Bee Speaker

From the Arthur C. Clarke award winner, Adrian Tchaikovsky, comes the third instalment of the DOGS OF WAR science fiction series, a future where genetically engineered "Bioforms" have inherited not the Earth, but the Solar System.

The end of the world has been and gone.

There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts.

But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees - an outlawed distributed intelligence - survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative.

Fast forward to today. A signal - 'For the sake of what once was. We beg you. Help.' - reaches Mars.

How could they refuse? A consortium of Martian work crews gather the resources for a mission: a triumphal return to the blue-green world of their ancestors. And now here they are - three hundred million kilometres from home.

And it has all already gone horribly wrong.