This process and the extent of their integration is so taxing that those who undergo the treatments must spend four months of every [Earth] year asleep in order for their minds and bodies to cope with the tremendous strains that result.

Bred to be a crisis commando, Veil and those like him are referred to as Overriders or "Black Hatch Men", used as a last resort measure to protect the bottom line for companies who can afford to hire them.

As an Overrider, Veil is conditioned to view saving human life as a secondary concern in favor of monetary assets and commodities like spaceships or freighters and their cargo.

Exploiting loopholes in the decommissioning process, Veil begins his exile to Mars fully intact, retaining nearly all of his military-grade augmentations including his AI combat and analysis system.

Overriders are an emergency measure, and as such, need to be at peak performance the moment they are activated so everything from physical strength, metabolism, endorphin production, and even aggressive tendencies are amped up to extremely high levels.

Now, freshly awake, he is anxious to settle things properly with the one responsible; a task he performs savagely and efficiently in the middle of a busy night club in front of witnesses.

Veil, already in trouble, agrees to work with the auditors in exchange for his release, as local law enforcement does not want to spend its time "babysitting" someone from Earth who only seems to make life on Mars more difficult.

Too worried about the local crime and "real" issues to care about a diplomatic problem with a distant, loathed oversight body, Chakana agrees to let Veil go as long as he acts as Madekwe's bodyguard during her stay.

[1] The Goat God explains to Veil the rough history of Hidalgo as a big-shot gangster back on Earth who has been making a name for himself on Mars by outsmarting law enforcement and encroaching on the territories of rival gangs.

Veil lets word spread that Nina Uchimara is being targeted by local law enforcement for her connection to Hidalgo, counting on him taking steps to either intervene or silence her before she can talk to the authorities about what she knows.

Veil, working with the Marshall's service sets up a sting operation outside the contact's apartment building ready to apprehend whomever Hidalgo sends for her with the hopes of getting even closer to him and his capture.

The two make a quick escape from the sting operation while Veil begins to put pieces together starting with the fact that Madison Madekwe is not a simple COLIN executive sent to Mars to investigate corruption, and more importantly, was not actually kidnapped at all, but rather staged the whole incident as a means of getting in contact with her real objective, Hidalgo.

He can turn Madekwe over to COLIN as promised in exchange for a ride back to Earth, hindering Hidalgo's operations on Mars and effectively ending the Navy's attempted coup of the planet's established government.

Exposure would lead to the distrust and eventual collapse of Mars' entire economic structure for producing counterfeit merchandise, losing all independent corporate investment and support.

Veil discovers Hidalgo has been setting the ground for a COLIN military take-over of Mars to put an end to Mulholland's corporate exploitation and corruption of the colony, and the discovery of the product scam was going to be the catalyst.

It turns out that Torres' death was inconsequential save for the fact that the investigation it triggered brought authorities too close to Hidalgo's real plan and afforded the Navy a usable cover to insert more covert agents to assist him.

However Chakana has a change of heart and discreetly frees Veil before helping him kill Mulholland, his security, Madewke, and her SOC forces in a fast and bloody shootout while in the governor's office.

[1] Several streets on Mars are named for Chicago School economists and conservative politicians;[1] in an interview Morgan stated that "neoliberalism has set loose a vast capital investment potential that certainly accommodates the necessary scale and ambition, but it is, of course, utterly rapacious, anti-humane and self-interested at the same time.

So also with Thin Air — the landscape is littered with the markers of a retreat from the grand scheme of terraforming and building a home for humanity on Mars, in favour of an ultraprofitable corporate stasis and an ongoing lie of highly emotive intangibles sold to the general populace in lieu of actual progress.

[2]With Martian terraforming having been partly abandoned, the atmosphere is described as "four percent Earth sea level standard";[1][2] the colonists of Mars are of mainly Andean and Himalayan stock.

[1] Morgan has described that some of the vague concept of Thin Air had been in his head since around the time Black Man / Thirteen and that the reference to "a character on Mars, a hibernoid PI who's hard as nails" in that novel was a template for Hakan Veil.

[2] Morgan was embarrassed to describe that new-fatherhood meant that he had not found time to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy before writing Thin Air, despite having intended to.