Josephson studied his drink and thought about it. “Well, maybe we ought to follow the same tradition. I know a little mythology too. Apollo had a half brother. Another great Olympian god. He had his own mythology; it was only later that he was identified with the Romans’ war-god… Only battle and bloodshed gave him any pleasure; his twin children Phobos and Deimos — Panic and Fear — accompanied him onto the battlefield…”

Michaels grunted. “Panic and Fear. Sounds like the kind of guy who’d prosper up on the Hill.”

Josephson smiled. No other name was possible.

And the press would love it.

Book Four
APPROACHES

Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 171/13:24:02

“Sixty minutes to pericenter,” Stone said.

All three members of the crew were in the Mission Module’s science platform. At the heart of this little octagonal chamber, lined with its banks of switches and displays, they were strapped into harnesses and had their feet hooked into stirrups.

Above York’s head there was a small science viewport. A brilliant, shifting white light beat down over her face, flooding the fluorescents.

She could see the upper half of a fat, pale, gibbous disc.

My God. That’s Venus.

To her naked eye, the dayside of the planet was glaring white — much brighter than Earth, from a similar distance — and it washed out the stars. Of the thin slice of nightside she could see nothing at all.

The trajectory of Ares had taken it arcing inside the orbit of Venus. Ares was barreling out of the sun toward Venus, tumbling along a hyperbola into Venus’s gravity well. Ares was already moving toward the planet at more than five miles a second, and, as York watched, that gibbous disc was narrowing, and the reflected sunlight cast shifting shadows across her lap.

There was a Hasselblad Velcroed to the work surface near her; she ripped it loose, jammed her face up against the port, and began taking pictures.

Venus was about the size of the Earth, but this was nothing like her experience of Earth orbit. There was no detail: the surface of Venus was permanently hidden, baked under its huge layers of carbon-dioxide cloud. From this close, the cloud tops looked utterly smooth, featureless, as if the planet was a huge pearl: perfect, entire…

Although, when she looked more closely, she thought she could see a little structure in the clouds, right at the limb: a fine shell, surrounding the main cloud decks, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

She snapped the camera furiously.

“You have a problem, Natalie?” Stone asked drily.

“I think I see the haze layer,” she said. A shell of sulfuric acid clouds, swathing Venus, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

“Yeah. And that picture’s not on the schedule,” Stone said.