Including Tranquillity, there were only five independent (non-Edenist) bitek habitats to be found within the boundaries of the Confederation.  After Tranquillity, probably the most well known, or notorious depending on your cultural outlook and degree of liberalism, was Valisk.

Although they were both, technically, dictatorships, they occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum, with the dominant ideologies of the remaining three habitats falling between them, a well-deserved mediocrity.  Tranquillity was regarded as elitist, or even regal given its founder: industrious, rich, and slightly raffish, with a benevolent, chic ruler, it emphasized the grander qualities of life, somewhere you aspired to go if you made it.  Valisk was older, its glory days over, or at the very least in abeyance: it played host to a more decadent population; money here (and there was still plenty) came from exploiting the darker side of human nature.  And its strange governorship repelled rather than attracted.

It hadn't always been so.

Valisk was founded by an Edenist Serpent called Rubra.  Unlike Laton, who terrorized the Confederation two and a half centuries later, his rebellion was of an altogether more constructive nature.  He was born in Machaon, a habitat orbiting Kohistan, the largest gas giant in the Srinagar star System.  After forty-four years, he abandoned his culture and his home, sold his not inconsiderable share in his family's engineering enterprise, and emigrated to a newly opened Adamist asteroid settlement in Kohistan's trailing Trojan cluster.

It was a period of substantial economic growth for the star system.  Srinagar had been colonized by ethnic-Hindus in 2178 during the Great Dispersal, a hundred and sixteen years earlier.  Basic industrialization had been completed, the world was tamed, and people were looking for new ways of channelling their energies.  All across the Confederation emerging colony planets were exploiting space resources and increasing their wealth dramatically.  Srinagar was eager to be numbered among them.

Rubra started with six leased interplanetary cargo ships.  Like all Serpents he was a high achiever in his chosen field (nearly always to Edenist embarrassment, for so many of them chose crime).  He made a small fortune supplying the Trojan cluster's small but wealthy population of engineers and miners with consumer goods and luxuries.  He bought more ships, made a larger fortune, and named his expanding company Magellanic Itg - joking to his peers that one day he would trade with that distant star cluster.  By 2306, after twelve years of steady growth, Magellanic Itg owned manufacturing stations and asteroid-mining operations, and had moved into the interstellar transport market.

At this point Rubra germinated Valisk in orbit around Opuntia, the fourth of the system's five gas giants.  It was a huge gamble.  He spent his company's entire financial reserves cloning the seed, mortgaging half of the starships to boot.  And bitek remained technology non grata for the major religions, including the Hindu faith.  But Srinagar was sufficiently Bolshevik about its new economic independence from its sponsoring Govcentral Indian states, and energetic enough in its approach to innovation, to cast a blind eye to proscriptions announced by fundamentalist Brahmians on a distant imperialist planet over two centuries earlier.  Planet and asteroid governments saw no reason to impose embargoes against what was rapidly evolving into one of the system's premier economic assets.  Valisk became, literally, a corporate state, acting as the home port for Magellanic Itg's starship fleet (already one of the largest in the sector) and dormitory town for its industrial stations.

Although Valisk was a financially advantageous location from which Rubra could run his flourishing corporate empire, he needed to attract a base population to the habitat to make it a viable pocket civilization.  Industrial stations were therefore granted extremely liberal weapons and research licences and Valisk started to attract companies specializing in military hardware.  Export constraints were almost non-existent.