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the Ares Project. He might have just turned twenty-eight years old, but after the year or so he'd been with Ares they had stopped expecting him to act much more than eighteen. He bounced through Glenn Friedet's office door, making the harried-looking project director jump.

    "I swear, A.J.," Glenn sighed, "more than half of my gray hairs come from you."

    "Well, let me see if I can make your day a happier one, Fearless Leader." A.J. slapped a sheet of paper down in front of Glenn.

    That got Glenn's attention. "Paper? From you ?"

    A.J. grinned, smugly aware of his reputation as someone so far out on the bleeding edge that he considered paper and papyrus to be equally outmoded.

    "You won't begrudge me the death of that tree, Glenn."

    Glenn's gaze scanned the paper. "They went for it!"

    "You better believe they did!" He bounced around the office. "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I get to build Tinkerbell, Ariel, and the rest of my Faeries! And get to make all the rest of your engineers modify the designs on Pirate !"

    The latter made Glenn wince. Wince twice, actually, first at A.J.'s official use of the very unofficial nickname of the Automated Arean Reconnaissance Rover and Return module. Officially A 2 R 3 —which had led to its own spate of Star Wars jokes—the longhand acronym AARRR had been pronounced in such a way as to inevitably be followed by "matey," "walk the plank," and so on, thereby causing the obvious moniker of Pirate to refer to the test vehicle.

    The second wince was at the equally inevitable complaints the redesign would engender from the engineers.

    A.J. recognized both winces with satisfaction. "Hey, Glenn, I told them I would win this one. They should've planned for it."

    "Actually, they probably did. But with two more months going by than we'd expected, we were getting pretty settled into the other design."

    "So, do I call up NASA and tell them to keep their money?"

    Glenn laughed. "Not a chance. We can use all we can get, and none of the critical construction stages have been passed yet— though this was close."

    "I'll go get things started in RDD, then. You get someone processing the files—I've already digisigned everything to authorize my end and you'll find the secure contract files in your inbox."

    A.J. jogged out, giving another whoop of triumph as he exited the office area. His grin grew even wider as he headed toward Research, Development and Design.

    It was finally sinking in. Despite his words, he hadn't been nearly so sure NASA would go for his proposal. It made sense, true, but sense often didn't have much to do with government contracts, especially when the government agency in question was competing with the proposing private organization.

    The Ares Project.

    It had been A.J.'s dream since he was a kid to be able to go into space, and especially to land on Mars. But despite some initial rumbles in that direction in the very early part of the twenty-first century, the government's efforts to land a manned mission on the Red Planet had progressed only haltingly, with the vast complexity, immense inertia, and often wrongheaded design strategies that had characterized government space missions for years.

    With a new generation of engineers agitating for private space missions, the U.S. government had finally authorized a few incentives for private space work. A series of prizes had been established for achieving certain space-travel goals, with a general eye towards eventually reaching Mars.

    The prizes involved were mere pittances, needless to say, from the point of view of most government agencies and megacorporations. But they were large enough to warrant an attempt by moderate-sized consortia of interested organizations. The idea itself had its genesis in Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars , and the Ares Project had been formed to seize the opportunity. Many of the founders were, of course, the same people who had hounded the government into arranging the prizes. Collectively, the