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group had gained the nickname of the Nuts That Roared, for their Grand Fenwickian victory over the ponderous and generally unswervable inertia of official space programs.

    The public had started to take notice when the Ares Project successfully orbited, deorbited, and retrieved a fully functional man-capable space module—and did it for a million dollars less than the prize money for that achievement. But it was the follow-on Ares-2 , a smaller but fully automated sensing satellite, that galvanized public opinion. The completely privately constructed spacecraft reached the Red Planet, used aerobraking to achieve orbital velocity, and sent back multiple high-quality images. And did it at a smaller cost than any equivalent government probe to date.

    Stung into high gear by these successes, the politicians had showered money onto the space program. NASA and its associated partner agencies suddenly found themselves with quadrupled budgets and a mandate to get a manned spacecraft to Mars—and the unspoken mandate to manage the task before the Ares Project beat them to it.

    Politics and government approaches still influenced the work at NASA, of course, and part of that caused NASA to avoid using many of the approaches which Ares used. This suited members of the Project, like A.J., just fine. If NASA decided to copy their methods, it might well outdo the Project despite its current lead.

    For A.J.'s purposes, one important way in which they had taken a lesson from the Project was to avoid what Zubrin had called the "Siren Call" of the moon: i.e., to see the establishment of a moon base as a necessary precursor to a Mars expedition. The important way in which they had not taken that lesson was politically connected. The moon-base faction had been persuaded to give up on a Luna base, and a compromise reached: that a base would be constructed on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars.

    This was not something the Ares Project was directly interested in, but it made a lot more sense than building a base on Earth's moon. Phobos had no gravity well to speak of, and aerobraking in Mars' atmosphere could help in achieving a matched orbit at a reasonable cost. That done, the closeness of the moonlet would allow excellent surveying of parts of Mars.

    Better still, there had been some indications from prior probes, including the ill-fated Soviet Phobos 2 , that there might be some fossil deposits of water on Phobos, which was over twenty kilometers wide. That wasn't really surprising, since both Phobos and its brother moon Deimos were suspected to be captured outer-system bodies, possibly the cores of former comets. So the Phobos project was justifiable on its own terms while still being reasonably well integrated into NASA's overall mission design. And—always a critical factor in the world inhabited by government agencies and the megacorporations with whom they maintained an incestuous relationship—the Phobos project kept the existing vested interests happy. A moon base, after all, was a moon base, regardless of what moon it was on.

    It was here that A.J. had seen an opportunity. Obviously, no one—neither government regulatory agencies nor private insurance companies—was going to let the Ares Project blast human beings into space without firm proof that all aspects of the proposed system would work safely. Pirate was an unmanned device designed to demonstrate the most critical aspects of the system: to be able to travel to the Red Planet with no return fuel, just a small store of "seed" hydrogen; to be able to create fuel from Mars' atmosphere; and then return to Earth using Mars-manufactured propellant.

    A rover unit was to be deployed during the atmospheric fuel manufacturing stage to do surveying of the area, which was one of the prime locations currently considered for final landing of a manned mission. It would also leave the first "hab"—habitable enclosure—on Mars, although it was a scaled-down version from the