From his point of view, Ares really stole a march on NASA even though we were working together, and we've already been paid for our efforts.

He probably doesn't think he owes us anything, and like most people he doesn't have any real gut grasp of the demands of space travel. So he won't think twice about doing things that can cause us one hell of a lot of problems." "Like…?" A.J. prompted. "Like starting to make us pay our own freight. Yeah, we've started our colony, but it'll be a lot of long, hard years before we can even dream of them being fully self-supporting. If everyone's playing nice, they recognize that helping us stay established helps them with our expanding resource base and so on, but I don't think a lot of these guys will get that angle." Anne sucked in her breath as the implications sank in. "Oh, hell." "No kidding," Hank said. A.J. turned the implications over in his mind. His gut churned as the situation clarified. "You mean we'll have to pay full price for launch capacity. When our own launch capacity never got developed outside of NASA because of the emergency get-to-Phobos-nowproject." "It gets better. You know, I wasn't stupid when we got sucked into this. One of the deals I cut was that after theNike mission was finished-and by the contract I negotiated, it was finished once we'd gotten to Phobos and provided a few months support-Ares could have any available launch capacity basically at cost of launch, no more. But…" Hank ran a hand through his prematurely white hair. "The treaty divvied up Mars, and for political points the U.S. used NASA's foresight in making theNike engine-rocket assemblies detachable to offer each of the other space-capable nations-China, the E.U., Japan, Russia, and India-one pretested, functional, high-power NERVA engine to 'help bring all of Earth into the true Space Age,' as the president's one speech put it. The extra engine they agreed to give to the U.N. so they had something to use for their administration of the 'common property of the human race.' "