A Dark and Hungry God Arises Read Online Free PDF Page B

Thermopyle was going to find out just how much Milos Taverner knew about shit and survival.
    Eighty seconds later, Angus said, almost crowed,
    'Hang onto your balls. As soon as we cross, everything changes. You bastards have just cornholed me for the last time. '
    Milos knew that wasn't true. In an apparent effort to reassure him, Hashi Lebwohl had allowed him to watch a number of Angus' tests on UMCPDA's monitors. And he'd been given many of the test results to read. They all demonstrated incontrovertibly that Angus had been well and thoroughly welded; that he would never be able to violate his programming. For all his enhanced capabilities, he was the most helpless being in human space.
    Nevertheless, without thinking about it, without even realizing he did it, Milos cupped his hand over his crotch as Trumpet disappeared into the gap.

ANCILLARY
DOCUMENTATION

BILLINGATE
    Even while the power of the United Mining Companies Police was at its peak, a number of illegal or bootleg shipyards survived and occasionally flourished in and around human space.
    The reason for their existence was simple. Forbidden space had a vast hunger for the same raw materials which Earth craved in such quantity, as well as for the mass-production technologies at which humankind excelled; a hunger which legal trade - both enabled and limited by the United Mining Companies - couldn't satisfy. To feed this appetite, the Amnion were willing to pay well for what they desired, without questioning how those things were obtained. This was true despite an explicit treaty to the contrary. Therefore piracy became a thriving subcu-taneous industry. Theft offered a higher reward for a given amount of effort than honest prospecting or mining.
    That the risks were great, or that the opportunities were unpredictable, were drawbacks which had never hindered crime at any time in human history. That piracy required fast and space-worthy vessels, however, would have been a significant drawback in the absence of bootleg shipyards. Ships were far more difficult to steal than their cargoes. If they were taken while in dock, they were often stopped before their new masters could escape. And if they were attacked somewhere in space, they were usually damaged too severely to be worth much.
    Illegal shipyards came into being by the blunt logic of human larceny. A passion for profit was the engine which drove Earth and her widely scattered stations. When that passion was felt by men and women with unscrupulous souls, they acted on it illegally. The law of supply and demand guided many of them, not into piracy, but into providing support for pirates.
    The best-known - because the best-defended - of these bootleg shipyards was the one called Billingate on Thanatos Minor.
    There were a number of such shipyards within human space, of course. However, by virtue of their locations their existence was precarious: they were vulnerable to direct attack by the UMCP. In order to exist at all they required secrecy. Therefore they hid like ferrets; they moved whenever they could; often they kept their own operations — and profits - small so that they would be less susceptible to exposure or betrayal.
    Billingate had few worries along those lines. Because it had been hived into the bleak rock of Thanatos Minor, a planetoid which sailed the vacuum a few million kilometers inside the borders of forbidden space, it had little or nothing to fear from overt assault. It was protected —
    albeit obliquely - by treaty. It was also defended by Amnion warships: the quadrant of space it occupied lay along the most heavily patrolled boundary with human space. And it was defended as well by the ships which depended on it. In human space, any illegal might reasonably flee rather than face a UMCP destroyer or battle-wagon. In forbidden space, flight was less attractive because it led deeper into the fatal realm of the Amnion.
    Safety from imposed mutation existed only at the fringes of Amnion