Martian prospectors Sonia Androff and Fisk Banzer are convinced that they are too threatened to use local mining teams to establish a claim on a suspected rich gold discovery. They hire a primitive support crew from the Philippines to help dig out gold in a remote Martian canyon. During an on site cave exploration Apollo Panahon, a teenage miner with that team, discovers a Paleolithic ice puddle with tiny fish embedded in the ice. When he thaws and tastes the fish, a virus in the fish infects Apollo with a disease that has a side effect that duplicates Nostradamus' ability to communicate through time. Apollo's sense of events yet to come enables him to warn Sonia that they must flee to survive. The two barely escape the claim-jump murders of their companions. However, their freedom is precarious. In desperate need of medical attention, both survivors are infected, both are getting worse, and both slip into comas while on the run. Media journalist Terra Newton, at a conference on the Moon, gets distracted by strange events surrounding the epidemic that has friends from a Filipino barrio in quarantine. She identifies the odd side effect of the virus as a Nostradamus Syndrome, the ability of some of the afflicted to communicate through time.