The Great Galactic Score!

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The marketers and advertising executives and media management companies had described Banks Space Station as a 'Shining beacon in space', not realising the sheer vastness of space meant that, even with the most powerful telescopes anyone could imagine, people would only see it as, at most, a fleck of dust within the bleak, and incredibly dark, cosmos. This, however did not deter them.

They want on to call it a 'port of call' for diplomats, commerce and wanderers, but it soon became a place of bickering ambassadors who really had better things to do with their time than make fun of each other's increasingly odd hairstyles, smugglers, who found it remarkably easy to bribe the resident customs officers and the detritus of galactic society, who found themselves there thinking they had booked passage to a certain pleasure station, only for an unfortunate mistake, with one letter on their visas, had them arriving somewhere where clothes were really not as optional as they had hoped.

Not to be weighed down by the realities of galactic life, those self-same marketers, advertising executives and media management companies tried to sell Banks Space Station as the galaxy's last, best hope for peace, only for the entire population of the galaxy to come to the zeitgeist realisation that keeping their noses out of other people's business was, perhaps, the best hope for peace after all and simply started leaving each other alone. It helped, of course, when the IBTST Corporation cracked the ability to rearrange matter into practically anything anyone could possibly want and doing so by using something as common as bodily waste as the proto-matter required.

This, of course, led to IBTST Corp buying up every planet with large bovine populations and cornering the market on transformable waste. Banks Space Station was, in every possible way, redundant. Their revolutionary revolving internal structure became obsolete once DWAIt Corp pioneered their, stolen, gravity plating solution and no-one needed to suffer travel sickness while sitting in a bar, within Banks' many promenades, ever again.

Still, the marketers, advertising executives and media management companies, could rely on the fact that Banks Space Station was, to any keen eye, a very pretty station, with a gleaming, sleek superstructure that resembled the most beautiful hyper-cars that everybody loved on the Earth-That-Was before everyone decided that, actually, having a car that drove a long way on a pittance of fossil fuels, or, preferably, none at all, was far more desirable than a car that made certain people groan with lust at a nicely shaped bumper.

That, too, became a moot point when extra bits started to become added to the space station. Extra habitats, more docking pylons for ships, all of which had their own, proprietary docking systems and absolutely refused to listen to the Galactic Standards Agency when they tried to create a universal docking connector, and a surprising and worrying number of brothels became attached to Banks station. After that, the marketers, advertising executives and media management companies gave it all up as a monumental failure and went off to count the immense amounts of money they had earned from the station. Not all of it legitimate.

"What a dump!" Demi ducked her head as a spider-like person skittered along the roof in a rush to reach the next ship out. "I've seen dirty, I've seen overcrowded and I've seen badly designed corridors that look, to a female eye, incredibly dodgy, but this takes the biscuit."

"It does have an ambience, but, if your research is reliable, and I have no reason to doubt it, this is where we'll find Bognrd. We need Bognrd!" Friss narrowed his eyes in a way that made Demi think he was trying to look determined or constipated. She couldn't tell which, but kept her eye out for public lavatories, just in case. "Do you think Lodka will be fine? She doesn't like other ships, you know. She compares herself to them. How slim they are, whether they have nacelles bigger than hers. I keep telling her, she's perfect the way she is, but ..."