This was where I decided to stretch myself (and my readers' patience) a bit. Although I carried on for a while with the Literary Challenges - and some of those stand-alone posts will crop up later, inserted into roughly the right spots in the overall timeline - I'd had enough positive feedback that it went to my head, and I wrote a long story with multiple points of view.
Perhaps more to the point, I now had two contrasting characters - the solid and serious Tylha, and the manic and scatterbrained Ronnie - who could play off one another in (I hope) an entertaining double act. I needed one more character to represent the Klingon point of view, and I picked Shalo, my Orion engineer, who is fun to write for different reasons from Tylha and Ronnie. The thing about Shalo is, she is not a bad person - by her own lights. She just happens to come from a culture which values honour and artistic vengeance, and isn't too fussed about the value of sentient life.
Of course, virtually nobody's a villain in their own mind, anyway - and that's the spirit in which I approached writing from the Klingon perspective. I tried to make sure they weren't pantomime villains, but serious-minded people, with goals that seem reasonable to them, setting out to achieve those goals in a reasonable way.
Which is why the death toll is horrific.
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