A Death-Horse And The Milky Way

In Poul Anderson's A Stone In Heaven, Dominic Flandry and his Shalmuan servant, Chives, ride a missile towing a bundle of nuclear warheads through space toward their target:

"The death-horse plunged onward." (XIII, p. 177)

This reminds us of the Hell Horse. (Scroll down.) Hard sf echoes fantasy and myth.

Searching for the Hell Horse in the appropriate text, we find yet another description of the Milky Way:

"Everywhere around were stars, but unthinkably remote in a black heaven. The Swan flashed overhead, the Milky Way spilled suns off its dim arch. Carl's Wain wheeled under the Pole; all the stars were cold."
-Poul Anderson, Three Hearts And Three Lions (London, 1977), CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR, p. 150.

"...all the stars were cold..." reminds us of the opening sentence of Chapter I of Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows:

"Every planet in the story is cold - even Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT I, p. 342.

Finally, for now, jumping from one fictional timeline to another reminds us of Manse Everard's description of his job in the Time Patrol:

"'...we Unattached agents are so damned busy, hopping around in all space-time like fleas on a griddle....'"
-Poul Anderson, "Brave to Be a King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 1, p. 58.