The future: a dying Earth has been abandoned, the poor and weak left behind. While Earth's elite survivors colonised Mars, its outcasts, the miscreants, criminals, fringe-dwellers, crackpot scientists, and sociopaths, fled inward, to Venus ('a place fit for scumbags'). Three generations later the denizens of Venus, strengthened by hardship forged in brutality and hellish conditions, are thriving. Attracted by the successful launch of Venus's second floating cloud city, the corporate fascists of the Mars Council launch an insurgency for control of Venus.