Captain's Fancy and trade with the Amnion

[Sorus]

While it is largely irrelevant to the storyline, I have always wondered about this passage from TRS:

(Pertaining to the original Captain's Fancy.)

She seemed to him the bravest of the best, a trim
metal sheath of power which pierced the heavens and
the gap. Her lines were sleek, yet she bristled with
weapons. Her holds were huge, yet she swept across
scan and docked and undocked as gracefully as a creature
of the great deep. Her crew were exotic men drawn from
the strangest parts of the galaxy, men with the strength
to pit themselves against the vacuum and forbidden
space, and the wealth they traded was fabulous.

Exotic and strange parts of the galaxy? I recently compiled a fairly comprehensive list of locations mentioned throughout the series; mainly military installations and research facilities. Well, Billingate could certainly be considered strange.

It likely has a lot to do with Nick's perception, his romantic view of deep space, and the notion that anything probably seemed exotic compared to station life.

...a station that tended one of the official (therefore rich)
trading routes between Earth and forbidden space.

I may have missed something here. I need to reread Forbidden Knowledge, but when was there an official trading route between Earth and forbidden space? What could they have legally traded that the Amnion would have been interested in? When was any trade with the Amnion legal? Forbidden space is forbidden space.

[drew]

Com-mine is almost in forbidden space, I'm sure they traded with the rest of humanity.
And wasn't the origional Captains Fancy also a pirate ship?

[Alynna Lis Eachann]

I do recall there was some sort of trade between Earth and the Amnion, at least until forbidden space became thoroughly forbidden. I can't remember the details, but I'm certain that for a while there were definitely materials going back and forth, until humanity realised the threat the Amnion posed.

[Sorus]

Com-mine is almost in forbidden space, I'm sure they traded with the rest of humanity.
And wasn't the origional Captains Fancy also a pirate ship?

I've always believed so, though I'm having difficulty finding evidence. In TRS she is described as a 'merchanter'.

In those days, piracy was a constant and maddening
problem across the shipping lanes. The UMC Police
were relatively new; their ability to enforce the laws
Earth made didn't reach far. And forbidden space didn't
appear to make any reliable distinction between
sanctioned and dishonest trade.

Okay, sanctioned trade. I still wonder what they were trading.

[drew]

Probebly ore. It seem to ve the only thing that the Amnion want.
I think that that's a ruse tough..I'm sure they are perfectly capable of mining asteroid belts themselves, it's obviously a way to meet human illegals who are willing to trade more than just Ore for Credit Jacks.

[Sorus]

'Fabulous wealth' hints at more than ore in my opinion, but I think you're right there.

Besides, it gives credence to my theory that the she was a pirate, or at least illegal.

[Variol Farseer]

There was indeed an official trading channel (I don't know about a route per se) between human and Amnion space. It was controlled by the UMC, and the UMC monopoly on that trade was what made Holt Fasner insanely wealthy.

I don't know what the Amnion sold to humans. But we are told that the Amnion's manufacturing techniques were suited to produce quality rather than quantity, and that in a straight-up war, humans would have the advantage of mass-produced weapons. I imagine the UMC sold various kinds of manufactured goods to the Amnion. What they got back was probably what used to be called 'better living through chemistry'. And there must have been a voracious appetite for information on both sides.

'Forbidden space' seems to have been forbidden by the UMC, who didn't want anybody violating their monopoly, and perhaps also by the Amnion, who didn't want alien life forms violating their genetic purity. But it certainly wasn't forbidden to the trading agents on both sides. I imagine there were stations on the boundaries of forbidden space where the UMC and Amnion both maintained trading outposts — rather the way the Bill and the Amnion coexisted on Thanatos Minor to handle illegal trade.