Before Mars

Anna Kubrin has spent months travelling to Mars, where she takes up a post as a geologist and the base's unofficial artist-in-residence. Her husband and baby are back on Earth, and she will be away for more than a year. The distance is already wearing at her.

In her new room on the base, she finds a note in her own handwriting. It tells her not to trust the colony psychologist, and she has no memory of writing it. Then she unpacks her wedding ring and discovers that a fake has taken its place.

A footprint turns up in a spot the colony AI insists no human has ever visited. Anna begins to suspect that her assignment is not what she was told, and that a corporate conspiracy may be at work. The other possibility is that her memory and mind are failing.

Standing apart from the other books in the Planetfall universe, this dark science fiction story unfolds through Anna's doubts about her own sanity. She keeps working with the team while she tries to sort out what is real, and she has to reach the truth before her own mind gives way.