Steel Helix

ORIGINAL SIN

Piers Rameau, a brilliant geneticist, was offered the chance to help design mankinds replacementOriginal Man, a smarter, stronger, swifter race based on manipulated human DNA. But Rameau refused, and chose to follow his own path.

Now Kuno Gunnarsson, creator of Original Man and Rameau's would-be employer, is deadbut his superior creation lives on. And one faction of Original Man is determined to wrest control of the galaxy from the inferior race. A brutal attack destroys both Rameau's home planet and the satellite that has become his world. One tragic casualty is Dakini, a fragile, genetically altered dancer who had become Rameaus reason to live.

The sole survivor, he finds himself a prisoner of Gunnarsson Prime, a clone of the original creator, on board the Jumpship Langstaff. Against his will, Rameau is enlisted as the ship's wartime medical officer. As a doctor, he swore an oath to do no harm. As a man, he swears blood vengeance on the inhuman killers who destroyed everything he ever loved . . . .

A planet is attacked and devastated--left uninhabitable by the clone warriors known as Original Man. They kidnap a skilled surgeon, Piers Rameau, and force him to treat their wounded against his will. Quickly Rameau is embroiled in a much larger conflict: civil war between factions of Original Man. Original.

Ann Tonsor Zeddies spent her first three summers on a mountaintop in Idaho, and wanted to be a cowboy until she realized that the frontier had moved off the planet. Her interest in biology began at an early age, when she collected a bucket of assorted amphibians and turned them loose in the tent where she was living with her parents and younger brother. Her brother became a professional biologist; Ann chose to deal with strange life forms by writing science fiction.

While working on earlier novels, Typhons Children and Riders of Leviathan (written as Toni Anzetti), she swam in all of the Great Lakes, and snorkeled in the Pacific, between the Mariana Trench and the volcanic island of Pagan. She has camped in the Badlands, and ridden horses in the Huron National Forest and the vineyards of Quercy. Along with her husband and two of their four children, she earned a black belt in tae kwon do. After stays in Michigan, Kansas, and Texas, she now lives in Pennsylvania.