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Idaho’s volcanic mud.
    The woman who watched this intimate spectacle called herself Sparta. It was not her real name. It was her persona, the mask she showed only to herself, and Sparta was a secret name, secret from everyone but herself. To most people she was known as Ellen Troy–Inspector Troy of the Board of Space Control. Which was not her real name either. The people who knew her real name held her life in their hands, and most of them wanted to kill her.
    To those who did not know her, Sparta seemed young, beautiful, intelligent, mysteriously gifted, strangely lucky. She was in fact powerful beyond casual comprehension. But to herself she seemed frail, her humanity crippled, her psyche constantly on the edge of dissolution.
    Now she’d been yanked out of the normal course of her life once again–if her life could in any sense be considered normal–to be thrust without preparation into a situation which would require her complete alertness and total concentration, a peak performance that was to be demanded after two weeks of suffocating shipboard imprisonment on this cutter. Given the present alignment of the planets, an EarthMars crossing in two weeks was as close to instantaneous as even a Space Board cutter, the fastest class of ship in the solar system, could get . . . two weeks during which Sparta had nothing to do but study the meager information on the unsolved case that awaited her.
Her brooding was interrupted by the young man who entered the wardroom behind her. “Phobos and Deimos,” he said cheerfully. “Fear and Terror. Wonderful names for moons.”
     
“They fit well enough,” she said. “The chariot horses of Mars, weren’t they?”
     
He lifted a black eyebrow over a green eye. “Ellen, is there really something your encyclopedic brain hasn’t stored? If you want to get fussy, the god in question was Ares–the Greek war god, not the Roman. Phobos and Deimos were two of his three sons by Aphrodite, not his horses.”
     
“I read they were his horses, and they ate human flesh.”
     
“Mangled mythology. The man-eating horses–there were four, one also named Deimos but none named Phobos–belonged to Diomedes. You’ll recall him from The Iliad .”
     
She smiled. “How do you keep all that stuff in your head?”
    “Because I love that stuff. I love The Iliad enough that I got through even Alexander Pope’s awful translation.” He smiled back at her. “A woman who calls herself Ellen Troy,” he whispered, “really should read it at least once.”
    Blake Redfield–his real and quite public name–was one of the few who knew that her name was not Ellen Troy. He was one of the few–perhaps the only one of those who knew the truth–who did not seek to kill her for it. If at times Sparta thought she loved Blake, at other times she was afraid even of him. Or perhaps of her love for him.
Love was a subject she had been avoiding lately. “Look, you can see Phobos Base.”
    Bright points glistened on the edge of Phobos’s biggest crater, high-rimmed Stickney, eight kilometers across. Sharply limned against the midlatitudes of Mars, Stickney was an iron-black chalice against a golden mirror. Eighty years ago the first human expedition to Mars had landed on Phobos, and for several decades the moon had served as a base for the exploration and eventual settlement of the Martian surface. “Looks like it was built yesterday,” Blake said. “Hard to believe it’s been deserted for half a century.”
Aluminum huts and domes still stood on Stickney’s far rim, undamaged, unoxidized, a time capsule of planetary exploration.
    On the videoplate Phobos was already sliding away; off in the far corner of the screen Mars Station emerged from the crowded field of stars–it being the reason Phobos Base was deserted, no longer of practical use. The station was a big bottle of air that rotated fast enough to provide substantial artificial gravity on its inner surface.
    They watched in silence