Makeshift squatter’s digs crowded the Queen’s raw Palace: nets of tough Shaper bubble suburbs, "subbles"; sleazy pirate craft copulating in a daisy-chain of accordioned attack tunnels; rough blown-out honeycombs of Mechanist nickel-iron, towed into place; limpetlike construction huts clinging to the skeletal girders of an urban complex scarcely off the drawing board. This city would be a metropolis, a circumsolar free port, the ultimate sundog zone. He had brought it into being. But it was not for him.