Founder's Seed

When humans attack Iridos, killing most of the unammi population, misfit cleric Alira discovers she is a Harvester, able to absorb the memories and personalities of those who die in her presence. She'll need that knowledge to help her people. The problem is, not all Harvesters survive with their minds intact. Alira knows the pilots-including her brother-who live among the humans will be the next target for enemies of the unammi, unless someone flies to the nearest colony world to warn them of the threat. And since Alira Harvested the last pilot on Iridos, she's the only one who can do it. If she leaves, she'll be outcast. If she doesn't, her brother and the other pilots will die. To Alira, there's no choice. She's never going to fit in anyway. As a shapeshifter, looking human is easy. Acting human is far more difficult, especially once her Harvests start arguing in her head. But she has to succeed. If her species is to have any chance at survival, Alira must take the form of her nemesis, Harvest souls never intended for her, and shelter the remnants of her race where her enemies would never look, in a place only a lunatic would go. Can she succeed without going insane?

Disguising herself as a human is easy for shapeshifter Alira. Living as one turns out to be harder than she'd expected. And imitating a human well-known to millions on all the colony worlds may have been a mistake. To make matters worse, the harvests of knowledge and memories she's gathered from the dead aren't adequate to fully understand her assumed role-unless she surrenders control to the one internal voice she thinks can make things right. But that harvest isn't willing to share the space in her head, and soon Alira is no longer sure which voice is his, and which is her own. Galen has vowed to help Alira succeed and follows her increasingly unbalanced directives, until he realizes that her harvests have corrupted her conscience, maybe even her sanity. Galen has never been a leader. But as the crisis screams toward them, he must make a choice: abandon their people to save Alira or sacrifice her to save them all.

Alira's back from the brink of madness, though the voices still threaten her control. Terrified she'll lose it again, she tries to evade human conflicts. Yet after she witnesses Cartel slavers kidnapping humans from her friend's village on Bejami, she leaves her sanctuary to stop the Cartel from abducting and enslaving others. On Danua, acting Clan Admiral Knøfa experiments on his unammi prisoner. Except the squib isn't healing any longer, and the medics aren't working fast enough to save her. Knøfa starts searching for another unammi-maybe a male this time, so he can create all the test subjects he wants. Stopping the Cartel is enough to keep Alira's hands full. She doesn't want to fight the Clan, too. Yet, when she learns Knøfa is searching for the unammi survivors, she races to warn them. As Knøfa's ship approaches them on Earth, the council tries to force it to leave. But Alira knows that if the humans escape, the unammi are doomed. Knøfa's "experiments" will escalate, and other humans will follow his example. To protect her people's secrets, she must stop that ship. Her only hope is to attempt something no Founder's Daughter has ever done.