The Nomads are a coalition of three colossal ships whose inhabitants, dissatisfied with a society run by faceless macroeconomic interests and the AI Aleph, decided to break away and create their own societies in space, moving between systems and trading with the locals. Tunguska lives off the traffic and storage of information, Corregidor offers skilled labor at competitive prices, and Bakunin specializes in all that is exotic, illegal, or both, from fashion to nanoengineering.