Forty Thousand in Gehenna

316 pp. Union settlers attempt to colonize an unusual planet at the edge of Alliance territory. "A few years after the truce between the Union and the Alliance factions, Union lands a new settlement on the world called Gehenna, a colony consisting of 41,911 "non-citizen" clones and several hundred natural born men as supervisors. Gehenna seemed to have no intelligent native life-and therein lay the mistake. Calibans, dragon-like beasts, had a different sort of intelligence; and, as time passed, they began to twist the minds of the new generations to their own inhuman rhythms of life. Abandoned as a colony, life on Gehenna assumed stranger and stranger forms-until the day that Alliance spies arrived and applied the match to the many social explosives that had been piling up."