The Collaborative International Dictionary
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Usage examples of "mercatoria".
To be allowed to do what they did, the Seers had to be an officially recognised profession within the Miscellariat, the catch-all term for those useful to the Mercatoria who did not fit inside the more standard subdivi-sional categories, and as such all Seers were subject to full Mercatorial discipline and control, committed to obeying any order issued by anybody properly authorised and of a sufficiently superior rank.
One might even - knowing the importance that the Mercatoria attaches to reconnecting all the many, many systems which have been without Arteria access all these millennia - wonder why the expedition from Zenerre to Ulubis with a new portal was dispatched with such alacrity, given the arguably still greater claims that more populous, more classically strategically important and more at-the-time obviously threatened systems might have had upon the resources and expertise of our esteemed colleagues in the Engineering faculty.
More portals and wormholes disappeared during the War of the New Quick and the Machine War, and only the establishment of the Mercatoria - at least by the estimation of those who controlled it - brought about a lasting peace and the beginning of the Fourth Complex.
Quaup, the majority of whom were part of the Mercatoria - the captain had served on a war craft with a Quaup officer - were of the meta-species type people usually called blimps, small to medium-sized balloon-like creatures, air-going oxygen processors.
But aside from the vast cost and the point - assuming a portal would be heading in the other direction before too long - that it would be a waste of time and effort which would bring reconnection no quicker, there was one clinching argument that would apply until either no signal arrived from Zenerre or word came of an utter breakdown in civil society: in the Mercatoria only Engineers were allowed to make and emplace wormholes.
The entire history of the Mercatoria was the record of its implacable persecution and destruction of AIs and the continual, laborious, zealously pursued effort to prevent them ever again coming into existence within the civilised galaxy.
Dwellers, Fassin had gained the distinct impression that Dwellers both despised and felt sorry for the Quick - the species, like humans, like all the others in the Mercatoria, which felt the need to use wormholes.
More importantly, so, potentially, does the fate of the Mercatoria and the civilised galaxy.
The attack squadrons will arrive years before the Eship and its escort fleet, their war craft will be fully deployed for uninhibited battle against all who oppose the Mercatoria, and - depend upon it -they will prevail.
There was, for the Mercatoria, little point in having a network of super-fast travel connections scattered throughout the galaxy if your ships were too fat to fit, and so the proportions of war craft - the ultimate levers of power for the Mercatoria, just as they had been for all earlier imperia, semimperia and others who had thought to enforce their peace or impose their will on the galactic community over the aeons - were derived from the width of the channels they would have to negotiate.
Most were from Ulubis but some were more exotic and from further afield, generally trustafarians and-or gappers portaling in from the rest of the Mercatoria, taking time out between education and responsibility to relax a little.
Omnocrat for the Mercatoria, in the industrial complexes of the Leseum Systems.
But if they thought I was dead or not likely to succeed, the Mercatoria might intervene directly.
Plus the invaders the Mercatoria is worried about might well think the same way with even less cause to hesitate.
The danger was that, in carrying out a raid to secure a given volume for long enough to hunt down the information they were looking for, the Mercatoria would cause the Dwellers to react as though they were undergoing a full-scale invasion.