The novel “Ash Ock” by Christopher Hinz was published for the first time in 1989. It’s the second book of the Paratwa series and follows “Liege-Killer”.

Terrorist attacks are hitting one of the colonies where humans live after the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. The fear is that the perpetrators are the terrible Paratwa, genetically modified assassins who share a conscience in two bodies. Susan Quint witnesses one of these attacks and, when she exchanges a look with one of the killers, she feels a sense of familiarity, but at the moment she thinks more about running for her life than about that strange feeling. But when two policemen come to interrogate her and try to kill her, Susan runs away and tries to figure out what’s happening to her.

The Costeaus used to be pirates, but over the last few decades, they have begun to integrate into the colonial population. The Lion of the Alexander, the leader of one of their “tribes”, collaborates in the investigation of the attacks, also to try to establish if there are any Paratwa behind them as he saw their ruthlessness when he was a boy. The fact that some sort of malware is destroying important archives is suspicious because the Paratwa are among the very few to have pre-Apocalypse technology. The Lion decides to awaken Nick and Gillian, the Paratwa hunters.