Commander Milana Lin stepped through the rocky crag, removed her helmet, and became the first human to inhale Venusian dust.

The terraformers had done their job, but only after her crew on the Amarilla Celestial had spent the better part of a decade destroying Venus’ thick atmosphere.

As Milana trod the yellow regolith, she laughed that her first thought was about Mars. Humanity had wasted so much time there, all driven by Dr. Craig Harrison. Driven as he was cunning, he’d secured trillions just to create an artificial magnetosphere on the red planet. A project that was eventually taken out by a meteorite no larger than a fist (albeit a fist orbiting the planet at over eighteen thousand kilometers per hour). All that money… all that time… all those people… gone in a matter of days. Milana spat at the thought of him. The arrogant persistence. He should have let it go.

There were two things that made Milana Lin the perfect fit for the Venusian mission. First was the fact she had trained on Earth. Cadets had been training on Luna now for decades. Loonies were used to managing their mass in low gravity and were infinitely comfortable with a black sky, but they’d never survive on Venus. “Gravity’s a bitch,” so they say.

The second thing that made Lin a perfect fit was the fact that she had pioneered the idea of how to colonize Venus. While humanity had spent two generations constructing elements to sustain life on Mars, Lin knew from her post-war station that humanity was far better at destroying things than building them.

Venus was a furnace. The Russians learned that a hundred years ago through their Venera probes. Lin chuckled to think they had been right to invest in our planetary twin so long ago. They had been the first to land on the surface and capture data from the hellish rock. “Uninhabitable,” “Scorching,” and “Hotter than a brick pizza oven,” were all descriptions her colleagues used when she had initially tossed out the idea of colonization. But not one of them had thought to do what she proposed. The reason Venus was an oven wasn’t because of surface characteristics; it was the atmosphere. Those clouds were so thick, the heat couldn’t escape. They welcomed it in and trapped it like a blanket.

Lin’s proposition was simple: Take all the repurposed nukes that weren’t used during the war and detonate them across the Venusian atmosphere. Destroy the atmosphere and there’d be nothing left to trap all that heat. It would be like setting fire to the insulation in a hot attic. The trick was how to do it without burning the house down. She would incrementally detonate them, dispersing a unique cocktail of gasses to seed the planet. If it worked, she would transform the yellow ball into the next Earth-like home. We could start over, make good, and all that.

And that’s exactly what she did. “Manifest Destiny,” they said when they talked of her journey. “Trailblazer,” they called her when they talked of her ingenuity. “The V.P.,” became her new nickname, short for, “The Venusian Pioneer.” Milana laughed at the term. As far as she’d come and as much as humanity was indebted to her, she was still given a nickname that most of the world associated with second in command.

As she carved the first human path on the Venusian surface, Milana studied the empty, rocky terrain and realized a barren planet had nothing to offer except potential. Potential could be anything, but in actuality, it is nothing. It would take decades to build something as simple as a community with a school and a shop. There was no postal service, no addresses, no communications network, no recreation areas, no cars, no farms, no shipments. No houses or beds or churches. There was no entertainment, no cities, no nations, no animals, forests, or parks. Not even a single person apart from her crew orbiting above. There was nothing here to love. And nothing to hate.

Harrison had persisted on filling Mars, and to what end? He led the colony to extinction, and the planet became barren, as it was before humanity had tried to transform it. Milana had spent decades of her life to become the first to arrive at yet another desolate place. Why persist again? For what? Humanity had lost sight of the value of a perfectly tailored planet.

To Milana Lin, it was the most unsettling feeling in the universe to set foot on a world that was yours for the taking, but a world that was utterly empty. The obsession to build something great pawed at her soul, and with it, a cursed arrogance that smelled too much like Mars. She had gotten humanity here, but she would let them decide the future of this place.

“Men are from Mars and women from Venus,” they say. But now that she had set foot on a new world, she saw Earth in a different light. In that moment, Milana made the bravest choice of her life: To clean up the planet she loved most. She turned around, resigned from the mission, and took her first steps back home.