Free Tropic of Creation by Kay Kenyon

to look at this creature. “And what is your tendency, Maret? Toward beating your prisoners, or not?”
    “That would be an offensive question.”
    An ahtran insult. Good
. He closed his eyes again as a wave of nausea overtook him.
    The creature Maret remained silent then, watching him as he fell back into a stupor.
    The usual pictures played out on the back of his eyelids. The bridge of the
Recompense
. Screens on every side, each one filled with fire, fire from the
Fidelity
, from the
Raptor
. Radio channels clogged with shouts, some incoherent, some all too clear. He thought he heard the ship hull scream, metal torqued beyond endurance.
    The
Recompense
shuddered under a hit, lights failed, came back, failed again. In strobelike frames, Eli saw the bridge crew in random moments of chaos—Lieutenant Nule’s face was bleached, his eyes always on Eli, waiting for orders.
    All the while the bridge filled with noise like the world cracking open, releasing monsters, bellowing.

8

    T he forest was changing. The enlisteds said so. Sascha had seen the grass sprouting in camp like a patchy beard. But she wanted to see the forest.
    Sascha waited for one of the torrential rain squalls that lashed the camp and made a dash past the desultory guards on the perimeter.
    Though both camps were officially on alert, few believed in the possibility of ahtran attack. Captain Dammond was missing from mischance, not malice. Meanwhile the enlisteds awaited the decision to leave. Soldiers stood around in tight knots, resigned to more waiting. Oddly, the ones that had been waiting three years seemed more patient than the ones that just got here. But for everyone, life was suspended until they dug the captain out or gave him up.
    The digging reports were ominous. Field bots morphed into diggers had initially gouged out a crater some twenty feet wide and six deep, but the walls slumped in during the first rain, creating more of a mud wallow than an excavation. From gradiometer imaging they knew the hexadron was buried deep. If Captain Dammond was alive, he’dbe in the tunnel below, perhaps unable to activate the hexadron for the return trip. The plan, which every hour looked more desperate, was for the two bots to drill their way down and morph into a machine capable of repairs to the hexadron.
    Sascha ran in the opposite direction from the digging operation, toward the Gray Spiny Forest, rumored to be outgrowing its name. After four days of pacing the compound, ducking her mother, pestering her father at his desk, and—in her mind—clawing out that muddy in-filled shaft with her own fingers, she needed a cheering sight.
    Smells of wet soil and mud surrounded her. In the distance thunder ground out a swallowed roar, but the lightning was missing. Something was always missing. This world was bound up in secrets, like the hexadron to nowhere, like the fate of Captain Dammond, like the precursors of all those bones in the valley where she’d found her amphib.
    Her father tolerated her nickname, amphib. By the dentition and morphology, many of the specimens they’d collected resembled amphibians. Now that Null revealed its water, the classification began to fit.
    She was in the spiny forest, standing in an eddy of light. The squall had passed, leaving her feet sunk halfway in mud, her shirt adhering like a droopy skin. A patina of pale green shone from the stick trees. It was an intermittently green world, where one slant of light brewed a verdant palette to the forest, another a gray-brown. On the nearest tree she noted that the inner grooves of nascent green now bulged as though swollen with water—ballooning over the ridges of the bark grooves, and grown lighter in color with the expansion. Sascha took out her knife and sample bag, cutting into the curdle of green, the first blush of an unguessed-at spring. From the tops of a few stick trees a green growing tip protruded from the sheath of gray bark.
    Fingers of morning sunlight released fog