I still want to leave, to check on Aphrodite, but I can’t tear myself away right now. I can see Nightenhelser madly taking notes on his recorder ansible. This makes me laugh, since the thousands of noble Trojans and Argives battling here are all as preliterate as two-year-olds. If they found Nightenhelser’s scribblings, even in Greek, they would mean nothing to these men.

All the gods are getting into the act now.

Hera and Athena blink back into existence, Zeus’s wife visibly urging Athena into the fight. Athena does not resist. Hebe, the goddess of youth and servant to the older gods, flashes down in a flying chariot, Hera takes control, and Athena also leaps aboard, dropping her robe while buckling on her breastplate. Athena’s battle shirt gleams. She lifts a crackling energy shield of bright yellow and pulsing red, and her sword sends bolts of lightning to the Earth.

“Look!” It’s Nightenhelser shouting to me above the fray. There’s real lightning coming from the north, a towering bank of dark stratocumulus rising forty thousand feet or higher into the hot afternoon sky. The cloud suddenly shapes itself into the form and visage of Zeus.

“LEAP TO IT THEN, WIFE AND DAUGHTER,” roars the thunder from that storm. “ATHENA, SEE IF YOU’RE THE WAR GOD’S MATCH. BRING HIM DOWN IF YOU CAN!”

Black clouds roil low over the battlefield while rain and lightning strike down at Trojan and Argive alike.

Hera brings the chariot low over the heads of the Greeks, then lower still, scattering Trojans like leather-and-bronze tenpins.

Athena leaps down into a real chariot next to exhausted, blood-encrusted Diomedes and his faithful driver, Sthenelus. “Are you done for this day, mortal?” she screams at Diomedes, the last word dripping sarcasm. “Are you half the size of your father to stop when your opponents hold the field so?” She gestures to where Hector and Ares are sweeping the Greeks back before their charge.

“Goddess,” Diomedes gasps, “the immortal Ares protects Hector and . . .”

“DO I NOT PROTECT YOU?” roars Athena, fifteen feet tall and growing, looming over the fading glow of Diomedes.

“Yes, Goddess, but . . .”

“Diomedes, joy of my heart, cut down that Trojan and the god who protects him!”

Diomedes looks startled, even horrified. “We mortals may not kill a god . . .”

“Where is that written?” booms Athena and leans over Diomedes, injecting him with something new, pouring energy from her personal god-field to his. The goddess grabs the hapless Sthenelus and throws him thirty feet from the chariot. Athena takes the reins of Diomedes’ chariot and whips the horses forward, straight toward Hector and Ares and the entire Trojan army.

Diomedes readies his spear as if he fully plans to kill a god—to slay Ares.

And Aphrodite wants to use me to kill Athena herself, I think, heart pounding with the terror and excitement of the moment. Things may soon be going quite differently than Homer predicted here on the plains of Troy.

The ship began decelerating almost as soon as it left the Jovian magnetosphere, so their great ballistic arc above the plane of the ecliptic to Mars on the far side of the sun would take several standard days rather than hours. This was good for Mahnmut and Orphu of Io since they had a lot to discuss.

Soon after their departure, Ri Po and Korus III in the forward control module announced that they were deploying the boron sail. Mahnmut watched through ship’s sensors as the circular sail was unfolded and trailed seven kilometers behind them on eight bucky cables, then deployed to its full radius of five kilometers. It looked like a black circle cut out of the starfield to Mahnmut as he watched the stern video feed.

Orphu of Io left his hull-crèche and scuttled down the main cable, along the solenoid torus, and then out along the support cables like a horseshoe-crab Quasimodo, testing everything, tugging everything, scooting on reaction jets above the sail surface to check for cracks or seams or imperfections. He found nothing wrong and shuttled back to the ship with a strange and imperious zero-gravity grace.

Koros III ordered the modified Matloff/Fennelly magnetic scoop fired up and Mahnmut felt and recorded the ship’s energies changing as the device on the prow of their ship generated a scoop field radius of 1,400 kilometers, shoveling in loose ions and concentrating on gathering up the solar wind.

How long is this going to take to decelerate us enough to be able to stop at Mars? asked Mahnmut on the common line, thinking that Orphu would answer.

It was the imperious Koros III who responded. As ship velocity decreases and the effective area of the scoop increases, always keeping sail temperature from exceeding its melting point of two thousand degrees Kelvin, ship mass will equal 4 × 10 to the sixth power, and therefore deceleration from our current velocity of 0.1992 c to 0.001 c—the inelastic collision point—will require 23.6 standard years.

Twenty-three-point-six standard years ! cried Mahnmut over the common line. That was more discussion time than he had bargained for.

That would slow us only to a still-sizable velocity of 300 kilometers per second, said Koros III. One thousandth light speed is nothing to sneeze at where we’re going in-system.

Sounds like it’s going to be a hard landing on Mars, said Mahnmut.

Orphu made a rumbling, sneezing sound on the line.

The Callistan navigator came online. We’re not going to depend only upon the ion boron-sail deceleration, Mahnmut. The actual trip will take a little under eleven standard days. And our velocity upon entering Mars orbit will be less than six kilometers per second.

That’s better, said Mahnmut. He was in the control cradle of The Dark Lady, but all his familiar sensors and controls were dark. It was strange to be picking up all data other than his own life support from the larger ship’s sensors. What makes the difference?

The solar wind, said Orphu through the hull-crèche hardline. It averages about 300 km/sec out here and has an ion density of 10 to the sixth protons/m to the third power. We started with a half tank of Jovian hydrogen and a quarter tank of deuterium, and we’re going to strip more hydrogen and deuterium from the solar wind with the Matloff/Fennelly scoop and fire the four fusion engines on the bow just after passing the sun. That’s where the real deceleration is going to kick in.

I can’t wait, said Mahnmut.

Me too, said Orphu of Io. He made the rumbling, sneezing sound again. Mahnmut thought that the huge moravec had either no sense of irony or a wickedly sharp one.

Mahnmut read À la recherche du temps perdu—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—while the ship passed some 140,000,000 kilometers above the Asteroid Belt.

Orphu had downloaded the French language in all of its classic intricacies along with the novel and biographical information on Proust, but Mahnmut ended up reading the book in five English translations because English was the lost language he had concentrated his own studies in over the past e-century and a half and he felt more comfortable judging literature in it. Orphu had chuckled at this and reminded the smaller moravec that comparing Proust to Mahnmut’s beloved Shakespeare was a mistake, that they were as different in substance as the rocky, terraformed in-system world they were headed for and their own familiar Jovian moons, but Mahnmut read it again in English anyway.

When he was finished—knowing that it had been a cursory multiple reading, but eager to start the dialogue—he contacted Orphu on tightbeam since the Ionian moravec was out of his crèche, checking the boron-sail cables again, lashed firmly to lifelines this time because of the increasing deceleration.