Twenty years ago, life on Earth was annihilated. Now, the few remaining colonists on Mars scratch out their living in the worn husk of New Houston, a once vibrant settlement. Outside its walls, a perpetual storm rages - acidic snow and rain - the result of a failed attempt to terraform the planet decades earlier. The human race, once numbering in the billions, has dwindled to five hundred or so souls. David Adler has survived in these circumstances by keeping a low profile and minding his own business. But when he gets a knock on the door from his old flame, Oksana Levi, everything changes. Mars' lead engineer and Oksana's current boyfriend, Carl Epstein, has been brutally murdered in his workshop, and Oksana pleads for Adler's help. Adler soon finds himself pulling at the threads of a conspiracy by a millenarian cult and its bloodthirsty father figure to do away with life on the red planet once and for all.