The Five Moons Consortium had decided some decades ago that two trillion watts of energy would be a terrible thing to waste.

Mahnmut watched as Io’s north pole flicked beneath them. Ejecta from various sulfur volcanoes—especially from Prometheus far south near the moon’s equator—was being spewed 140 kilometers high and higher above the pockmarked surface, as if the violent moon was shooting at them, trying to make them turn back before they reached the point of no return.

Too late. They were already there.

On the common forward video, Ri Po’s superimposed navigation brackets showed their proper insertion into the flux tube and projected alignment with the scissors. Jupiter rushed at them, rapidly filling the view ahead like a multi-striped wall.

The physical blades of the scissors—that dual-armed, rotating, magnetic wave accelerator set within the natural particle accelerator of Io’s flux tube—were 8,000 kilometers long, only a fragment of the flux tube’s length of more than half a million curving kilometers connecting the north pole of Io to the north pole of Jupiter.

But the scissors could move. As Orphu of Io had explained to Mahnmut, “Angular momentum can be a many-splendored thing, my little friend.”

The ship nestling Mahnmut’s beloved submersible had approached Io and the flux tube—even after full acceleration from the ion-tugs—at a velocity of only some 24 kilometers per second, less than 86,000 kilometers per hour. At that speed, it would take more than four hours just to traverse the flux tube distance between Io’s north pole and Jupiter’s, e-years to reach Mars. But they had no intention of continuing on at that creeping pace.

The ship entered the crackling, roaring, twitching field of the flux tube, found the vertex of the scissors, aligned itself with the upper blade, and then used the tube’s own accelerator properties to hurl the spacecraft-solenoid through the five-kilometer-wide field coils of the superconducting dipole accelerator. As soon as the ship entered the first gate like some clumsy croquet ball passing through the first of several thousand wickets, the blade of the accelerator-scissors began snapping open with a differential angular velocity nearing—and theoretically even surpassing—light speed. They were riding a rippling bullwhip one second and then flicked from the tip of it the next, using as much of that two trillion watts of energy as the scissors-accelerator could grab.

The ship—and everything in it—went from zero-g to almost 3,000-g’s within two-point-six seconds.

Jupiter zipped toward, past, and under them in an eyeblink. Mahnmut slowed all his monitors down so that he could appreciate their departure.

“Wheeehaw!” cried Orphu from the outer hull.

The ship and submersible strained, creaked, groaned, and whinnied from the g-force, but it was all made of tough stuff—The Dark Lady itself had been built to withstand several million kilograms per square centimeter of pressure in Europa’s deep seas—and so were these moravecs.

“Holy shit,” said Mahnmut, meaning to send the comment just to Orphu of Io, but managing to broadcast to all three of his colleagues.

“Indeed,” responded Ri Po.

Jupiter’s broiling polar lights—the brilliant auroral oval surrounding the gas giant’s north pole, accompanied by Io’s blazing footprint where the flux tube met atmosphere—flashed beneath them and disappeared astern.

Ganymede, which had been a million kilometers away across the system a few seconds before, zoomed toward them, flicked past, and was lost to sight behind them.

“Uruk Sulcus,” said Koros III on the common band and for a moment Mahnmut thought the command-moravec was choking or cursing before he noted the slightly sentimental tone to his usually cool voice and realized that Koros must have been referring to some region on Ganymede itself—a half-glimpsed grooved and dirty snowball flashing past—that must be home to the Ganymedan.

The tiny moon Himalia, which none of the crew had visited—nor cared to—whipped by like a firefly with its hair on fire.

“We’ve passed through the bow shock front,” reported Ri Po in his flat Callistan accent. “Out of the local pond for the first time, at least for this moravec.”

Mahnmut glanced at his screens. Ri Po’s readout reported that they were fifty-three Jupiter diameters out now and still accelerating. Mahnmut had to check unused memory banks and see that Jupiter had a diameter of almost 142,000 kilometers before he got a sense of their speed. The ship was arcing above the plane of the ecliptic, but Mahnmut vaguely remembered that the plan was for the sun’s gravity to hook them back down toward Mars, which was on the far side of the sun at the moment. At any rate, navigation wasn’t his concern. His job would begin when they landed in the ocean of Mars, and sailing there seemed simple enough—rich sunlight, warm temperatures, shallow depths with no pressure to speak of, stars to navigate by at night, geo-positioning satellites that they’d drop into orbit so they could navigate during the day, almost no radiation compared to the surface on Europa. No kraken! No ice. No ice! It all seemed too simple.

Of course, if the post-humans were hostile, there was a good chance that the moravecs would not survive the trip to Mars or the atmospheric entry, and even they did, there was a high probability that they could never return to their homes in Jupiter space, but there was nothing Mahnmut could do about any of that now. His thoughts began to turn back to Sonnet 127.

“Everyone all right?” asked Koros III.

Everyone reported in that they were fine. It took more than a few thousand gravities sitting on their respective chests to get this crew down. Morale was high.

Ri Po began reporting some other navigational and spacefaring facts, but Mahnmut wasn’t really paying attention. He was already caught up in the gravity field of Sonnet 127, the first of the “Dark Lady” sonnets.

Daeman slept well and dreamt of women.

He found it slightly amusing, if not odd, that he dreamt of women only when he was not sleeping with one. It was as if he required warm female flesh next to him every night, and his subconscious supplied them when his daily efforts failed. As he awoke, late, in his comfortable room at Ardis Hall, the dream fled in fragments and tatters, but enough remained—along with usual morning erection—to bring back a vague memory of Ada’s body, or someone very much like Ada—warm, white-skinned, perfumed, with full buttocks and round breasts and solid thighs. Daeman looked forward to the weekend’s coming conquest and had little doubt this lovely morning that he would succeed.

Later, showered, shaved, dressed impeccably in what he considered rural casual—white-and-blue-striped cotton trousers, wool serge vest, pastel jacket, white silk shirt and ruby cravat stone, carrying his favorite wood walking cane and wearing black leather shoes a slight bit more sturdy than his usual formal slipper-pumps—he breakfasted in the sunlit conservatory and learned, to his satisfaction, that Hannah and that Harman person had left early that morning. “Preparing for the evening’s pour” was Ada’s cryptic explanation and Daeman did not have sufficient interest to ask for clarification. He was just glad the man was gone.

Ada did not bring up conversational absurdities such as books or spaceships, but spent the late morning with him, serving as guide, reacquainting him with Ardis Hall’s many wings and gabled corridors, its elaborate wine cellars and secret passages and ancient attics. He remembered a similar tour on his first visit there and the feckless girl-Ada leading him up a rickety ladder to the rooftop jinker platform and Daeman, alert as ever to such revelations, had half glimpsed a young man’s heaven up her hoisted skirt as she climbed above him: he perfectly remembered the milky thighs and dark, stippled shadows there.