Bonnie Chiswick is trapped in a deteriorating marriage to Jeff, who is second in command of a cult. The cult's leader, Brother Jacobs, takes the twenty-five members on a one-way trip to Mars. He is convinced that, by settling there, they will rise to a higher level of existence.
Li Julong is the chief scientist of the Chinese Moon base. He is forced to do the bidding of their military in their wish to dominate all of space.
Charles Winston, a NASA biologist located on Mars, is searching for life. What Charles discovers sets off a mad scramble as the home world exhorts each group to acquire for itself any alien technology.
Little do they realize that their collective actions will determine the fate of the Earth. An alien probe, bent on the Earth's destruction, has arrived on Mars, and the clock is ticking.