Rim Station at Oudemans Crater

There was a colony here on Mars a hundred years ago. A vast spread of glittering industrial cities, fast trade roads, thorus tracks carrying rocket pods from Big Junction to Elysium Station, water pumped from the poles to the vast food production centre at Langtang Crater.

It was all for one purpose, to build and launch an interstellar colony ship, The Sunstorm. That ship was never finished, it sits in orbit at the high end of the derelict space lift that still reaches up out of Pavonis Mons. The economy of the solar system, strained to breaking point by the effort of construction, crashed in what is known as The Fall. Despite Langtang, Mars was never even remotely self-sustaining and millions died, left stranded and starving when the supply ships from Earth stopped coming. The glittering cities are no more, but the few who clung on are still here, living in the ruins and scavenging to survive.

There is only one question. Have you got the strength to carry on in the wreckage of the mighty and overwhelming past? The ruins are haunted by ghosts and worse, water and food are always short, the struggle to keep ancient machinery that we rely on endless, and above, in orbit, Earth has returned in the shape of The Militia - and they are not our friends.

Failure, of course, is the other option, and you would be in massed ranks of good company. Countless bodies lie stiff and frozen below the Martian sands. The price of seeking to fling the Sunstorm across space, to colonise new worlds and to stand beneath the light of far distant stars, has, after all, been truly terrible.