Martian adventure featuring Julia and Viktor, scientists who appeared in his novels ‘The Martian Race’ and ‘The Sunborn’. It’s the kind of scientist fiction you would see more often in Analog than F&SF.
Here Benford sets up an issue with the deep-lying microbial ‘life’ on Mars – Julia and Viktor are called in by a team of Chinese scientists, and there appears to be something impacting on it. To complicate matters there’s a political shit-storm back on Earth, echoed by what happens on the Red Planet.
