I've got a bunch of options and locked-in investments of other sorts at Dust-Storm that I could liquidate at a terrible loss, but I'd also lose out on my position there. Which was really what I came here to solidify." Hank nodded. He knew A.J. had made the trip back from Mars specifically to work on major advances to the "Faerie Dust" sensor motes and use his unique talents and access to the alien-technology discoveries made by NASA and Ares to finish acquiring a major stake in Dust-Storm Technology.

It just so happened that a week before A.J. landed, the U.N. finished its acrimonious arguing over how the entire "Mars situation" would be handled. That had set off an awful lot of political and business landmines, including the current crisis at Ares. A.J. brushed back his unruly blond hair. "Anyway, that puts Ares back in the black, or at least enough in the gray that we can operate on for a while, right?"

He felt his gut tighten as he saw the older man's normally cheerful face go carefully neutral in expression. "Well, A.J., yes and no. That takes off the immediate financial pinch, but we have a major issue that's only partly to do with money and investors. If we actually had been granted title-or, let's be accurate, since there wasn't any way we'd actually be grantedownership of a planet-right to exploit for some reasonable time on all of Mars, we'd have kept our investors. Or even if we got a really big chunk of it." "Hey, wedid! " A.J. said.

"Joe's stunt made it so that we didn't lose out!" Hank shook his head.

"We got lucky, yeah. The Buckley Addendum was rammed through, but even though the administration claimed that was to ensure 'fair treatment' of Ares, it was just taking advantage of the situation to make sure that there was some mechanism to allowother government and corporate agencies to claim rights on extraterrestrial territory by allowing the first person to set foot on an extraterrestrial body to have a ninety-nine-year no-holds-barred lease on some portion of that body.