The Integral Trees

In the far future, the crew of an interstellar expedition abandoned the main spacecraft, which housed an AI who monitored the crew for the all-powerful State. The "mutineers", as the AI calls them, made a new home in a gas torus that rotates around a neutron star, rich in trees, animals, sufficient water, but no real gravity. Five hundred years later, their descendants live in various, sometimes waring, clans.

A scouting expedition by men and women from one of these groups meets with hardsh...