In the ash of humanity's first interplanetary war, Colonel Ralph Lindsay defuses the ghosts of Mars: sleek robotic bombs still humming with murder, decades after the ceasefire. The Terran Union calls him a hero. His wife, Jenna, calls him something else: a man destroying her people's last desperate legacy. She carries Martian blood in her veins, and the robombs remember. As Ralph dismantles one device after another, each discovery pulls him deeper into a question the war never answered: what do you owe to people you've sworn to hate? The marriage fractures under the weight of atomic secrets and old vengeance, while somewhere in the ruins of a dead civilization, the Martians left something worse than bombs. They left a choice. This is atomic-age science fiction at its most morally uncomfortable: not a tale of good versus evil, but of two people who love each other caught in a war that never ended.
