In the year 2040, scientists unearth something astonishing in the subterranean ruins of a long-dead city on Mars: startling evidence of an alternate history that threatens to split humanity into opposing factions and plunge the Earth into chaos and war. And now the Marine Mars Expeditionary Force of the USMC has been dispatched to the Red Planet to protect, with lethal force if necessary, American civilians and interests suddenly threatened by great powers who would devastate a world to keep a shocking, half-million-year-old secret buried in the Martian dust.