materials, technologies, and organic tissues which the Amnion craved. The human species was betrayed more consistently, more often, and more profitably there than anywhere in human space - or human history.
    For this reason, Billingate had grown populous -
    UMCPDA estimated between four and seven thousand inhabitants - as well as rich.
    For the same reason, it had also become known.
    The stories which reached the ears of private citizens and corporate officials, station Security officers and UMCP ensigns, sequestered researchers and GCES
    Undersecretaries alike, had a specificity which the tales of bootleg shipyards generally lacked. Because Billingate had been built entirely by illegals for illegals, it had good cause to be regarded as 'the sewer of the universe'.
    Internal crime was violently interdicted because it reduced profitability; but every vice known to humankind thrived there, restricted only by the available credit of its participants. Slavery was common. Chemical dependencies of every kind could be readily nourished.
    Sacrificial prostitution prospered for the amusement and enrichment of the men — and women? — who owned nerve junkies or null-wave transmitters too reduced to defend themselves. Bio-aesthetic, -prosthetic, and -retributive surgery enhanced or destroyed human capabilities.
    It was better to be dead than poor on Thanatos Minor.
    Over this morass of human desuetude and corruption, a man called simply 'the Bill' presided on the strength of his even-handed malice, his political acumen (that is to say, his ability to gauge the motivations and breaking-points of his people), his talent for protecting the shipyard's profits by making sure that he got paid first; and on the authority he gained by being perceived as Billingate's
    'decisive' by the Amnion. It was he who ruled Thanatos Minor, settled disputes, punished offenders, kept the books - and made Billingate function with some approximation of efficiency, despite the manifold weaknesses and eccentricities of its populace.
    Rumor suggested that he had been surgically provided with a double phallus so that he could penetrate women in both nether orifices simultaneously.
    Unfortunately all this information served no purpose except to increase the outrage with which Billingate was viewed in the more conservative, genophobic, or ethical strata of human society: it did nothing to threaten Billingate itself. The UMCP was prevented by clear treaty from entering forbidden space to extirpate Thanatos Minor. Likewise, of course, the Amnion were precluded by treaty from permitting Billingate's existence; but this was an unequal, essentially toothless restriction, since the Amnion could - and did - deny all knowledge of the Bill's operations. On that basis, any UMCP incursion into Amnion space would be deemed an act of war.
    In the corridors of UMCPHQ, as well as in the chambers of the Governing Council for Earth and Space, it was frequently argued that war was preferable to this kind of peace. As long as places like Billingate were able to exist, the UMCP could never prevail against piracy.
    However, the official position of the United Mining Companies was that the benefits of trade justified the costs of piracy - and war would put an end to trade.
    Speaking for the UMCP, Director Dios took the same position for different reasons: he argued that the costs of war would be far greater than the benefits of eliminating piracy. War, he claimed, would produce an exponential