Hunted
James Alan Gardner
 At the opening of the story, Explorer Edward York (son of one of the High Council's most ruthless Admirals) is freshly arrived on board an Outward Fleet spaceship, the Willow, which is leaving the Troyen solar system where he has been stationed for the past twenty years. The atmosphere aboard ship is febrile; the shy and retiring York is roped into attending a party, a masquerade-cum-orgy, by a woman in an Admiral's uniform with a large port-wine birthmark on her cheek. (Readers of the previous novels will recognize the recurring character of Festina Ramos.) The reason for the crew's semi-hysterical state quickly becomes clear: the crew has violated the League's single basic rule, and suddenly everyone aboard ship, except for York, drops dead, cryptically executed by the high authorities of the League of Peoples. Alone aboard the ship, York, who by his own testimony suffers from at least mild mental retardation (he's not a genuine Explorer, but merely an Admiral's black-sheep son who's been shunted into the Corps), begins to unravel an increasing complex plot. In the ship's hold, he discovers, dead like everyone else, a queen of the Mandasar species that has spent the past two decades consumed in a violent civil war. The Mandasars are the key alien species and society in the novel: they resemble giant lobsters, with eight legs, pairs of claws and arms, with whiskered faces and brain humps on their backs. Their species comes in four castes or orders, varying in size and color, from small brown females called "gentles," through workers and warriors, up to the hive-queens, who are four meters long, saffron yellow, with four claws instead of two and bright green venom sacs. Their social order is something of a cross between an ant farm or beehive, and feudal Japan. What is a dead hive queen doing on a ship of the Outward Fleet? And what did the crew do to earn themselves an infallibly just death sentence from the League of Peoples? As York tries to plumb deep waters of conspiracy and corruption, he meets the real Admiral Festina Ramos, and realizes that the woman aboard the Willow was costumed as the Admiral for the masquerade party. He also falls in with genuine Explorers, and ends up on a desperate expedition back to Troyen, the Mandasars' home world, in an attempt to unravel an Admiral's corrupt scheme and stop a civil war. In the process, York learns the real meaning of his status as his father's genetically-engineered clone; he learns too that his beloved twin-sister-clone, whom he saw dead twenty years before, is still alive, but not the person he thought he knew; and he discovers the nature of the double within himself that sometimes takes over his mind and body. The story expands to include a formidable nanotechnology, a sentient and telepathic moss that can overwhelm a human being, and members of a mysterious species who are never seen outside their personal robot craft. The ending manages to tie up all the loose ends, as well as provide anticipations of further stories to come.