By Morgan and Kippax, authors of "Seed of Stars". This one is #3 (SoS was #2) and the theme of Earth-space-colonies-menaced-by-aliens continues, as does the theme of harmful mutation. The book itself is a bit disjointed, and I think doesn't work as well as SoS; to say why requires spoilers, which I'll provide, since the chances of you finding this slim tome, let alone reading it, are negligible. Goodreads isn't impressed.The action centers around <planet>, which has been colonised and run as a great success by the mighty, and thus inevitably in this sort of book evil or at best amoral <corporation>. A fish biologist, of all people, sent out to investigate, realises that the wonderful harvests of ever-increasing salmon have been accompanied by a strong and - utterly implausibly - unnoticed dimunition in lifespace of the millions of human colonists. How they are supposed to have not noticed is beyond me, never mind, the response is that the <corporation> realises that the <bureaucrats> will order the colony abandoned. So, in order to avoid embarrassment they decide to nuke the colony and wipe out the survivors, and trust that everyone will assume it is the naughty aliens.
Meanwhile, a second plot - which doesn't get resolved in the book - has people looking for a Warp Drive, since the aliens clearly have one. Although why they don't just look for a faster FTL drive I'm not sure, since they already have one FTL drive.
In the end - which is pretty slow of them, I guessed much earlier - everyone guesses that it wasn't the naughty aliens, since last time they just used a <space ray> that turned the entire planet to slag, so why would they descend to nukes this time? And anyway one of the nukes didn't go off, and was labelled "I am a human nuke" as a clue.
In the end - and I give the book some credit, it isn't clear in advance how it was going to end, with the <corporation> evil but triumphant, or destroyed, or what - the <corporation>'s bosses daughter kills the <evil CEO> and life continues much as before. Except for the dead folk, obvs.
Side note: although the mighty Venturer Twelve and friends are nominally there to protect Earth and the colonies, it becomes clear - more in #2 than here, though here by default - that they are actually fuck all use; the only aliens they meet are so powerful that the Earth ships and weapons are useless.
