Terraforming, applied to my family, was really just a grand word for farmer. By the time my father took us, all the heroic, glorious stuff had already been done on Mars. Not that it wasn't still dangerous, just mundane dangerous. Not exciting dangerous. My dad had a small farm in the outlay area. The thing about farming on Mars, you aren't just responsible for keeping your family alive, you have to meet a goverment quota of land subduction per quarter per year. Roughly a fiscal quarter in business terms. This meant you had to grow outwards constantly. I didn't know any of this, of course, I was only 6. All I knew was that I had to work my butt off constantly. There were no summer vacations. There isn't strictly a 'summer' on Mars. But anyway, its not like you don't know this.

The danger to this whole project mostly came from the weather. The hydrogen towers pacified the weather, but pacifist weather on Mars is destructive on Earth. There was also the chance of dog attacks, which were rare. I suppose I should explain. The dogs, no one really knows where they came from. Dog is actually a terrible understatement. They look like terrestrial dogs, but they are enomrous. Roughly the same size as a horse, more compact and definitely more aggressive.

A bunch of theories surfaced, but the most probable, and the one that stuck in the conscience of the Mars colony is as follows: The first terraformers that settled on Mars were able to erect an infrastructure for the hydrogen towers, reservoirs, and irrigation system. And of course their base camp. These workers were all without family; the risk of death was near 100%. But they were allowed to bring any pets along with them.

When the second wave of terraformers arrived on Mars, 20 years later, there was no trace of any human life on Mars. The infrastructer was intact, everything was set as it should have been, even a bit ahead of schedule according to the records, but there was no one present. There were not even any human remains. Nothing was alive. There was no trace that anything had been alive for the last five years. The second wave searched for a while, but found nothing. And being that lots of hard work had to be done before the third wave arrived in 10 years, they stopped worrying, commemorated their lost fellow humans, named the home base Roanoke, knuckled down and got to work on the technical details of creating a functional atmospheric pressure system for Mars.

It wasn't until another five years before the first dog was spotted. A worker noticed rapid movement near the horizon, drew his military issued low gravity gun, and waited to see what came. Soon the first life form on Mars was recored: a giant dog.