Planet Eyes: Part Eight

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here. 

For Planet Eyes: Part Seven, click here.

 

31

It is not lost on you, the irony of your near death, only this time, it was not Icarus flying too close to the sun—it was the Hiraeth plummeting toward Icarus III, your bright future. Gravity stabilizers are fully repaired, the consoles on your flight deck freshly rewired. Your engineering crew has installed safeguards to prevent overloads throughout the ship. All of this would reassure you if you didn’t feel like there was a ghost in the machine. 

Superimposed over all of these fears and memories, like a laugh track in a terrible sitcom, is the knocking on the window, the soft tap tapping that you heard walking the corridor, late that night before your first surface mission, that you still hear when you fall asleep. 

Tap. 

Tap tap.

Your comms unit chirps, and you jump. When you try to thumb it, you’re shaking so hard that it takes several tries. 

“Captain,” says the voice on the other end, “it’s Lieutenant Spencer.” Nothing about his tone sets you at ease. Surely there’s been an emergency, something truly horrible this time, for him to sound like that, all breathless and urgent. It takes you a moment to remember the scans you asked him to run what feels like ages ago, the transmissions you had him sending on all frequencies, in search of life on the planet. Something like compressed panic inhabits the space behind your ribs. On several occasions over the last few days, you’ve told yourself to check in on him and ask about the scans, but time has escaped you. 

“Report.” 

“You told me to call the moment I found anything. Captain, our broadcast comms are picking up something strange. It’s not a transmission, I don’t think, more like some sort of interference, but you should come hear it for yourself.” 

By the time you reach the lab, you’ve run through a dozen scenarios. He has found something. What has he found? An image of what you’re up against, outlined in code. A snapshot, blurry and grainy, of a surprised alien caught mid-stride, face turned to the camera. Shields around the planet’s core, protecting a secret civilization. Innumerable possibilities. Whatever this discovery is, it has to be ground-shaking, earth-shattering. It will throw everything you know into disarray. 

You’re still caught up in the excitement, heart clambering up in your throat, so you don’t even hesitate, you just rush into the room. Then it’s too late. As you hit the ground, and all the air leaves your body, it takes you a second to realize he’s tackled you. There’s no time to think, no time to wait for the ringing in your ears to subside. Already he’s reaching for you, knee pressed into your ribcage, hands outstretched toward your face. At first you think he’s planning to strangle you, which carries its own kind of horror—you have nightmares about suffocation. But no, he wants to blind you. You realize this just in time to twist to the side, as far as you can, and squeeze your forearm across your eyes. And then you realize something else—that no one is coming to your aid, that the two of you are alone. 

“Stop it,” he yells, and it’s more of a gurgle, like his mouth is filled with mud. He doesn’t even sound human. “Stop it. You’re not allowed to see.” As he starts to pry your arm away, you force yourself to slow your breathing, to fight the rising tide of panic. 

You strike blindly, which is a mistake, because when your fist connects with something bony, probably his jaw, it only enrages him further. You thumb your comms unit and shout into it, “Security. code 17, tech l—” before he rips it from your collar and hurls it across the room. Your stomach twists as you realize you have never used code 17 before. What if they don’t remember what it means? What if they don’t realize the need for urgency? He will blind you, if he gets the chance, if they don’t arrive in time. It’s getting harder now to fend off the panic. It has become a physical presence in the room, hands pressed to your chest in an effort to crush your lungs. 

You listen to the sounds he’s making, enough to judge that his head is just above yours. Somehow you’ve twisted yourself onto your stomach, forearm still pressed firmly to your eyes, but already he’s grabbing you by the collar, yanking you up. “Captain, this is for the best.” He sounds hysterical. “You don’t need them anyway, because you’re leaving. Just give them to me. We’ll keep them safe.” 

To get a good shot at his face, you will have to be able to see. The second or two that your eyes will be uncovered might prove too long, but soon it won’t matter anymore. 

You brace yourself against him, for balance, and awkwardly swing your knees up over your head. They connect with his face, a bright bolt of pain, followed by a wet crunch. You’re already on your feet and sprinting drunkenly to the door when he lets out a howl of pain. At any moment you expect to feel hands grabbing you from behind, but then the door slides open, and you run headlong into a wall of security officers. 

As they rush past you into the room, you turn to survey the scene. There he is, Spencer, curled up in the fetal position. One of his eyes has begun to swell shut, and his nose is fountaining blood. Then you can’t see him anymore, past the swarm of officers. You get one last glimpse of the room, see that an entire bank of terminals has been smashed, before they pull you away. You can’t calculate the equipment damage, not in this moment, but it’s a fair guess that you won’t be able to continue your scans for a while. 

32

Down in the medical bay, you watch as Johnson mixes a batch of stimulant for you, though you can tell by the set of his shoulders, the way his face sits like a mask, that he’s only obeying you because that’s his job. The fatigue is a monster in the corner of your vision. If you look at it, you will see it growing. 

You catch yourself with a hand over your eyes, like you’re still trying to shield them. If you let yourself think about Spencer right now, you will lose the semblance of calm you’ve rebuilt for yourself over the last few hours. 

You were supposed to feel safe, wrapped in the protective blanket of your top-of-the-line starship. Space is never safe, not like sleeping in your own bed is safe. It’s safe like falling, because as long as you are only falling, you will not die. After all, it isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the landing. But there is a difference between what you were warned might happen, in the course of routine space travel, and what is happening before your eyes. This is a far cry from your textbook, chapters labeled Equipment Malfunction, Stray Asteroids and Hull Damage, Crew Mutiny. Those were stories told by innocent people who thought they could imagine the worst. This is worse. 

Johnson is visibly trembling as he fills a hypodermic needle with the blue solution and swabs your arm. The smell of disinfectant leaves your nose tingling. 

Moments like these, of simple, unadulterated, black despair lend you a little more clarity of vision, as if you can somehow understand what was going through Fleurie’s mind on the flight deck. Strangely, you find—and then less strangely, when you are honest with yourself—you are not surprised by his words, or even by his actions, only disturbed, like watching someone come down with the flu, knowing you’re next. 

Once the sting of the shot has passed, you unroll your sleeve and stand. Johnson puts a hand on your shoulder, lightly, and you don’t know if he’s trying to tell you something or if he’s making sure you’re still there, still corporeal. 

Take a deep breath, arrange your thoughts into the shape of thoughts. 

“Yes, Lieutenant,” you say, “what is it?” As if you don’t know. 

“Captain, I know you’re uninjured, but are you okay?” 

“Yes,” you say, because it seems like a respectable answer. Down in a lonely storage bay, in a hastily-constructed cell that looks more like a cage than anything else, sits a man under heavy sedation. His name used to be Lieutenant Spencer. Now he is a mystery, an undiscovered entity. If you wanted, you could go down there and listen to him rambling, words flowing like water over stones. Spencer and MacAvoy should meet up for coffee, sometime, maybe to compare notes and develop a cohesive story, a better angle for their plan of attack. 

“With all due respect, Captain, you should take some time off. We would all understand.” You tell yourself that you were attacked, that he has every right to be concerned, but you can see it, framed in his mind, the image of what happened on the deck as described to him, with you in Fleurie’s stead. It is an ugly tableau. You have dreamed about it yourself, in the moments sleep has snuck up on you. 

“I’m doing what I have to do. I don’t have a first officer anymore. That changes things.” 

“Lieutenant Renee Mel is your first officer now.” 

“I got my last one killed.” It’s an odd confession to make, taken out of context. You’re not sure if he’ll even understand what you’re saying, but the words are out already—they were a long time in coming. “I won’t do that again.” 

When you let yourself drift, you can still hear it ringing in your ears, the damage report after the incident in the tech lab. It will be weeks before the terminals are functional again, weeks before you can conduct any sort of scans. Whatever records there were of Spencer’s findings have been destroyed; what set him off will remain a mystery to you. 

“You haven’t slept in what, two, three days? That’s not healthy. I can’t keep giving you stims—you’re going to have a heart attack.” 

“Lieutenant, I’m doing what I have to to keep everyone alive. If that means giving me stims, then you’ll give me stims when I ask for them. That’s your job.” It is an unkind way to put it, and you want to take it back. But you meant every word you said. 

Then, somehow, you are in your quarters, with no complete memory of leaving the medical bay or traversing hallways. Outside your door, two security guards stand at attention, and you can feel their presence through the walls. You see that at some point you must have pulled your newly-installed curtains to either side of the gaping window, because no one else would have been in your room, surely, but you don’t remember doing it, don’t know why you would have wanted to. 

You move to close the curtains, but instead find yourself standing there, staring out at the planet like you’re awaiting orders. It occurs to you that time has passed—how much, you don’t know—and you have simply been, existing in this spot, your mind a blank slate. 

With the rest of your willpower you whip the curtains shut, hurry to the bathroom, which was why you came here in the first place, and step into the stinging chemical spray of the shower. Even then, you feel eyes on you, tracing every inch of your exposed self.

33

The halls hum with quiet, the absence of noise so physical, so present, it is almost audible. You feel the shift in your body, in your mind, the one you were trained for but is alien nonetheless. It is one thing to learn how to be in space, to interact with the ship, the forming culture of a crew on the very edge of the known. This is something heavier, something unknowable, impossible to distill into a textbook or a seminar. Even the ground feels strange. Something about this has altered your vision. You know the difference; even in the windowless hallways, your mind is not tricked into believing you are on Earth. You are vulnerable, your consciousness an exposed nerve. 

You suppose being on a spaceship is similar to being on the south side of buzzed. Everything is muffled, and you feel like you’re fine, because you’re supposed to be fine, but something deeper and more instinctive has you aware that you’re processing the world through a barrier. So when you pass Ensign Hathaway in the hallway and he says hello, you only nod in response, too far away from your mouth to form words. 

Your comms unit chirps several minutes later. You take a deep breath, and it feels like your first in a while. “Go ahead.” Your words are indistinct; something about the walls dampens the sound. You are talking underwater. 

“Captain.” You recognize the voice on a delay. It’s Lieutenant Lane, head psychiatrist. “Captain, I have some news for you. I think you should come speak to me in person.” 

All the way to her office, you feel dread rising in you, coming to rest at the top of your consciousness like an oil slick. 

Her office is windowless, you notice, a breath of fresh air. You hold on to the relief for as long as it lasts. 

“What is it you needed to talk to me about?” 

“As you know, I’ve been monitoring Ensign MacAvoy’s condition. I know—I know you received copies of my reports. Have you had the chance to look over them yet?” 

You shake your head numbly. The reports haven’t even crossed your mind for the past two days, at least. It’s been what, a week since Fleurie died? You don’t know for sure. It might only have been a handful of hours. With no sleep to mark its passage, time has become a meaningless entity. You don’t remember if you even opened the files. 

“Captain, my staff and I have been inundated by people experiencing acute levels of stress. Some of them have become borderline delusional. My interest was piqued by several things Ensign MacAvoy said. I’ve heard echoes of his thinking in others of the crew. I want clearance to view Commander Fleurie’s personal logs, to compare my findings.” 

“I think they’re connected,” you blurt, the idea that hasn’t left you alone since Fleurie’s death. It’s hard to talk, hard to find words. Your head is an endless wasteland, your thoughts wild, unwilling to be corralled. “Fleurie killed himself after reading MacAvoy’s logs. I started to read the logs, right after MacAvoy snapped, but they felt contagious, too persuasive. I think the commander killed himself because of something he read in those files.” You have never said it out loud before, this secret admission to your guilt, and you’re not sure you’ve framed it in any sort of way she can understand. It should have been you reading poisoned words in Fleurie’s stead. 

“I wondered if no one had told you.” She taps on her screen, pulls up a file, and glances at it momentarily before locking eyes with you. “Ensign MacAvoy passed away this morning.” It’s a soft expression, lacking the harsh sterility of its cousin, he died. But it contains, if anything, more mystery, a peaceful phrase that encompasses any number of violent meanings. 

It takes you a moment to realize that she’s still talking, so you only catch the tail end of what she’s saying. “—agree the cases could be connected.”

 You fill in the details for yourself, find that she has come to the same conclusion as you. 

“You have my permission to read the files. I’ll send them to you right away.” It’s a burden lifting off your shoulders—though it shouldn’t be—to pass along the torch yet again. Probably this will kill her too, if you’re right about the cause and effect. When you consider what you’re doing, you feel cold all over. But someone has to follow those leads, to track down answers, any answers, and as captain, you can’t risk it. “Once you’ve finished, please send the results to my screen immediately.” 

34

By the end of the day, or whatever passes for day now, you set out for the med bay once more, intent on asking for a shot to help you sleep without dreaming. Whatever these stims are doing to your mind, because it has to be the stims, it can’t be good. 

But the moment you enter the med bay, the thought of sleep becomes too horrible. Unconsciousness is too much like falling, somehow linked with the Hiraeth in your mind, so that if you fall, so does the ship. As if the only tethers holding you safely in the sky are your eyelids, pulled up, every blink a kiss blown toward disaster. An acid thought. 

You hear yourself, a witness to your own malfunction, asking for more stims, sounding irritated when you find you have to insist. Poor Johnson, poor guy, run ragged—no doubt on stims himself in order to deal with the influx of patients. Because even though nothing as grandiose as Fleurie has happened, people have become clumsy, careless. There has been a spate of accidents, injury reports popping up on your screen at all hours. Fear is such a small thing, small as a bacterium, and so much more deadly. 

What was once a spotless, well-kept medical bay is a helter-skelter diorama in the art museum of your deadly life. And if you follow me through this doorway, ladies and gentlemen, you will see a study in chaos. Observe the dramatic reds of new blood, the rusting browns of old. Observe the discarded bandages, the unmade beds. I invite you to look, over here, at the listless, drugged patients. 

With your blood pulsing, so stimmed up it feels like you have more than one heart pumping furiously in your chest, you flee the med bay and make your way to your office where you brew a pot of coffee before stumbling blearily onto the flight deck, thermos in hand, to relieve the officer in charge of the night shift. Through the staticky blur that has replaced your vision, you observe how tired he looks, worn as thin as you. 

Despite the caffeine and the stims, you find yourself drifting the longer you sit, staring out the viewport. Drift, snap awake, drift, awake, drift, wash, rinse, repeat. The moments of consciousness and unconsciousness meld together into a blur that tastes of stale coffee and unwashed breath. The hours move like a viscous fluid. When you catch your head against your hand for the third time, you know you have to do something to shake yourself out of this slump. 

You stand and survey the room. There can be no denying you all feel this collective dread, each of you holding your breath, the same breath. 

Of course you know that fear divides, that this is a solitary moment carved out of the horribleness that is the worst yet to come, but in this separate space, you feel like a single entity—you and your crew, glued together by this creeping unease, no distinction between where you end and they begin. When you part ways to rest, or, as you will surely do, begin the next task in the endless litany of tasks that has become only the barest excuse for staying awake, this false peace will be shattered, but you cling to it nonetheless. You cling to it because it is likely the last of its kind. 

You don’t know when it began in earnest, the shift from thinking about the incident on the bridge as a setback to your larger goal, to thinking about it as the beginning of the end. Possibly it was as early as when you watched Fleurie leak out violently, arterial spray painting the ship, an unconventional redecoration. It doesn’t really matter how it began, how long it took. You have forgotten, until this moment, the series of surface missions lined up, your future vision, the green and blue on your palate intended for the canvas of Icarus III. These goals, these plans, these investments, they hold no relevance to the now. They are someone else’s dream, running a parallel track to your existence, never once intersecting. They are so incompatible with your reality, you hardly recognize them as having been yours. 

You are simply here, teeth gritted, hanging on until you can’t hang on anymore. There is nothing else to be done. Every moment is the same moment, but heavier. 

I wish I could tell you, in the end, that it will make a difference, this holding on. But if you want my honest opinion, it doesn’t matter. In the end, holding on only makes it more difficult. Nothing you do now will hinder the inevitable. But lie to yourself anyway, and lie to your crew. Pretend these lies are the twin of mercy. 

35

You sit in your office, thinking about rain and how much you miss it, the soft patter on dirt, the drumming on a metal roof, its many iterations. You miss bruised skies and thunder, the electric anticipation before a storm, the smell that lingers after. You sip coffee and consider turning on rain noises to banish the silence, but the silence is a sucking void, an entity unto itself. No amount of sound could banish it. 

You stand and move to the window. It is a magnet, and you are a magnet; you always end up staring out the window, no matter how much you hate the stars now, the very sight of them, and the citrus slice of Icarus III, bathed in its own dawn that does not touch you. The crescent curve of the planet resembles a frown the longer you look at it. 

Outside, separated from you by only the thinnest layer of bulkhead and synthetic glass, is a nothingness so absolute it is something—so palpable it must surely be able to enter your ship by osmosis, leak into the Hiraeth on the cellular level, seep past the molecules of your skin. 

36

After you drag the matter-reprocessing terminal into Fleurie’s room, on a cart loaded with storage containers, there isn’t much left to do but run his stuff through it and watch all the various pieces of his life disintegrate. You could have done this the other way around, lugged his belongings down to the blue-walled bay where the terminal was housed, but doing it this way feels kinder, more personal. You owe him so much more than this; this is the best you can manage. 

You start with the basics, or what should feel like the basics—his uniforms, his socks, his sheets. One by one you feed them into the mouth of the terminal and wait for it to devour them. With every item, it takes a moment for the machine to recognize and catalogue the cellular makeup, a few more moments to break it all down to the molecular level. After you’ve processed everything made of cloth, you move on to his more private belongings—his bronze sculpture of a rabbit, his toothbrush, his aftershave. As each storage unit fills, you hook up the next one, until there are none left. You throw his badge of rank in, watch it become nothing, and then you’re done. 

Once you’ve catalogued and labeled all the storage containers, which will hold the molecular solutions in cryostasis to keep them stable until they are needed, you palm his screen, tuck it under your uniform like a dark secret. You hold it close to your heart, all that’s left. 

Down in the storage bay, you add the containers to the multitudes of others, so many it’s hard to fathom. Someday someone will pull these units down and turn Fleurie’s belongings into clothes, cutlery, food. He will become just another part of the Hiraeth. It is the only funeral you can stand to give him. 

Still a better funeral than yours. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks