The rules governing ownerless territories had always been, by the Star Union's own design, conveniently elastic.
An unclaimed planet was an open market. Trading rights, talent access, resource extraction agreements — the mechanisms for monetizing unregistered territory were numerous and well-established, and the Star Union's enforcement apparatus looked the other way with the practiced ease of an institution that had decided certain forms of profit were not worth the administrative cost of preventing. Thousands of buyers existed throughout the galaxy — individuals, smaller powers, emerging factions — all of them willing to pay a substantial sum for access to something that hadn't yet been formally claimed by anyone capable of objecting.
The Black Demon Trade Union had operated within that comfortable gray space for a long time.
