The climactic Karil and Loris adventure was inspired, like James Joyce's Ulysses, by the Odyssey, with a Ganymede brothel as The Lotus Eaters, Jupiter as The Cyclops, the Asteroid Belt as The Wandering Rocks, the Venus hellscape as Hades, and a homey Martian colony as Ithaca. Investigating the strange disappearances of shipping in the Asteroid Belt, the crew of Atalanta are kidnapped by the powerful interplanetary criminal Madame Feronia, imprisoned on Venus, and confronted by the monumental secret beneath that planet's deadly, crushing atmosphere, while they try to find their way home to Mars. Atalanta herself has the final word of the series.
