The day Homer and his friend Lipton saw the alien, everything changed. Outside the spherical floating city of Valloon, a hundred thousand feet over the ground, the winds had died. The forecast from the Solarian cities, with their satellites and computers, gave Valloon a seven-hour window. The city could anchor over the ground safely, without fear.
“Homer, it’s time,” his mother had said gently as she woke him that morning. He’d heard the old phone ring, and he knew what it heralded as he blinked the extra sleep from his eyes. Time to descend into hell again, he thought to himself.
Homer had donned his cumbersome pressure suit with the help of a mechanic as the doctor Esther watched. The mechanic checked over every seal and joint, making sure Homer stood ready to get dropped into the ninety-times-normal pressure of Solars surface.
“For the city,” The mechanic said as he slapped the helmet into place.
“For our people,” Homer mumbled.
Then the city’s elevator had lowered Homer and a similarly suited-up partner down to the ground, swaying and jerking them about inside. It dug in with its screws when it hit bottom, holding itself and the city steady as the incredibly strong Nano-filament wire quivered all the way back up to the city’s docks.
Every week, weather permitting, boys like Homer checked over the mining machine their city depended on, the cuatetl. It hunted for the precious metals Valloon needed to survive. This week it had radioed a panic failure code.
Despite the calm a hundred thousand feet above him, Homer strained his way forward through the hurricane-like winds here. He’d first come to the surface on his eleventh birthday. In the following two years he’d never seen a calm day. He heard the older boys that it happened, but he’d believe it when he saw it.
Homer 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 Homer, pinging off the acid-polished shine of his ground-suit. They left tiny dents and pits on impact.
“Dam%it.” Homer 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 amounts of pressure of Solars atmosphere at ground level would crush his soft fleshy body instantly. That is, if the heat didn’t kill him first, all 800 degrees of it. Hot enough that the horizon constantly rippled.
Homer 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 ground-suit weighed over fifty pounds, despite being made of special light-weight alloys. It was manufactured by some distant city on Solar, since Valoon didn’t have the means to make anything like the ground-suit.
The pelting stopped. Homer 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 bug-like suit. Wing-like vanes stuck out of the back of the older suit dumping excess heat out above the ripples. Homer sighed.
Lipton 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 Homer programmed the buoy to tell it.
Lipton would probably say, “I told you so.” His family could drive someone off an edge like that. Always perfet, always stepping to the beat of tradition, always following the rules handed down. Homer and Lipton were Flitzonian, young, thin, and small enough to fit inside the ground-suits designed to fit Dogima outsiders, not adults from his city. Homer lumbered towards his fellow Flitzonian. They touched their oversize helmets together to speak.
“I told you so.” Lipton’s voice buzzed, sounding like it came through a tin can a room away, even though his smirking face stared at Homer. “If the cuatetl isn’t working properly, what makes you think it’s going to follow the recall code correctly?”
“I know,” Homer 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 Flitzonian, fifty years ago when the city had been built in Solars 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 itself, of course. “You’re right, upwind is safer.”
“We are 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 go to work.” Besides, if something had failed Homer 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.
Homer 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 Homer had to brace himself as he leaned forward. Lipton stayed back, worried about knocking his heat vanes on something in the tight quarters and boiling himself to death.
Lipton lived in terror of mistakes. His entire family depended on him to provide for them. But even more than that, Lipton’s family thrived on the status of being one of the twenty Flitzonian families. Lights blinked at Homer, 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. Homer and Lipton had been lowered with three new disc cutters. If something else had failed, the next couple hours would drag on. Homer didn’t want to go tromping around through the whole machine. Last year he’d been working with an older Flitzonian when one of the ore processors to the rear broke down. It had taken weeks of hard work by all thirty of the Flitzonian to get a whole new processor winched down to the surface and swapped in. Homer checked the diagram on the panel. It indicated a broken disc cutter.
Good.
Now he and Lipton just had to get outside and lug a fifty-pound piece of equipment back and swap it out. Homer glanced at his wrist. 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 at least one of those hours to get winched back up to Valloon. You couldn’t swap out a new air bottle on Solar’s surface. He backed out of the alcove and bumped helmets with Lipton.
“It’s a disc cutter,” Homer said. And even luckier, the cuatetl had rotated the failed unit down toward the ground for them to access.
“Great.” Lipton 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 Lipton, 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 Nu Mak of New Levian left aboard ships bound for other planets, trying to escape their history there, had they ever imagined ending up on a world like this? Homer doubted it. His ancestors may have been tricked into believing things borrowed from a lost culture on a distant World by cruelly manipulative aliens. They may have warred with the Ragamuffins who lived on New Levian 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.”
Lipton took the lead and Homer followed him. One of Lipton’s heat vanes had a slight bend. Even upwind some of the debris had hit Lipton’s suit. Homer reminded himself to tell the mechanics when they were winched back up.
Out from the shadow of the cuatetl Homer 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.
Homer fell into a pattern. Step, step, rest, breathe. Lipton pulled well ahead of Homer. Homer 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.
Homer turned and saw a hazy figure on all fours run at him through the edges of the muck. Lipton moved on, oblivious, as Homer 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. Homer moved farther away until it faded into a brown haze. They pushed helmets together. “Did you see that?” Homer shouted. “Something else is on the surface with us. It doesn’t look human.”
“That can’t be.” Lipton’s brown eyes widened.
“It’s an alien!”
“That is heresy,” Lipton said. “Forget we saw it, let’s go.”
Homer turned and looked back, trying to spot the creature. What did he care about heresy? His grandparents had Reformed and left Nu Mak on New Levian years ago during the DMZ wars. Their fears of aliens trying to rule Homer’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 Solars surface. “We should follow it,” Homer said. “If there are aliens here, on the surface, don’t you think people would be interested in knowing that?”
“It’s too dangerous.” Lipton shook his head. “It’s too deep in the debris zone.”
Lipton and the rules. Valloon floated far overhead. Downwind of the city lay the debris zone, a dangerous place to stand still. But Valloon 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 Vallon less and less each year. The city just didn’t have much to offer the others.
Homer made up his mind. “I’m going. Come or not, Lipton. You don’t have to share the honor of the greatest discovery Valloon has ever made. Can you imagine the visitors from other cities that will come if we are the ones who finds aliens hiding on Solar’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 Solar secret, maybe they’ll pay our city.”
That got Lipton’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 Lipton to follow Homer 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 Homer 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 gloom. Something much larger hit the ground. He felt the thud through his feet, but didn’t see anything. But Homer knew what that meant. This was bad, this was really bad. He’d screwed up.
“Lipton! Debris!”
The shouting served nothing, it was just reflex. They couldn’t hear each other at all. Homer ran at Lipton. 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 Lipton and bumped into his side.
Their bulky ground-suits clanked as they almost both hopped off balance for a second. Homer grabbed Lipton’s helmet and yanked them both face to face. “Debris!”
Lipton paled. “The cuatetl!”
Their training told them to separate and hunker down near any depression or hole they could find. But everywhere Homer 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. Homer 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 Flitzonian, an honored position in the city and for his family. It had been a good life. But nothing hit. The debris had stopped. Homer opened his eyes. A jagged rip in the cuatetl’s side billowed smoke. A bad sign. Valloon could not afford to replace an entire cutter head.
He turned around to check on Lipton, his friend lay facedown on the ground. Homer walked over to tap helmets, but Lipton didn’t stir when he rapped on the back of the large metal suit. Two of Lipton’s radiators had been broken off. The suit was overheating. Gods. Homer got to the ground, pushing Lipton 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. Homer rolled Lipton back onto his face. He couldn’t lift the extra bulky 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, Lipton certainly wouldn’t survive. The ground-suit slid slowly over the surface.
It took almost fifteen minutes to get Lipton 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 Lipton carefully in among the three massive disc cutters inside. The elevator’s large portholes shattered four years ago, leaving it open to Solar’s boiling depths. Valloon couldn’t repair the damage. Everything seemed to break down these days. Homer 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 Homer 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 ground-screws 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. Homer bit his lip as they ascended into sulfuric gloom of his world. “You can make it, Lipton,” 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 ground-suit creaked, metal joints and ribs popping as the immense pressure decreased. Homer put his hand on Lipton’s helmet and urged the elevator to move as he promised every god he could think of offerings at the family altar if they could just get winched back up to Valloon in time.
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