Description:
Welcome to Hell City, Mars
Jimmy Martin has a sore head.
He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him.
The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist.
It also claims to be a bear.
A bear named Honey.
Jimmy has nothing against bioforms--he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock--and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.
The problem is that humanity isn't the only entity with designs on the Red Planet. Out in the airless desert there is another presence. A novel intelligence, elusive, unknowable and potentially lethal.
And Honey is here to make contact with it, whether Jimmy likes it or not.
Brief description: Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the ten-book Shadows of the Apt series, starting with Empire in Black and Gold. His other works include the novel Children of Time, which won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the short story collection Feast and Famine, and the novellas The Bloody Deluge and Even in the Cannon's Mouth. He has been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award and the British Fantasy Award.