Lois McMaster Bujold / Suford Lewis …
sinopsis
Leo Graf was an effective engineer. Safety regs weren't just the rule book he swore by; he'd helped write them. All that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat. Leo was profoundly uneasy with the corporate exploitation of his bright new students... until that exploitation turned to something much worse. He hadn't anticipated a situation where the right thing to do was neither safe, nor in the rules... Leo Graf adopted a thousand quaddies---now all he had to do was teach them to be free.
Falling Free takes place approximately 200 years before the events in Cordelia's Honor and does not share settings or characters with the main body of the series.