Children of Strife

She found most of the others bores too, much of the time, but Hartmand was a bore who’d reserved executive privileges over the ship-station’s life-support functions, and somehow this inherent threat didn’t make him any less boring. Because of how Hartmand had swindled them all, in the way he’d set up his personal space-fiefdom out here. Condense the fragmentary reports, contradictions and inaccuracies of her crew into pure truth, so she could make the right decisions. When the Portiids finally came to investigate, there were seventy-two Stomatopods left alive, and some of them had begun to realize they’d taken their war games too far.