Burning the Ice

Like everyone else in the tiny, struggling human colony on the isolated ice planet Brimstone, Manda is a clone--yet she is unique, and outcast, because she's a singleton. All the colonists are twins or triplets--and so is Manda, but her twin brother died at birth. Alien to her own kind, Manda prefers to work alone, exploring the sea bottoms with remote equipment. When she discovers evidence of intelligent alien life in the sea, she isn't surprised that her finding creates discord in the colony, which is on the verge of terraforming Brimstone. But she doesn't expect her surveillance of the aliens to be mysteriously cut off, she doesn't expect to fall in love, and she never dreams that the supposedly long-gone starship that placed the colonists on Brimstone might be monitoring all communications, and its crew carrying out their own malign, decades-old designs on both the colonists and natives. --Cynthia Ward


Genre: Science Fiction