And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed _Aphrodite_ was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the _Aphrodite's_ launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives. Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The _Artemis_, the _Andromeda_, and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine. All three were miserable failures. The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly. The _Artemis_ exploded. The _Andromeda_ vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the _Aphrodite's_ starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under 20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull. The _Aphrodite_ was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did.... The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve. Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere. Cob sensed his discomfort. "That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too." Strike shook his head. "Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable." Cob shrugged. "Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women." He grinned maliciously. "Equal rights, you know." "No doubt," commented the other sourly. "Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?"