Authors: Tobias S. Buckell
Timas stood on smooth rock, melted and flattened out by hundreds of years of sulfuric rain and howling winds. He watched as the giant conical drilling nose of the cuatetl breached the surface upwind of him,
vomiting debris. Most of the giant worm of a machine, hundreds of feet long, lay hidden under the ground right now.
Grit and pebbles smacked Timas, pinging off the acid-polished shine of his groundsuit. They left tiny dents and pits.
“Damnit.” Timas had expected the cuatetl to appear on the surface to his right. Standing downwind of the cuatetl could leave him with a cracked suit. If that happened the insane pressure of Chilo’s atmosphere at ground level would crush him instantly.
If the heat didn’t kill him first, all 800 degrees of it. Hot enough that the horizon constantly rippled.
Timas watched the thousands of counter-rotating disc cutters on the cuatatl’s head finish spinning down. They still kicked more dirt into the air as he moved upwind. He winced as each loud pop and ping reverberated inside his protective armor.
Each step took its toll. The groundsuit weighed over fifty pounds, despite being made of special lightweight alloys. It was manufactured by some distant city on Chilo, since Yatapek didn’t have the means to make anything like the groundsuit.
The pelting stopped. Timas sweated and panted, wishing to the shady underworld that he’d picked a better spot to stand.
The silver figure of his companion loomed out of the oppressive gloom of the surface in a cumbersome, gleaming, buglike suit. Winglike vanes stuck out of the back of the older suit dumping excess heat out above it in ripples. Timas sighed. Cenyoatl, Cen for short, had certainly gotten lucky today. He stood well upwind of the recall buoy they’d triggered. The cuatetl hadn’t popped up to the left of it, as Timas programmed the buoy to tell it.
Cen would probably say, “I told you so.” His family could drive someone off an edge like that. Always perfect, always stepping to the beat of tradition, always following the rules handed down.
Timas and Cen were xocoyotzin: young, thin, and small enough to fit inside the groundsuits designed to fit svelte outsiders, not adults from his city. Timas lumbered toward his fellow xocoyotzin. They touched their oversize helmets together to speak.
“I told you so.” Cen’s voice buzzed, sounding like it came through a
tin can a room away, even though his smirking face stared right at Timas. “If the cuatetl isn’t working properly, what makes you think it’s going to follow the recall code correctly?”
“I know,” Timas replied. Every time he touched helmets just to talk he wondered what it would be like to have the luxury of working radios in every suit. His father’s father once told him that they’d all had working radios when
he’d
been a xocoyotzin, fifty years ago when the city had been built in Chilo’s upper atmosphere. Now just a handful of radios worked, used by the city to call other cities or help airships dock. And the one on the mining machine, of course. “You’re right, upwind is safer.”
“We’re also right on the edge of the debris field, you know we’re supposed to tell the cuatetl to move farther upwind of the elevator. Just in case.”
“It’s right on the edge. It’ll be okay. Come on, let’s get to work.” Besides, if something had failed Timas didn’t want to have to haul equipment much farther than this.
The cuatetl’s stilled nose dripped detritus, stuck in the air at a forty-five degree angle. It loomed into the sky, dwarfing them. The two boys walked in between a large gap in the segment between the cutter head and the main body.
Timas clanked on, avoiding slurry dripping down from twenty feet over his head. He clambered onto a small alcove, no-slip surface crunching underfoot. The machine’s angle meant that Timas had to brace himself as he leaned forward. Cen stayed back, worried about knocking his heat vanes on something in the tight quarters and boiling himself to death.
Cen lived in terror of mistakes. His entire family depended on him to provide for them. But even more than that, Cen’s family thrived on the status of being one of the twenty xocoyotzin families.
Lights blinked at Timas, advertising the interface panel he needed to check.
The entire cuatetl stretched six hundred feet down a slope under him. He hoped the problem was in the drill head. It usually was. Timas and Cen had been lowered with three new disc cutters.
If something else had failed, the next couple hours would drag on.
Timas didn’t want to have to go tromping around through the whole machine. Last year he’d been working with an older xocoyotzin when one of the ore processors to the rear broke down. It had taken weeks of hard work by all thirty of the xocoyotzin to get a whole new processor winched down to the surface and swapped in.
Timas checked the diagram on the panel. It indicated a broken disc cutter.
Good.
Now he and Cen just had to get outside and lug a fifty-pound piece of equipment back and swap it out.
Timas glanced at his wrist. He he had three hours of air left. He didn’t bother looking at the pressure or heat dials. Thinking about either just got one jumpy.
Three hours of air. It would take an hour to get winched back up to Yatapek. You couldn’t swap out a new air bottle on Chilo’s surface.
He backed out of the alcove and bumped helmets with Cen.
“It’s a disc cutter,” Timas said. And even luckier, the cuatetl had rotated the failed unit down toward the ground for them to access.
“Great.” Cen grinned on the other side of his slightly warped visor. “We can get one dragged over and changed in time. No second trip tomorrow.”
Even duty-conscious Cen, proud of his family and his role, didn’t want to return to the hellish surface tomorrow. Once a week to service the mining machine was enough.
When the Azteca of New Anegada left aboard ships bound for other planets, trying to escape their history there, had they ever imagined ending up on a world like this? Timas doubted it. His ancestors may have been tricked into believing things borrowed from a lost culture on a distant Earth by cruelly manipulative aliens. They may have warred with the Ragamuffins who lived on New Anegada and lost, but this he would never have wished on his worst enemy. He didn’t imagine his own great grandparents had willingly wished this on him.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
Cen took the lead and Timas followed him. One of Cen’s heat vanes
had a slight bend. Even upwind some of the debris had hit Cen’s suit. Timas reminded himself to tell the mechanics when they were winched back up.
Out from the shadow of the cuatetl Timas checked the markers they’d left drilled into the ground. The red blinking lights, powered by the fierce wind, led the two boys deep into the murky orange gloom away from the cuatetl.
Timas fell into a pattern. Step, step, rest, mouthful of stale, recycled air. The smell of three generations of sweaty xocoyotzin before him filled the suit. Step, step, rest, breathe.
Cen pulled well ahead of Timas. Timas stopped, panting and watching his visor fog, and noticed something move out of the corner of his eye.
Shadows. Here on the surface, in the brown muck and low visibility with the heat rippling and wind kicking, it wasn’t unusual to imagine things moving about.
But no, he did see something.
Timas turned and saw a hazy figure on all fours run at him through the edges of the muck. Cen moved on, oblivious, as Timas squinted at the metallic tentacles that draped from the front of the creature. It wore a formfitting suit, more advanced and flexible than his.
It veered away. Timas struggled to catch up to Cen so that he could bang the back of Cen’s suit and point. Both boys stared, amazed as the alien moved farther away until it faded into the brown haze.
They pushed helmets together. “Did you see that?” Timas shouted. “Something else is on the surface with us. It doesn’t look human.”
“That can’t be.” Cen’s brown eyes widened.
“It’s an alien!”
“That’s heresy,” Cen said. “Forget we saw it, let’s go.”
Timas looked back, trying to spot the creature. What did he care about heresy? His grandparents had Reformed and left Aztlan back on New Anegada years ago during the DMZ wars. Their fears of aliens trying to rule Timas’s people again didn’t mean anything anymore. True, some believed that god-aliens had followed their exodus to this city and still looked over them. A crazy belief. Aliens were just . . . other kinds of creatures.
And apparently at least one of them walked Chilo’s surface.
“We should follow it,” Timas said. “If there are aliens here, on the surface, don’t you think people would be interested in knowing that?”
“It’s too dangerous.” Cen shook his head. “It’s too deep in the debris zone.”
Cen and the rules. Yatapek floated far overhead. Downwind of the city lay the debris zone, a dangerous place to stand still. But Yatapek didn’t drop things. Not unless some airship collided with it by accident, driven into the city by a gust of wind. And airships from other cities visited Yatapek less and less each year. The city just didn’t have much to offer the others.
Timas made up his mind. “I’m going. Come or not, Cen. You don’t have to share the honor of the greatest discovery Yatapek has ever made. Can you imagine the visitors from the other cities that will come if we are the ones who find aliens hiding on Chilo’s surface?” Most human worlds didn’t welcome aliens, so it wasn’t surprising that they’d hidden. “Maybe they’d even trade with us, or if we swear to keep the fact that they’re hiding on Chilo secret, maybe they’ll pay our city.”
That got Cen’s attention. Both of them knew that being down here helped the city, and that they were responsible for its health. The idea that aliens could help got Cen to follow Timas as he lumbered downwind.
Both boys moved as fast as they could through the thick air, trying to find the alien. The sense of getting away with something illicit deep in the debris zone made Timas smile.
Then something hit the ground in front of him. It looked like a shard of plastic, melted and contorted. As he watched, it bubbled and melted away.
He leaned back and peered up into the gloom.
Something much larger hit the ground. He felt the thud through his feet, but didn’t see anything. But Timas knew what that meant. This was bad, this was really bad. He’d screwed up.
“Cen! Debris!”
The shouting served nothing, it was just a reflex. They couldn’t hear each other at all. Timas ran at Cen. He had to force himself up into the
wind, legs pushing hard. His thighs burned and sweat dripped from his forehead, stinging his eyes, as he overtook Cen and bumped into his side.
Their bulky groundsuits clanked as they almost both hopped off balance for a second.
Timas grabbed Cen’s helmet and yanked them both face to face. “Debris!”
Cen paled. “The cuatetl!”
Their training told them to separate and hunker down near any depression or hole they could find. But everywhere Timas looked the ground stretched out smooth and even.
“Run.” They both scrambled, running back toward the barely visible silhouette of the mining machine through the murk.
It cleared as they got closer. Timas slowed just as something hit the top of the cuatetl’s cutter head. He threw his hands up and dropped to the ground as metal shards pelted him.
He waited for the inevitable with his eyes closed, raising his hands and praying to the gods to at least make it a quick and painless death.
Fifteen years, two as xocoyotzin, an honored position in the city and for his family. It had been a good life.
But nothing hit. The debris had stopped.
Timas opened his eyes. A jagged rip in the cuatetl’s side billowed smoke. A bad sign. Yatapek could not afford to replace an entire cutter head.
He turned around to check on Cen: his friend lay facedown on the ground. Timas walked over to tap helmets, but Cen didn’t stir when he rapped on the back of the large metal suit.
Two of Cen’s radiators had broken off. The suit was overheating.
Gods. Timas got on the ground, pushing Cen carefully onto his side so he could look into his visor. He could see nothing but fog clouding it.
They had to get off the surface.
Timas rolled Cen back onto his face. He couldn’t lift the old extrabulky hundred pound suit. But he could pull it along the smooth surface.
The helmet wouldn’t crack, he kept telling himself. If he damaged
the suit’s vanes by dragging him any other way, Cen certainly wouldn’t survive. The groundsuit slid slowly over the surface.
It took almost fifteen minutes to get Cen along the wind beacons to the large metal sphere of the elevator. A slim ribbon of material stretched from the elevator’s roof up into the gloom above, disappearing into the sky.
Another few minutes fell away as he pulled Cen carefully in among the three massive disc cutters inside.
The elevator’s large portholes shattered four years ago, leaving it open to Chilo’s boiling depths. Yatapek couldn’t repair the damage. Everything seemed to break down these days. Timas held on to the empty airlock’s door frame. He slapped the green switch wired on the outside to give the haul-up signal.
Then Timas sat next to his facedown companion, blinking away sweat and watching the condensation from his own exertions run down the inside of his visor in little rivulets.
What had happened up there, a hundred thousand feet over his head? There shouldn’t have been any debris. Not like that.
There might have been tears of frustration and not sweat in his eyes, but he wasn’t sure as the elevator jerked. The groundscrews buried into the rock underneath disengaged and folded up into the elevator. They bounced along the ground, and then rose into the air over the rippling heat waves of the orange-tinted surface.
The higher they got the cooler it would get. Timas bit his lip as they ascended into the sulfuric gloom of his world.
“You can make it, Cen,” he whispered.
He sat there and stared at the dials on his wrist. The heat dropped down from 850 degrees into the high 700s, PSI began dropping.
But would it be enough?
A gust of wind slammed into them, pushing the elevator out at an angle from underneath the city. His groundsuit creaked, metal joints and ribs popping as the immense pressure decreased.