I ease myself down into the reddish soil and laugh.

 

It’s an honest laugh, though painful. My old lungs aren’t the same as when we first landed. Bronchioles are more sensitive than we thought to lighter gravity — they don’t inflate like they should. Decades spent breathing oxygen from recycling tanks or suit canisters took their toll. Then those intermediate years as I fought the partially transformed Martian air.

 

Don’t get me wrong! It was always my choice to ignore regulations and brace the spare atmosphere outside the dome. “Rebel,” they called me, for that and many other reasons.

 

The laugh? Pure satisfaction. I luxuriate in digging my toes into the dirt. Real dirt, in fact near-mud, in front of me. Not like the desert we saw at Landing.

 

The sand and toxic elements were brutal at the beginning. I pulled my hair out figuring how to get sufficient organic material into a wide enough area to start the terraforming in earnest. Rebecca came up with the critical breakthrough: a new strand of dissimilatory perchlorate-reducing bacteria, or as we christened them over the last bottle of Earth wine from stores, “Eatums.” Yeah, I stole that bottle. The first Governor-General cussed me out and said he wouldn’t stand for any rebels on his watch.

 

Rebecca’s the reason we are two hundred years ahead of schedule. But it was still a near thing. Twenty years ago, we were unsure whether Mars would reclaim his world or relinquish it to humanity. We won this war, though: the dome opens tomorrow.

 

My weakened lungs spasm. I wish Rebecca could have seen this day. I wish all the Landing crew were here.

 

From my pain and grief, I look up and smile. A meter in front of me, the pink waterline starts. The combination of soil minerals, thin atmosphere and feeble sunlight stain the hue which I knew in my youth. I wonder if that will change in years to come. Will our colony’s descendants ever sit on this bank and see blue?

 

While I marvel, the blush deepens as the sun dives towards the horizon. A pond! This is the first such body Mars has known in three-and-a-half billion years. And thanks to me. Okay, that is Rebel’s ego talking: all my comrades were heroes, not just me. But my icebots, and Rebecca’s Eatums… We changed a world, damn it!

 

I staked out this area for myself, a natural depression in the middle of the crater we settled. I always thought it would be fitting if deep in Martian history this had been the site of the last open water. It is our ground zero — where I sowed my nanobots.

 

They went deep into the sand, programmed to find molecules of ice and release their payload: Rebecca’s bacteria. Those ingested the poisonous perchlorates in the soil for energy, which melted the ice. The sacrifice of their own minuscule, momentary lives propagated carbon into the environment. And they flourished, planet-wide.

 

Wincing at the renewed pain in my chest, again I dive from happiness to misery. One more day. I need to see the dome unfold tomorrow. I want to hear the Governor-General’s speech, listen to him laud Rebecca, witness Man’s dominion over the War God’s world.

 

The sun is setting. Redness dims to black as I rise. The rebel has one last mission.