The Long Grass of Kestrel Reach
Chapter One
Pa said the grass on Kestrel Reach would outlast us all. He meant it as a comfort.
It was waist-high on me and rippled silver-green to the horizon, where two moons hung in the pale morning like thumbprints. We had come out on the colony transport fourteen months before with a plow, a wood stove, Ma's rocking chair, and the Federation Agricultural Service's promise that the soil would be kind. That was before Cardassia let the Dominion through. Now the comm in the barn brought only lists of systems that had stopped answering.
My name is Laura Ingalls. My sister is Mary, and the baby is Carrie. Ma said the names were no accident. Our family had been naming daughters that way for three hundred years, ever since a woman in the old Wisconsin woods wrote down her childhood and someone down the line decided we were kin to her. Nobody could prove it. There were no records, only the story, a cracked copy of the first book, and Pa's fiddle, mended so often that he said not one original piece remained. "It still plays," he'd say.
Pa had traded the replicator for a milk cow at Settlement Station. "A man ought to know where his supper comes from." Ma didn't argue, but she kept the tea dispenser, and nobody mentioned it.
The ships came at dusk.
The wind stopped first. Then the sky over the Station lit white and silent, and a few seconds later the sound reached us and the ground shook up through my boots. Mary said the hair on her arms was standing up. Ma had Carrie on her hip and the root cellar hatch open before Pa finished saying her name.
"Down. Now."
We spent three days in a hole in the ground. The dark was total. Ma had banked the stove and sealed the door above us, and there was nothing to do but breathe quietly and listen. The first night we heard the bombardment, steady as rain. The second night we heard the grass.
The Jem'Hadar don't talk. I learned that lying with my cheek on cold dirt, listening to something heavy move through the Reach in a line, parting the stalks the way a hand parts hair. Pa had his arm over Mary and me, and I felt him stop breathing. Carrie stirred. Ma put her mouth against the baby's ear and hummed, so low I felt it more than heard it, a hymn with no words. The footsteps stopped directly over the hatch. Dust sifted onto my face. Something exhaled, slow and wet.
Then they moved on, toward the Hollis place. Mr. Hollis had four sons. We heard it for a long time, and then we didn't.
On the fourth morning a Starfleet shuttle came down in the east pasture.
The officer who climbed out was a tall woman with a medical kit and a gray, hollow face, and there was blood on her sleeve that wasn't hers. She came to our door because it was the twelfth homestead on her list, and because Pa was standing in it with a pitchfork.
"Two hundred and six settlers on the Reach," she said. "We've found thirty-nine."
Nobody spoke. She sat at our table without being asked. Ma poured her tea from the old dispenser, because the relays had flickered back, and the officer held the cup in both hands like something holy.
"The line has collapsed," she said. "We can't hold the Reach. We can't even try. I can take seventeen people on this shuttle, and there's a transport in orbit for as many as I can bring before it has to leave." She looked out the window at the silver grass. "I'm sorry. I came down to tell you the truth. That's all I've got."
"How long?" Pa said.
"Two hours."
Ma started packing. The rocking chair stayed where it was. I watched her walk past it twice and not look at it.
Pa found me in the barn, standing in front of the cow, who didn't know anything was wrong. Ten men were gathering on the east ridge with hunting rifles and a hand beacon, he told me, to bring in the far homesteads before the Jem'Hadar came back. He was going to help them. The shuttle would make a second trip, the officer had said, if there was anything to go back for.
He put the fiddle in my arms.
"It's older than any of us," he said. "Don't let it go quiet."
"Pa."
"I'm not saying I won't come." He kissed the top of my head. Pa never promised what he couldn't plant.
We lifted off with Mary's face pressed to the viewport and Carrie asleep on Ma's shoulder. Below us the Reach was already burning at the edges, a thin orange line eating into the silver. In the middle of it, small and dark, was the east ridge. I held the fiddle in one arm, and in my other fist were the seed heads I had stripped from the grass at the door, a whole handful. I didn't remember doing it.
Grass grows back, Pa said. It grows faster than anything.
I played one note when the Reach was too small to see. Then I stopped. It was too soon for the rest.
