Chapter Four

When Ollin returned two days later he snagged Timas's arm and pulled him along through the courtyard away from the watered down pulque.

Ollin didn't tower over Timas, but his bulk and presence could intimidate.
Ollin made him feel like a child again. Ollin's wrinkled tunic and unkempt hair were the only signs that he'd been out of the house for two days.

"I know we don't talk often, now." Ollin's words cracked quickly. Precise, businesslike. "But you're grown now, you've seen one of the worse things a man faces, here on Yatapek, and I should treat you as one."

Timas stumbled behind his dad into the cool shade. "I tried to bring him up in time…"

"There was nothing you could have done. I talked to Heutzin." The chair creaked as Ollin sat. "Itotia!"

Timas's mother appeared in the doorframe with a tentative smile. "You're back."

Ollin didn't smile back. He raised his hand. "I invited the pipiltin over for a lunch. We have little time, and a crisis to move .. everyone in the city begins to offer advice and rumors to cloud our thoughts."

"I'll get the courtyard ready." Itotia hesitated for a moment, looked at Timas, then backed away.

Ollin leaned over the table and peered at Timas over clasped hands. "Would you believe that the man who fell out of the sky and hit us is still alive?"

"Mom told me," Timas said. "If he is still alive, can we hold him accountable? Is he from the Aeolian cities?" If so, he might be rich enough to fix the damage he'd done. Unlike Yatapek, the Aeolians came from worlds where humans had lots of contact with aliens and their advanced technologies. The Aeolians had faced oppression, minorities among those alien worlds. But now they called Chilo their own, using the tools and technologies they'd wrested away from other races. How could Yatapek compete with that?

"We don't know," Ollin shrugged. "But he will pay one way or another for what he did. He's delirious, he keeps talking about zombies and invasions. We think he may have spent time here before." People nicknamed Aeolian ambassadors "Zombies" due to their awkward pauses and blank looks.

Timas felt a chill at the idea of an Aeolian invasion. Their city could do little to ward them off.

"And the cuatetl," Timas whispered. "What do we do about that while we wait?"
"We'll talk about it tonight. I know many will say we have to go on our knees and beg the Aeolians to give us a loan." His father looked disgusted with the thought.

"What other choice do we have?" The almost mile-wide city needed raw resources to survive. The Aeolian cities floated high, some of them even had cables that reached out into space. They got their ores and materials from asteroids. Few got them from the surface with old mining equipment like Yatapek. One of Timas's great grandmothers had helped purchase the machine. He doubted she anticipated that they would still be using it.

"The pipiltin will figure them out tonight." Ollin stood up and rubbed his face. His eyes were red from weariness, Timas noticed.

"And you will be there to help them." Timas also got up and walked towards his room. Everyone knew about his dad's desire to become one of the guiding leaders of the city.

"That is why I invited them to council here. Where are you going?" Ollin stood in his doorway.

"Back to sleep." The pulque sat heavy in Timas's stomach and made him feel weary.

"Sleep? Is that what you've been doing all this time?" Ollin entered the room and grabbed Timas's shoulder. "You at least went running, didn't you?"

Timas didn't try to lie. "What's the point right now? I won't be needed for a while, and if the cuatetl gets fixed, it will be by the Aeolians."

Ollin shoved him away. "You are xocoyotsin," he hissed. "You will keep your shape. You will not fall apart on me."

The anger in his dad's eyes didn't shake Timas. He gritted his teeth. "Like Heutzin?" His father merciless hounded him about being primed for the role of xocoyotzin.

"Heutzin," Ollin said slowly in a neutral voice. "He paid his dues, saw friends die, and risked his life for almost ten years."

Without children, though, Heutzin remained just another once-xocoyotzin. Timas left the thought in the air.

Ollin shook his head. "You need something to keep your mind off Cen. You keep your schedule, you run every morning and night, and you watch your food. And I think I have something to help you find some direction. It will keep you from circling around yourself."

"What's that?"

Ollin lowered his voice to a whisper. "There's a delegate from one of the Aeolian cities here sniffing around already, dropped off by airship an hour ago. I was going to have your mother take her around the city, but I think now you're going to do that."

His father's voice had that 'no-options' edge to it. Timas would spend the day playing babysitter to some snooty outsider tourist. He knew they liked to fly out to Yatapek to enjoy the large and open upper layer for vacations. No wide-open spaces in their packed cities. Handmade crafts from the lower level markets also attracted them. For the Aeolians the price of a flight here cost little, even though most on Yatapek couldn't afford to leave.

"Great," he muttered. Another of Ollin's and Itotia's schemes to get involved running the city. They'd climbed up from the filth and darkness of the lower layers thanks to him. Yet still they schemed as if the grime lay lurking just behind them.

Ollin ignored that. "Listen to me." He slapped his hands together, but still kept his voice low. "You will tell her nothing about the man who hit the city, except that we have his body. Do not tell her he lives. You understand me?"
Timas understood. "I understand."

"Right." Ollin smiled. "We want to know what we can get out of it before we volunteer information." Yatapek had few powerful friends in the other cities. Again, Timas reminded himself to think about the dying cuatetl. His city needed the resources to fix it. His city needed him.

"Take me to the delegate, I'll give them the tour," Timas said.

Ollin pulled his brass pocketwatch from inside a tunic pocket. The city bumped at them from underfoot. Ollin swayed and Timas followed suit. Neither of them paid close attention to the unconscious reaction. "She should be waiting outside. Her name is Katerina Volga."

Timas walked around his dad and into the corridor where he could see the courtyard gates that led to the street. The girl who stood in front of them wore a silvery shirt and trousers, had her hair cut short to her ears, and her left eye glinted in the morning light.

"She's my age," Timas said. "I thought you said she was a delegate from the cities."

"She is." Ollin walked alongside Timas as he left the corridor for the courtyard. "You know the young and inexperienced of theirs can wield a lot of power. You've seen the tourists. Even the children are rich."

"She has one of those metal eyes." Timas had seen Aeolians with them before. "She's like a robot?"

"Something like that. I'm sure she'll tell you all about it, it's hard to get them to shut up about themselves." Timas looked over at his dad as they crossed the courtyard together. Ollin didn't often reveal personal opinions about the Aeolians. "Be back by lunch. The elders will want to talk to her."

"Okay."

Ollin opened the gates. "Welcome, Katerina, to my home. This is Timas, my son. I've asked him to personally take you on a tour of our city."

Katerina had wide eyes, one of them green and the other, her right eye, silver. She had brown skin like Timas's. Usually the Aeolians were black or pale, it surprised Timas to see someone that looked more like him. Maybe that was why she'd been sent, she could almost blend into Yatapek. Except for her hair. Yatapek's citizens had straight, black hair. Katerina's hair was frizzy.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm pleased to meet your son, and thank you for the hospitality."

She looked both of them up and down, very slowly, her silver eye taking them both in. It had tiny metallic veins that spidered off the corner of her eye-socket and eyelids.

It was erie.

Ollin left them both at the gate.

"So were do you want to start?" Timas asked. He couldn't avoid staring at the silver eye.

Katerina waited for Ollin to walk back into the house. "We've seen Yatapek, we don't need the tour. But I haven't eaten yet since I left home this morning."
They way she used 'we' and 'I' differently made Timas pause. He looked at the silver eye. If Heutzin told the truth, people all throughout the Aeolian cities looked at him right now through that silver eye of hers. Through their more advanced technology.

He shivered.

"Am I making you uncomfortable?" Katerina asked.

Timas considered lying. For a moment. "Yes. A little bit. Knowing that other people see what you see, back in all the other Aeolian cities. It's unusual." And a little creepy.

"We're all sorry." She blinked and held her eye closed. It looked like a normal eyelid, except for the metallic veins. She grabbed his arm. "We can keep the eye closed, if it bothers you that much. But you'll have to help me walk around if I'm doing it with one eye closed. It messes with my depth perception."

Timas stepped back. "It's okay, you can use your eye."

"You realize we can hear you." Katerina tapped her right ear.

"It isn't metal," Timas said.

"They don't have to be. The eye is a marker, a choice, by us, to let outsiders know."

"Are all Aeolians part robot?"

Katerina sighed and rolled her eyes. "Oh come on!" She bit her lip, paused, and then tilted her head. "We're not robots, Timas. We're people, like you."

Timas considered it. "You're all connected to each other, using your devices and transmitters? Do you all have similar things in your head like that eye?" He also thought: if they ever chose to invade, they would swarm around Yatapek's warriors, who had no radios to plan their defense. Yes, the Aeolians could invade easily enough.

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

"Then you're not anything like me." Timas felt nervous around her as he contemplated the thought of hundreds of Aeolians with silver eyes taking over his city. "Are you?"

"I'm hungry, Timas. Can we go eat?"

Happy to change the subject, Timas nodded and led Katerina down the street. Along with several other roads it radiated out from the atrium like spokes in a wheel.

Timas walked them towards the outer edge of the city. The clusters of buildings that stood near the atrium petered out into the city's farms and gardens. They made the bulk of the top-most layer, the dome curving up over all the greenery. A tiny mist of rain trickled down from the sprinklers in the dometop far overhead.

The oldest citizens of Yatapek said that the topmost layer felt the most like being back on the world they came from, New Anegada. The Aeolians said that as well. Tourists often stayed in rooms near the edge of the upper layer's fields and gardens.

"Is that a harvester?" Katerina pointed at a rusted machine that sat in the center of the wheat section on their left with several clusters of farmers standing around it.

"The harvester," Timas said. It had broken down again. He kept her walking along, the harvester broke down more than it worked. Nothing unusual there.
"Where are we going?" Katerina asked. "Your maps don't show any elevators on the inside of the city wall."

"I'm taking you to the mezzanine gardens."

Even this sophisticated delegate should appreciate the food and view there.

At the edge of the dome the land gave way to treetops.

"Oh, I've heard of this," Katerina said. "Neat effect."

They took the steep stone stairs down the wall and descended into the trees and shrubs of the gardens that all carefully framed the clouds just outside the city. It made one aware of the fact that the whole city floated. They lived a hundred thousand feet in the air, following the air currents near Chilo's great storm in a regular circular pattern, far enough above it they were not affected. The dirty brown spiral of the storm dominated the landscape before them today.

At the bottom of the stairs Timas turned around and let her look out into Yatapek's second layer.

"This is the real view," Timas said.

The mezzanine he'd taken her to hung underneath the topmost layer. From here they looked out over the farms and edge gardens of the second layer. And where the sun failed to reach on the edges, the layer's streets, houses, and structures began.

"Very neat," Katerina said. Weblike towers criss-crossed the inner area, and this high up you could see that the layer resembled a three-dimensional map. A diorama laid out for just them, with the edges of it receding into gloomy murkiness.

The city lights hung from long cables connected to the underside of the top layer. They vibrated and swung whenever the city trembled from super-gusts.
"But where's the food?"

Very neat, that was all she had to say about the mezzanine? Timas led her along the path by the large windows.

"Here." A small booth with little tables and chairs scattered around flagstones hid behind a series of over-large hedges. Timas snagged a paper menu from the booth.

"So do you have anything like this in your city?" Timas asked.

Katerina looked over her menu. "Well, no, not any more. Eupatoria's edges are filled with developments now. Everyone wants an apartment 'on the edge' so that they have sky in their living room."

"Then how do you grow food?" The edges of the layers and the top layer got all the sunlight.

"Hydroponic gardens, we keep them around the core of the city. Or vats." More technological tricks up their sleeves, Timas thought as she tapped on the menu. "No beef, just chicken?"

"Meat, even for xocoyotzin, is not very plentiful," Timas said. "We don't have the land for grazing."

"Grazing… animals." Katerina looked upset for a second. "I'll have beans and rice."

Timas felt like he'd failed some test with her. She had this look on her face like his mother did when she'd had to visit one of her cousins in the lower layers, deep in the city near the recycling plains.

Katerina felt Yatapek dirty and uncivilized, and Timas by extension too, no doubt.

Timas walked up to the kitchen booth and ordered extra beans and rice, with chicken.

"Go sit with the young lady," the tall cook winked, "I'll bring it right out, xocoyotzin." The cook's teeth glinted with cheap metal caps when he smiled.
When Timas returned Katerina looked up. "You said 'xocoyotzin' didn't you? You work on the surface?"

Excited that some measure of respect had arrived, Timas sat up straighter. "Yes. I am xocoyotzin."

She leaned forward, eager. "We would like to ask if you were on the surface when the debris hit your mining machine?"

"You say 'we' again." Timas did not feel comfortable talking about the cuatetl. He didn't want to say anything that the elders or his dad wouldn't want him to. They might need to bargain or beg with this girl, and the people behind her silver eye, for the repairs.

"'We' is what we say when we are engaging you. When I use I it's just me talking."

"Just you?"

"Katerina," she smiled.

"How can you both be a robot and yourself?" Timas asked. "It's weird."

Katerina sighed. "You go to school right?"

"My schooling is very technical." Timas tapped the edge of the table. "I can continue school after I no longer function as xocoyotsin." Die like Cen, grow fat like his father and Heutzin, or just grow old and not able to quite fit. He prayed for the last.

"We know you should know what a democracy is, yes? You have, what 40,000 people living in Yatapek? In Eupatoria it's more like a quarter of a million, and our city is the same size. The Aeolian Consensus uses techno-democracy to handle self-governance. We're a little different than you. And there are dozens of Aeolian cities."

"But you're still controlled by that." Timas pointed at her eye. He'd seen a silver-eyed Aeolian once, visiting his dad. That happened back before the Aeolians forced Yatapek to install a large communications bubble on top of the city. Back then, the man who'd visited had taken forever to answer the easiest questions. He'd had to wait on every diplomatatic phrase to get vetted and and then a response voted on and beamed back to him to speak out loud. Without advanced and fast technology, it had taken forever to get through dinner.
Damn zombies, Ollin had muttered late in that night, apparently tired of the two-minute pauses.

"If you volunteer to be on a sports team of some sort, are you controlled by your team?" Katerina asked. "Or are you still you, but just within the team?"
"You're still you…"

"I"m on a very big team." Katerina hunched forward. "There are three hundred thousand people from a random variety of Aeolian cities, live, voting on my every word because I'm their avatar, emissary, diplomat, or whatever you would like to call me. I agreed to this when I became a citizen. Three days ago I was studying for finals when I got the message that I'd been randomly selected for citizen's duty. And here I am, representing Eupatoria's interests."

So when she said 'we' the masses behind that silver eye spoke through her. And when she said 'I' it was only Katerina. "It takes getting used to," Timas said.

"Try having all this sitting behind your skull," Katerina said. "A public face of the citizenry is never an easy task. Fail to do your job properly and you get fined, or exiled and stripped of your citizenship."

The cook interrupted them, staring openly at Katerina's silver eye as he set their plates down and grinned at Timas.

Timas waited for her to start eating.

"Timas, we're not here as tourists. We have an offer for your city." Katerina pushed her plate aside. "An offer we want you to deliver to your city's leaders later tonight."

She wasn't eating. Timas rolled up a corn tortilla and scooped rice and chicken up with it. Before biting he responded. "To the pipiltin? Why would you want me to do that? You should speak to them directly, or maybe even my father."

He bit into overheated rice. He breathed around it and realized he was awkwardly eating in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

Timas felt horribly aware of his gangly elbows, loud chewing, and uncomfortable posture.

"We feel," Katerina looked down at the table with a slight smile. "We feel that the pipiltin would be more willing to listen to someone from their own city. The voting is running two-to-one in favor of this theory. We feel that if we, with our reputation for being robotic and arrogant, stand in front of your leaders and give terms, that some will refuse on general principle."

Timas snorted. That sounded about right. He put the rice-filled tortilla down. "And what are you offering?"

"We're offering complete repair services on your mining machine. We know how desperate your situation is. Your city will founder without it."

"In exchange?" Timas was curious.

"We want the man who hit your city." Katerina said. "And we want to talk to him. Tonight. It's very important. He has given our cities information about a possible threat to them. We need more information."

Timas sat and looked at her. "What, you think the man lived through that?"

"Judging by your lack of surprise, and analysis of your body language, pupil dilation, we think you know he did. You just confirmed the suspicion for us. Let's not lie, Timas." She turned cold and expressionless. Timas felt out of his depth. He couldn't bargain about Yatapek's future! The pipiltin negotiated those things. Not xocoyotsin. "He lives and we want to see him. Your people would be foolish to turn down what we offer. What is one stranger to you?"
Apparently one stranger equaled at least a repaired mining machine. At least. Timas looked at his plate. "You're all so very sure of yourselves, aren't you?"

Katerina nodded. "The votes are decisive."

"And if they weren't?"

"I'd be eating and making polite small talk while the debate went on," Katerina said.

"I'm not going to finish my meal here, am I?" Timas asked.

"No," Katerina laughed. "I think we're about done."

Timas pushed his plate away. "I have no idea whether this man exists or not, but I don't see what your hurry is."

"The hurry is that he is at the least an incredibly dangerous man, we think, and the sooner we investigate, the sooner we know for sure. He might also be an early warning. Either way, we need to get him into our custody. Then we will decide what to do next."

Timas stood up and left enough money on the table to cover the food. Katerina picked up one of the bills. "Paper money?"

"Yeah."

"Cool!" She rubbed it between her fingers. "Very cool. Can I keep it?"

"No." Timas shook his head, slightly annoyed. "That pays for our meal. If you want more I'm sure your city can provide some."

Katerina dropped the bill back down on the table, looking disappointed. "Okay."

"And Katerina," Timas added as they left. "Please don't mention that I ate anything to my parents."

"Ok." She didn't ask why, thank goodness. Timas didn't feel like explaining more about the nature of being xocoyotzin.

Although he imagined there would be more trouble for him in revealing that the man who'd hit the city still lived, even if unintentionally, than in anyone finding out he'd eaten too much for the day.

Timas had the feeling that a lot of yelling at him lay ahead.

Chapter Three

The elevator slammed down to a slower speed on the final approach to Yatapek's city docks. Timas waited as the massive lower airlocks engulfed the small elevator and sealed themselves shut. Through the ruined portholes the lower curve of the city dominated the sky above, and in the distant gloom clusters of maintenance blimps floated, ready to intervene in case anything went wrong for this final stage of the winching up.

He could hear pumps whir as clean air flooded into the chamber. He looked out of the doorway into the lock and banged his armored fists against the side of the elevator to get attention.

Heutzin, one of the mechanics, ran in, pulling a large heat-safe glove onto his right hand. He popped the seals on Timas' helmet and Timas took a gasp of fresh, unsweaty air.

"You're back early."

Amoxtli, the doctor, stepped in next.

"What happened?" Heutzin looked him over and wiped his grease-stained hands on his chest. "I told them something had been knocked loose. There was debris. Doctor!"

Heutzin had been a xocoyotzin in his young teens, now his belly spilled out of his shirt. No groundsuits for him. But he knew exactly what the panicked look on Timas' face meant.

"The debris got him," Timas said. He kneeled down next to Cen and started to try and crack the groundsuit, but with his hands still in armored gloves he fumbled with the clasps and catches.

Heutzin pulled Timas up to his feet by his one heatsafe gloved hand. "Was his suit holed?"

"I think it was the heat vanes." Timas turned back towards the elevator, but Heutzin turned him right back around and pushed him forward.

"Keep moving," he snapped.

Behind them Amoxtli cracked the suit. Timas could hear steam whistle out. An odd smell drifted through the chamber.

Burnt flesh.

Timas gagged, and Heutzin kept pushing him towards the airlock out of the chamber. "Just keep walking."

"What happened up here?" Timas asked.

"Something hit the city," Heutzin rubbed the few hairs on his upper lip, leaving a long streak of grit.

"An airship?" Timas screamed. Why right then?

"No. A person fell out of one of the clouds. Hit some solar collectors lashed near the farms, knocked them off. I thought I saw debris headed your way, but the doctor and others were too busy running around, holing up the patch in the city and trying to save the guy who hit us." Heutzin helped Timas sit on a bench near the showers. He hit the chest clasps with his gloved hand, and then unbolted the cumbersome wrist joints.

Timas flexed his hands until they felt like they would crack. He said what came right to mind, what scared him. "I don't think Cen's alive. I think I killed him." He did kill him. He should never have asked Cen to go into the debris field.

He should have followed the rules, just as carefully as Cen.

Should. Should. Timas grabbed Heutzin. "We saw something. We saw an alien. We tried to go see it. And I think it's my fault Cen's dead."

"You let the gods and Amoxtli decide that." Heutizin lifted the chest shield up on its hinge. Timas crawled carefully up out of the steaming hot groundsuit. "Now stop talking."

By itself with the top hinged back, the suit looked like a monster from the deep. A soulless, bug-eyed alien.

Timas didn't have anything left in him. He leaned forward and rested his head in his sweat-wrinkled fingers.

Heutzin grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. Timas swallowed nervousness as Amoxtli stooped through into the shower room, a grim look on his face. He shook his head.

All three of them stood surrounded by the giant unmoving groundsuits. Somewhere on the far end of the room, behind the lockers, water spattered as a shower turned on.

"I'm going to go tell Cen's father." Amoxtli snapped the black bag he carried with him shut with a sharp click.

"I'll stay with Timas," Heutzin said.

Amoxtli walked over and put a hand on Timas' neck. "Lay something at your family's altar tonight, will you?"

It felt a little late for prayers and incense, Timas thought.

Timas walked alongside Heutzin in a daze, stumbling as the docks shifted and swung in the wind. Large clamps for airships, gantrys and walkways, all spiderwebbed and dangled from underneath the city like scraggly vines. They acted as a counterweight to the floating globe of Yatapek above.
"Breathers." Heutzin handed Timas a breathing mask as they dodged the hoses and electrical lines snaked around the grated floors. He held it to his face to make a seal.

The rickety cage elevator took Timas and Heutzin up through a chaotic free-swinging structure. The docks hung like wind chimes, downward facing cylinders of girders, with large tubes spiked out in random directions away from each other for airships to dock at. Random pockets of enclosed and air-filled workspaces, corridors, and storage facilities clung wherever.
It all passed them by as they rose toward the very bottom of Yatapek proper: the curve of the city's south pole swallowed the cage up with another set of locks.

They left the bottled air and masks, cycled through the doors, and both stepped into Yatapek's lower streets. Dim lights from the top of the fifty-foot ceiling flickered, struggling to penetrate the haze of overworked air scrubbers.

"You're damned lucky to be walking the streets now," Heutzin said.

"Lucky," Timas mumbled. He grabbed Heutzin's arm. "Lucky! It hit the cuatetl! Cen died!"

Heutzin sighed. "It's been damaged before. We'll barter for replacement parts."

Timas shook his head. "That doesn't make it lucky." He didn't know why he was arguing about this. He just didn't want to feel like something good happened today. "I shouldn't have gone for the alien. I wish I'd never seen it."

Heutzin stopped and grabbed his shoulder. "Shut up about the aliens. Don't repeat that ever again. It's heresy. We see shadows, nothing more. And some have died running off into the muck to chase those shadows. Besides, you'll lose the honor of being xocoyotsin if you keep saying that. So trust me, Timas, you must shut up!"

Timas stared down at old, scuffed plastic sidewalk. "I'm sorry."

"We'll talk to the pipiltin tonight. It is their duty to run the city, not yours." Heutzin said. "They'll probably decide to send xocoyotzin down tomorrow to assess the damage. But likely, the city will be focusing on Cen, and on the damage done to the city. Stop blaming yourself."

Timas wanted to go home now and crawl into his room. He felt like a ghost following Heutzin around the street.

Here at the bottom of the globe, the lowest layer of the city housed the heavy factories. Timas could taste the smoke and fire in the air as they walked down the industrial street towards the city's core.

"Heutzin?" Flickering streetlights cast a shadowy hue over the thick-armed workers going about their business.

"Yes."

"You know any xocoyotzin who died? When you worked the surface." Timas looked at the man. Heutzin didn't look like he'd once worked on the surface: his stomach alone would have trouble fitting in the largest of the groundsuits, let alone the rest of him.

They stopped at the Atrium, the cored-out center of the city. Heutzin looked up. The layers of the city dwindled away overhead, and elevators constantly crawled their way up and down the inner sides of the shaft, filled with tiny groups of people going about their business.

Yatapek floated above the clouds, where the sun filled the atrium with cheerful orange light.

"Heutzin?" Timas prompted.

"Yes. It isn't exactly a safe thing to do, going down there. You'll lose many more friends before you give up your groundsuit." A distant groan from a large shifting deckplate filled the air around them.

"I wouldn't do it if the family didn't depend on me," Timas said. "It feels like I'm holding them all up on my shoulders."

"And it doesn't feel fair, does it?"

Timas shook his head. "No."

Heutzin led them both into an elevator along with a small crowd. Timas stared at a boy who looked his age, but far more muscular, who carried a bag with papers sticking out over the edge.

As Timas watched the boy rubbed his forehead, pushing aside a fringe of flat black hair. "What you looking at?"

"Nothing."

Heutzin grunted. "You shouldn't talk to xocoyotsin like that." He stepped forward, menacing, and the other boy shrank back into his peers. They all stared up at the dirty mechanic as he leaned over them. "In my day even little runts had some respect for those risking their lives on the surface."

"It's okay." Timas put his palm to the glass of the elevator, looking down as it rose further up the massive atrium-shaft.

The elevator stopped, and the boy and several of his friends shoved their way into a crowded street. They were middle-layer. Not top. Not like Timas and his family.

Neon signs blinked just past the elevator doors, and garish track lighting bathed this layer in a blue glow. The houses jammed together, reaching from the floor to the ceiling: warrens. Many of them looked unsuited to stand, strung between wires reaching from the bottom of one layer down to the next. Timas wondered if the city's Balance Commission fined them for illegal weight distribution, and if they ever paid. Tight alleyways, dirty and filled with litter, disappeared behind the doors as they shut. The smell of body odor and frying oil hit Timas.

As the elevator continued up more and more people got off, until just Heutzin and Timas stood with each other. They glided to the dizzying top, where the parks and farms basked under the sun's warmth, protected by the city's globe above them.

Here the crowded underlayers and streets of Yatapek fell away.

A cool mist hung over the gardens just outside the elevator entrance. A noble elderman with his hair tied up in a jade clip and wearing a deep red tunic nodded as he passed them and took their place in the elevator.

"Do you want me to walk home with you, or are you okay?" Heutzin asked. He took a deep breath of the misty air and looked around at a low hedge of hibiscus bushes.

"I…" Timas almost said he would be fine. But Heutzin had a mournful look to him. Timas suddenly realized how long it must have been since Heutzin lived among the upper layer as a xocoyotizin. The gardens, the clean air, the constant sunlight: all this he would remember as he toiled in the lower layers of the city. Heutzin, even though escorting a grieving friend, now had a brief chance to relive those days.

A small point of anger flared as Timas wondered if Heutzin had so quickly helped him below just to get back up to the upper layer. But Timas quelled that thought. That wasn't fair to Heutzin. Heutzin always checked his groundsuit twice over and listened to him when he thought he'd heard odd creaks or whistles while below in the murk and pressure.

Timas felt a sudden surge of hatred for the generation that came to Yatapek. Seduced by pills and technological tweaks to keep their bodies svelte and elfin, they'd never assumed their great grandchildren would fall into near poverty and that only their children would fit in the groundsuits they'd purchased for the city.

Yatapek couldn't afford to replace the aging suits. Choices made long ago now made Heutzin a low man, using tricks to visit a part of his own city. And those same choices made Timas responsible for his own family, if not the entire city.

Sometimes at night it felt like the hulking groundsuits sat on his chest, the pressure crushing his lungs to the point he could hardly breathe.
"Yes," Timas said. "Please, come with me."

He could use Heutzin's support to face his mother anyway.

But when they arrived Itotia didn't get upset. She waited by doors to the courtyard. Her hair lay flat. Her simple white, cotton dress stood out against the brown brick of their house. No warrens in the lower layer, but a solid house with a straw roof over the metal rafters. A haven for Timas and his lucky family.

"Heutzin." Itotia nodded at the mechanic. "Thanks for bringing him up. One of the dock workers used the telephone to tell me what happened."

"It was no problem." Heutzin looked down at the ground. "I know what it's like. The ride back up is long after you lose someone down there."

"Mom." Timas wanted to run up and hug her. But not in front of Heutzin.

"Come." She turned and led them into the courtyard where several pitchers and wooden jicara bowls sat on a table. Timas took his shoes off at the threshold as he followed them across the cool courtyard flagstones.

Itotia poured him a bowl of pulque. Mango flavored, orange, yellow, and thick, the alcoholic afterbite stung when Timas sipped it. Warmth dribbled down into his core. He relaxed.

"The servants have a meal ready for you in your room. I'll come in when you're finished," his mom said. "I want to talk to Heutzin for a moment."

"Okay." Timas felt his stomach twist slightly from the pulque. Normally she didn't let him have it, even when his dad drank it and offered him a sip.
Timas walked across the courtyard into one of the many interconnected rooms. He closed the wooden door behind him, but then stayed by the crack and listened.

"He's safe, he's okay," Heutzin told her. Timas watched through the crack as his mother's shoulders slumped and her head drooped.

"Every time he goes down, I burn something on the altar for the gods. Was I too stingy this time? Should I have burned something more?"

Heutzin shifted from foot to foot. "He came home safe. You did right by the gods. But then, who knows what the gods want? In this case, it was Cen."

"Tomorrow it could be Timas." Itotia pushed her hair back and paced, her voice getting shrill. "Their suits get older every year. Already we've lost one xocoyotzin, and the year is just begun. Last year we lost five. Five. When you were xocoyotsin how many did the surface take?"

"Not as many," Heutzin admitted. He made a face as he did so.

"Is it worth it?" She stared at him as she yelled it. "Really, is it worth our children's lives?"

Heutzin looked around the courtyard, and Timas pulled back from the crack for a second, then peeked back out again. "You seem to enjoy the fruits. Of all the things I miss the most," Heutzin took a deep breath, "it's the freshly filtered air, not the dank must that falls down to the lower levels."
Itotia looked him up and down and said, with a small amount of scorn, "There is no age limit on xocoyotsin. All you have to do is fit in the groundsuit."
Heutzin winced and pulled himself out of a slump. He held his hand over his stomach, as if shielding it. "That's true." And even though he stood up straight, it looked to Timas like the man had deflated slightly at the reference to his weight.

His mom must have realized how deep the barb she'd thrown sank. She spread her hands. "I'm sorry, I'm angry. That was crude of me. Tell me about the cuatetl, I will have to tell Ollin what I know when I visit him."

"Timas says it's very badly damaged. I believe him." Heutzin's pained grin displayed his worn and acid-damaged teeth. More indication that Heutzin had once been xocoyotsin. A badge of pride. "They'll send older xocoyotsin down to check and take pictures for the elders and senior mechanics to look at."

"You'll be there."

"Be sure of it. No cuatetl, no city."

A voiced fear. Timas shuddered. The city, his way of life, his family: it would all disappear if the cuatetl fell apart.

"We'd be on our hands and knees begging for handouts from the Aeolian Cities then," Itotia said. "Disreputable."

Heutzin shrugged. "We'll do what we have to do." He turned to leave the courtyard. Realizing how long he'd eavesdropped, Timas turned and padded quickly for his room. If his dad caught him listening he'd get a solid hiding, no doubt, even despite the day's events.

His stomach growled as he ran down the corridor and turned into his room. Before a surface drop he drank nothing but water and ate vegetables to make sure that he would fit in the slim groundsuits.

The post-surface meal usually featured a family celebration, where his mother and father congratulated him on doing his job as xocoyotsin well.

Now he picked over the tray. He gobbled the three tamales that still steamed and then the bowls of sliced fruit.

By the time Itotia reached the room Timas had finished.

"Where's dad?" He wanted to talk to Ollin about what happened on the surface today.

"He can't come." His mom sat by him on the bed. The ropes under the mattress creaked. "Did you hear about the impact on the city's shell?"

"A body hit the city. That caused the debris, right?"

"Yes. Your dad went to help seal the dome, if you climb to our roof you might be able see the patch from here. The person who crashed through, he's still alive. Ollin is with him in quarantine."

"Quarantine?" Timas had never heard of anything like that before.

"The person insisted. Two days quarantine. The Pipiltin decided to do it."

"So I can't see Dad?"

"No."

They sat and drew comfort from each other's presence. Then Itotia stood up.
"It's been long enough."

Timas got up and followed her to the bathroom.

"Do you need help?" Itotia asked.

"No." He wanted to be alone now.

Timas planted one hand on the edge of the flat, square sink with the oversized drain. A small polished wooden dowel stuck out of a ceremonial cup on the right hand edge.

Timas picked it up and steadied himself.

Then he slowly pointed it down his throat until it touched the back. He gagged, convulsed, and then whipped the rod out as he vomited.

The sink caught most of it. The door squealed open as he shivered and held himself over the sink. Itotia wet a rag and held it over his head.

"Was that everything?" she asked.

He nodded as he ran the tap and splashed water to clean the sink off.

"Enough."

"Enough?" Itotia leaned over to whisper in his ear. "You don't want to end up like Heutzin before your time, do you? He left early, you know."

Acid burned Timas's throat and the back of his teeth. He rinsed his mouth and spit into the drain.

He raised his shirt. "You look," he said. "Do you see a shred of fat?"

Itotia leaned over and pinched the side of his stomach. She squeezed approvingly. "I know you've had a terrible day, but if the cuatetl is damaged, we'll need all the xocoyotsin. We depend on you, Timas."

He felt so weary. "I know. I know." He let her guide him back to his bed. The room still smelled of fresh tamales. It made his stomach twitch, nauseous again.

Itotia set a candle to burn by his bed as Timas crawled in. He lay still and listened to the city flex as turbulence bubbled past it, shaking it just enough to get its parts to tense against each other: harmless constant metallic earthquakes that ran along the faultlines of Yatapek's seams.

Later that night the word arrived that the weather remained good and the next shift of xocoyotsin had gone down and returned. Even despite the tough job of assessing damage in the night on the surface they had come to the same conclusion as Timas.

The cuatetl had been badly damaged. Yatapek did not have the resources to fix it.

Neighbors drifted in and out of the courtyard. Worried adult voices discussed what the news meant for their futures, for the xocoyotsin, and for each other.
Itotia sounded calm and measured, but Timas heard the worry in her voice.
Later into the night, once most people had left and the electric lights dimmed throughout the courtyard, scraping and squeaking noises drifted into Timas's room through the street-side window.

He poured himself a cup of warm water from the pitcher by his bedside and stood up to look out the window.

Cen's older brother, Luc, pulled a large wooden cart along the road. Bundles of clothing, furniture, and chests hastily stacked onto it swayed about, threatening to fall out.

Chantico, Luc's wife, walked slowly alongside her husband. Behind her: Luc and Cen's mother.

No longer the family of xocoyotzin, they moved now to the lower levels, looking for jobs where the city levels crowded on top of each other, where little light reached the buildings, and the alleys smelled of humanity, industry, and badly recycled air.

For a moment Luc paused and looked over at the window. Timas wanted to duck, but instead he nodded at Luc and raised a hand.

Luc didn't respond. He put his head down, repositioned his grip on the cart's handles, and kept pulling.

If the cuatetl did not get fixed, all the xocoyotzin would make that journey toward the elevators. The city's future sat on a knife's edge.

The day Timas and his friend Cen saw the alien everything changed.

Outside the spherical floating city of Yatapek, a hundred thousand feet over the ground, the winds had died. The forecast from the Aeolian cities, with their satellites and computers, gave Yatapek a seven-hour window. The city could anchor over the ground safely.

"Timas, 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 sleep from his eyes. Time to descend into hell again.

Timas had donned his cumbersome pressure suit with the help of a mechanic as the doctor Amoxtli watched. The mechanic checked over every every seal and joint, making sure Timas stood ready to get dropped into the ninety times normal pressure of Chilo's surface.

"For the city," the mechanic said as he slapped the helmet into place.

"For our people," Timas murmured.

Then the city's elevator had lowered Timas 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 nanofilament wire quivered all the way back up to the city's docks.

Every week, weather permitting, boys like Timas checked over the mining machine their city depended on: the cuatetl. It hunted for the precious metals Yatapek needed to survive. This week it had radiod a panic failure code.
Despite the calm a hundred thousand feet above him, Timas strained his way forward through the hurricane-like winds here. He'd first come to the surface on his thirteenth birthday. In the following two years he'd never seen a calm day. He heard from older boys that it happened, but he'd believe it when he saw it.

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. A giant worm of a machine, hundreds of feet of long, most if it lay hidden under the ground right now.

Grit and little 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 here at ground level would crush him instantly.

If the heat didn't kill him first, all eight hundred 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, as Yatapek didn't have the means to make anything like the groundsuit anymore.

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, bug-like suit. Wing-like vanes stuck out of the back of the older suit dumping excess heat out above the suit 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 oversized helmets together to speak.

"I told you so." Cen's voice buzzed, sounding like it came through a tin can a room apart, 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 further 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 further 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 grilling 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 being one of the twenty xocoyotsin families.

Lights blinked at Timas, advertising the interface panel he needed to check.
The entire cuatetl stretched six hundred feet down at a slope under him. Hopefully 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 through the edges of the muck at him. Cen moved on, oblivious, as Timas squinted at the metallic tentacles that draped from the front of the creature. It wore a form-fitting 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 further 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, lets 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' 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 them," 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 wouldn't be 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 towards 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 face down 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 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 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 amongst 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 onto the empty airlock doorframe. He slapped the green switch wired on the outside to give the haul-up signal.

Then Timas sat next to his face-down 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.

Timas put his hand on Cen'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 Yatapek in time.

Chapter One

      Pepper lay strapped to a blunt, cone-shaped heatshield with a hundred miles of Chilo's atmosphere to fall through yet. The edges of the 2,000 degree fireball created with the shockwave of his reentry licked and danced at the edges of his vision. A small taste of hell, he thought, as the contraption under his back wobbled and threatened to overturn.

      When the roaring abated Pepper cracked free of the crude heatshield and ran his spacesuit through a self-check. Even with the protection of the ablative plastics he'd just ridden down out of orbit, the suit had become a bit toasty.

    But within tolerances. Inside, Pepper only broke a gentle sweat.

    He threw the blackened cone away from him and reoriented himself to face downwards. Brown and dirty yellow clouds choked the world below him as far as he could see. The planet Chilo in all its glory: sulfuric acid laced clouds, crushing pressure, no breathable atmosphere. Not somewhere most would call home.

    A quick look straight below again. It really didn't feel like he was moving faster than the speed of sound.

    He'd survived deorbiting in nothing more than a spacesuit and a personal heatshield. But now the tricky part approached.

    A tiny buzz in Pepper's ear got his attention. He yawned, eardrums popping. His dreadlocks, bunched up inside the helmet, scraped against each other as a young-sounding male voice piped up in Pepper's helmet. The man sounded bored with a side of professional neutral. For the man behind that particular voice, this was just another shift, just another day. "Unidentified reentry vehicle, this is Eupatoria Port Authority, come in."

      Air thundered past Pepper, buffeting him.

    "Hello Eupatoria," Pepper said. The spacesuit's radio still worked. That would be helpful.

    "Yes, unidentified vehicle, your transponder seems to be down."

    Pepper threw out his arms to maximize drag. "I don't have a transponder."

    "That's a finable offense," the voice replied. "What are you de-orbiting in? We're having trouble tracking you."

    Pepper explained the situation in brief while scanning the horizon.

    There was a long pause on the other end. Then a polite cough. "You de-orbited with a handmade heat-shield and an armored spacesuit?"

    "The situation was complicated. Can you do me a favor? I need you to provide me with coordinates. Where I am, where I'm headed, and where I might be able to land." Eventually this slowing parabola would end.

    A brief off-mic murmur drifted by. "Unidentified... just please hold."

    He wasn't going anywhere. Pepper caught the glint of a far off structure: a tiny thread reaching up from the clouds into the dark depth of space. Shame that hadn't been an option. A lot less excitement to just take an elevator down to one of Chilo's floating cities. At the bottom of that thread might even be Eupatoria and the somewhat surprised Port Authority officials who'd started the day out thinking it would be a day like any other day.

    "Sir?"

    "Still here," Pepper said.

    "What's your name, sir?"

    "Juan Smith." Pepper's last alias. Over the last few decades working as assassin, spy, and general all-around human weapon, he'd gotten used to a regular rotation of false names. In the centuries before that, he could dimly remember even more identities and names.

    A crisp, older, and quite officious woman joined the discussion. "Mr. Smith, voice identification has been confirmed. Mr. Smith, you are aware that you are wanted for the murder of the entire crew of the Shiek Professional."

    "Ah." Pepper nodded. That would come up.

    "Well, Mr. Smith, this is quite an unorthodox methodology for deorbiting yourself, and you must realize that even if you survive you'll still be a wanted criminal. We are scrambling recovery vehicles for you right now. When you pop your parachute we will pick you up. But I am being asked to explain your rights before you are picked up. In the event that the pickup is not successful, would you like to enter a plea for prosperity and name legal counsel to continue your defense in the event that you are not present for your trial?"

    "No need for all that crap," Pepper sniffed. "I did it."

    "Your confession may not stand up due to the peculiar circumstances. Can you elaborate?"

    The never-ending carpet of dreary clouds visibly rose to meet him. Not a lot of time left for details. "About that rescue effort: one little problem," he said. "I don't have a parachute."

    Silence from Eupatoria filled his helmet as they digested that. "You don't have a parachute?" The original male voice sounded shocked.

    "Are you committing suicide?" The woman asked, just after him.

    "Spaceships don't routinely include parachutes in their manifest," Pepper muttered. "Particularly ones where no one expected anyone from the ship to ever dip into the orbital well."

    The clouds rose faster, gaining definition. He could see lumpy clumps, and long whisps scattered behind those larger formations.

    "So here is what I need," Pepper said. "You need to tell me where the nearest city is."

    "But without a chute..."

    "Terminal velocity at city height is a hundred twenty miles an hour. As some aboard the Shiek Professional found out, I'm not easily breakable. You help me hit a city, you either get to pick up my body, or come arrest me."

    "You'll endanger others, you're a projectile."

    "I'll hit one of the farm levels," Pepper promised. "Besides, you'll want to hear my side of the story."

    More off-the-mic chatter between the two people watching over him. Then they returned. "What did happen there? We still need more details."

    "I didn't start it," Pepper said. "I just replied... in kind."

    Several minutes later he angled himself towards a glint in the clouds. He'd slowed down over the long minutes to just over a hundred miles an hour.

    It was still going to hurt.

    "Eupatoria." The glint grew into a round silvery shape just above the puffy yellow and orange clouds. Pepper felt he might as well tie things up, just in case he didn't make it. "I'm sending you a pre-recorded burst. It explains everything."

    If Eupatoria, or any other of Chilo's floating cities, paid attention to his warning and destroyed the drifting Shiek Professional, if they did not go poking around the wreckage, they all might live.

    But Pepper doubted it. The invasion of Chilo would begin soon enough, in fits and starts. If he survived the impact, he might be able to help rouse its populace to defend itself.

    A round silver city hurtled towards Pepper.

    They said one should relax before major impacts, but at this speed Pepper really didn't think it mattered what one did, it was going to hurt either way.

FROM WWW.BOOKGASM.COM:

Sly Mongoose

Tobias S. Buckell's rip-roaring Caribbean-infused novels have been delicious treats so far, but after the Aztec-alien dirigible battles of CRYSTAL RAIN and the grand-scope space rebellion of RAGAMUFFIN, I initially was skeptical of SLY MONGOOSE. Could Buckell keep cranking out good books on a yearly basis? The answer is "Holy crap, yes!"
 
The novel takes Pepper, Buckell's dreadlocked cyborg superman; puts him in a floating city akin to a Third-World version of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK's cloud city of Bespin; and adds … wait for it … space zombies.

That's right. This is Buckell's zombie book, with overwhelming odds, sympathetic infectees that must be put out of their misery before they turn, and massive, gory rampages. As the zombie horde grows and gains a sort of hive intelligence, all that stands between the monsters and the domination of the infected planet is Pepper — and he's got issues of his own to deal with.
 
Yes, apparently Buckell decided that a full-strength warrior cyborg was a bit overpowered, even for a contagious swarm of alien zombies, so this time, Pepper has to face the bad guys without the advantage of a full set of limbs, and even worse, he has to get involved in something he's hated his whole life: politics.
 
That plot on its own would be enough for many authors, but Buckell never squanders an opportunity to flesh out the universe that he's created. Everything fits together, and if you've read CRYSTAL RAIN and RAGAMUFFIN, you'll appreciate the new levels of complexity added to the overall story arc. But SLY MONGOOSE works sublimely on it own — the cultures he dreamed up for the floating cities of the planet Chilo offer a fairly intense exploration society and community, especially in contrast with the zombie masses intent on destroying them.
 
While Buckell's books take place in a shared universe, SLY MONGOOSE demonstrates that while the author does write sequels, he doesn't write the same story twice. That's a tremendous accomplishment, and SLY MONGOOSE is hopefully a harbinger of even greater things. —Ryun Patterson

If Crystal Rain was Tobias Buckell's Caribbean steampunk novel and Ragamuffin his Caribbean space opera, perhaps Sly Mongoose could be described as his Caribbean tribute to George Romero. Mongoose is much more than that, but the nod to the zombie genre is alive and well, no pun intended.

Mongoose opens on the planet Chilo, where enormous floating cities hover above the toxic surface of a planet gripped by extreme heat and corrosive clouds. The citizens of Chilo are getting along well enough (if you discount some rather unsavory living conditions, and if you are willing to risk the lives of your children just to maintain your way of life) until Pepper, the one-man army from Buckell's first two novels, literally falls out of space, inadvertently killing a young boy. Pepper amazingly survives the fall, and he brings terrifying news: an army is to coming to eradicate the people of Chilo — an army of zombies.

Not your Night of the Living Dead variety, but humans altered by a disease spread through bite. A disease that in short order turns regular folk into raving, gnashing delivery systems called the Swarm. A disease that was created for a singular purpose. But what is that purpose, and how can Pepper save an entire planet when he is an outsider?

Sly Mongoose is a strong and vibrant third book from Tobias Buckell. It starts faster than Ragamuffin, and Buckell slows the velocity only on occasion, and never for long. Like Ragamuffin, Mongoose can be read independently from its predecessors, and Buckell infuses the milieu of his universe into the story without overshadowing the issues at hand. The writing is tight, the sentences short, the chapters punchy and sharp as Buckell uses language to convey pacing and flow.

There is a richness of detail in Crystal Rain that is missing here, but Sly Mongoose is by no means a lesser book. It pushes all the right buttons, delivers on all its promises, and manages to be quite gory while avoiding sensationalism. If you have never read Tobias Buckell, Sly Mongoose is a good place to start, and I recommend you do.

Coming hot on the heels of Ragamuffin's Nebula nomination and sporting an explosive Todd Lockwood cover that is simply made of awesome, Toby Buckell's third (and best to date) novel Sly Mongoose continues what he has told me he's taken to calling "the Xenowealth series, for reasons which become apparent in Sly Mongoose!" They do. What he didn't mention is how faithfully and commendably the book follows in the footsteps of Ragamuffin, in the way it expands the scope of Buckell's universe far beyond what was indicated in previous volumes. Sly Mongoose can be read on its own, too, for which even more props are due. While Buckell's loose, off-the-cuff writing style — reminiscent in some ways of early Niven — may not be to all tastes, anyone hankering for a book that is pure front-to-back action is likely to peg this as the space opera of 2008. Again, look at that poster-worthy cover, and you know exactly what you're getting. Surely the relentless action in this book augurs well for fans of Halo, as Buckell is tackling a new novel based on the gaming sensation next.

Sly Mongoose opens quite a bit in the future from the events of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin. Exactly how long isn't made clear, but it could be decades or even a century or so. I thought about emailing Toby and asking him before writing this, then decided not to. Ultimately it doesn't matter. The goal here is not to continue a strict narrative chronology but to add depth to the existing series, while allowing newbies the chance to hop aboard completely cold, and not feel lost.

All the backstory you need, which Buckell covers succinctly, is that the alien Satrapy — who once lorded it over all of the human colonies spread throughout space and connected by an elaborate wormhole network — has been defeated. Now, the human worlds are squabbling amongst themselves, with the Ragamuffins and their ruling Dread Council defending the worlds who wish to remain independent from the power hungry League of Human Affairs. Now this conflict has been taken up a notch, and will culminate on the Venus-like planet Chilo. Here, descendants of the Azteca societies from New Anegada, where the previous books were set, eke out a precarious existence in cloud cities hovering 100,000 feet above the crushing and boiling surface, well above the roiling and corrosive clouds. Select groups of young men brave surface conditions in bulky groundsuits to mine precious minerals. It's a simply breathtaking setting for a space opera, and one with some scientific validity behind it (check the book's afterword). It grabs your sense-of-wonder with a vise grip and never lets go once.

28 Days Later in Space more or less sums up much of the book, though with a far bigger budget and much more at stake for the characters and the reader. The League have unleashed a fearful infection that transforms its victims, not into mere zombies, but something even creepier. Individual infectees become mere drones of some kind of hivemind intelligence calling itself the Swarm. They fight without mercy, thoughtlessly sacrificing any of their own number solely to win at all costs. One by one, the floating cities of Chilo fall to the Swarm, until only poor and decrepit Yatapek remains. Here, with the help of Pepper, the lone-wolf Ragamuffin warrior from the first two books (no, I no longer feel any compulsion to snark on his name), the planet's last remaining humans will make their last stand.

Buckell's characters this time are among his warmest and most relatable yet, with much of the book's action seen through the eyes of young Timas, one of the xocoyotzin who work on the surface. Buckell takes just enough time — not too much, not too little — establishing how Yatapek's society works. They have a fairly rigid and unforgiving class system. When a partner of Timas's is killed on the surface (an accidental by-product of Pepper's rather explosive arrival on the planet), he's barely cold before his family are thrown out of their home, on the upper levels of the city reserved for the families of xocoyotzin. The ruling body, the pipiltin, are a bunch of petty bureaucrats, many of whom (Timas's father among them) are motivated by as much self-interest as concern for the city's welfare.

As the Swarm infection spreads, we meet others among Chilo's human denizens, such as the Aeolians, who practice the ultimate form of democracy through being something of a hivemind themselves. Their minds are linked technologically, and nearly every action they take is first put up to a vote. They've always looked down upon the poorer non-Aeolian cities like Yatapek. But when their own cities are the first to fall to the Swarm, many of them, like Katrina, a young girl about Timas's age sent to Yatapek as an envoy, must learn to adapt not only as individuals, but to the fact that their self-exalted status was so easily eradicated and that survival depends on putting humanity first. The tension that builds as Yatapek braces for the Swarm invasion is similar, though much stronger, to that in Crystal Rain, where thousands of helpless citizens sought refuge in their capital city as word of other cities falling one by one to invaders reached them. Sly Mongoose ups that ante, and culminates in some of the most phenomenal aerial battles put to paper.

Sly Mongoose runs mostly on adrenaline, but Buckell saves up a few surprises that hint at stories for future books. Savvy readers here may already be wondering what the League thought they could possibly have gotten out of spreading a runaway zombie virus among their enemies, and in fact that little curious detail plays a role in some nifty plot turns towards the climax. I'll stop now, as there's little more that needs to be said beyond the fact that Tobias Buckell improves by an order of magnitude with each story he tells.