Tropic of Creation by Kay Kenyon

called them lizards, but what they really were could not be determined from the body of the only one in their possession—a blackened corpse, the target of four laser guns at once.
    Through the drumbeat of rain, Sascha thought she heard a counterpoint. Voices shouting. In another moment, she was sitting up, swinging her feet off the cot.
    “Easy does it,” her mother said, turning slowly from her work at the computer. She raised her hand, palm out, to stop Sascha from moving.
    Geoff Olander walked to the tent flap, peering out into the encampment. “Someone’s coming. It’ll be Baker Camp coming in.” Baker Camp would be consolidating with their camp in readiness to move out. To debark the planet. “I’ll just check to see,” he said. Cristin looked at him with that
be careful
look she used so liberally.
    Sascha bolted across the tent to his side. “Father, please. Let me come with you.” If Baker Camp was on its way in, Badri Nazim would be with them. She swung around to face her mother, plead with her. “The only ones that died were right next to the stream.” They called the ditch running through camp a stream, for it was now a permanent watercourse.
    Geoff shook his head. “Stay with your mother.” He was weary of her entreaties, or perhaps of Cristin’s counter-entreaties.
    Sascha locked eyes with her mother. “You can’t protect me forever. You can’t protect me from my own
life.”
    Geoff looked at his wife for a long moment, challenging her to respond. Cristin took it as another of her husband’s small betrayals. “Go, then.” At Geoff’s hesitation, she waved at them resignedly. “Go.”
    They plunged out of the tent without further argument. Sascha’s clothes were instantly drenched in the pelting rain. Through the cascade of water, Sascha could barely see the tents sharing a row with their own. With the rain leaching the color from the world, the camp and the hills beyond had gone gray and white. Beyond the camp perimeter Sascha watched great banks of fog rolling through, masking the low, jagged hills. She knew those hills were changing. In moments of abating rain Sascha had seen a green fur lying over the toothed ridges. It was grass sprouting.
    The camp had awakened one morning to find the mossy fuzz everywhere, sprung up from the ground where rhizomous roots had lain dormant. Grass was a remarkable plant, her father had said—a strange comment, for Sascha had thought grass the simplest of growing things, the least worthy of consideration. But grass, her father said, had the odd characteristic of arising from underground structures without any growing tip protruding. Upon this quality depended all the grazing animals of all worlds, which otherwise might chew their local grass crop out of existence. And upon the grazers depended many a human settlement. So grass made human life possible, in a sense.
    Well, if so, Null was indeed coming to life. And this miracle was occurring just as they were leaving. Just as they were abandoning Eli Dammond. When he came back—and Sascha was sure that he would come back—he would find the land changed. Perhaps he would hardly recognize it for the hot, scoured place it had been when he left. The only proof he would have that he was even on the right planet would be the sodden remains of their camp.This lonely vision filled her with more dismay than the thought of his death.
    A large crowd of enlisteds had gathered at the perimeter to see what the commotion was. It wasn’t, as Sascha’s father expected, the contingent of sixty-three soldiers coming in from Baker Camp. It was a military detail leaving. The corporal next to her murmured, “They’re going to bring in the
Lucia
. ‘Bout time.”
    A unit of twelve soldiers was forming up under Lieutenant Roche’s direction. They learned the mission would be led by Captain Luce Marzano, tasked with hiking the six miles to the transport ship and flying it back. Marzano would be landing on the wide field