A.J. Baker skipped down the hall, drawing tolerant stares from other members of 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."