March 6th 2026. Captain Arjyla's Battle Fleet has completed its third training mission, and the crews are being given some rotating furlough while the yards overhaul the ships. While our Fighters and Missile bases make a formidable guard-force for the Earth itself, these three ships represent our only long-range striking power... and it seems prudent to keep them in top working condition.
We have started an important and long-range project on Mars. Our scientists and technicians have been working for months to assemble a series of Terraforming Stations for shipment to the Red Planet. Four of the Terraformers have been delivered to Mars, and have been coming on-line one at a time since the turn of the year. Our long-range plan is to turn Mars into another Earth... or better, into an Eden, since we have the possibility to avoid the errors made during Earth's own Industrial Age.
As the first step in the program, we have started flooding the Martian atmosphere with biologically inert greenhouse gasses. We intend to raise the temperature from its natural thermal equilibrium state of -48 degrees centigrade, up towards the freezing point of water. Once the temperature is up in the range where colonists require only respirators and warm coats instead of space-suits, we will start thickening up the atmosphere with Nitrogen, from its current 1% of Earth's density to a substantial fraction of normal atmospheric pressure. Finally, we will raise the Oxygen partial pressure up towards the level at which the colonists can throw their respirators aside, and breathe the air of Mars.
Several of my more vocal political opponents have denounced this whole operation as visionary and unrealistic... altering the atmosphere of an entire planet? At our current technology level? I have even been the butt of a number of rather feeble jokes and comedy routines on television.
Let them laugh. On my desk is a report from the monitoring station at Syrtis Major. The average global temperature of Mars has gone up more than a degree. In two months.