
Planet Eyes: Part Five
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For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here.
For Planet Eyes: Part Four, click here.
20
You need a moment before you talk to MacAvoy himself, so you find yourself walking, almost mindlessly, toward Med Bay B. You’ve moved personnel as much as possible to other decks, and you wash your hands every chance you get, but even so, you are keenly aware that you and Fleurie are breaking quarantine. It’s all well and good if you aren’t sick, or if the sickness isn’t dangerous. Otherwise it renders the quarantine pointless. But there is too much to do, especially now, to sit locked in your quarters while the ship falls apart. You imagine you will lift the quarantine by nightfall, anyway. If MacAvoy has a virus, he’s likely to have spread it all over the ship. You are starting to wonder if the quarantine was only for your peace of mind, a way for you to pretend that you have this situation under control.
As you enter the medical bay, the exhausted med techs exchange wary looks, like they expect you to start yelling at them at any moment. You decide to leave it for now. If they’re hiding something, you’ll find out eventually, and if they aren’t, and they just look suspicious because they’re worn out, asking pointed questions will only worsen the situation. They need a break. You’ve let yourself forget the fact that they’ve been on their feet, for the most part, since Montez was injured.
You pull one of them aside and step to the back of the room, as far from Montez’s cot as possible. “How is he, Ensign Vice?” you ask, voice hushed. Though you received several updates throughout the night, you hardly remember glancing at them, much less reading what they said.
“He’s stable, but there’s more damage than we first thought. His nose is completely shattered—shards of it came within millimeters of damaging brain tissue, and on top of that, he has a major concussion. With reconstructive surgery, we can make his face look passable again, but we expect he’ll be dealing with post-concussion syndrome for a while.”
“I’ll give him as much medical leave as he needs,” you say, more to yourself than to anyone else.
“You can talk to him,” Vice continues, like he hasn’t even heard what you said, “but I don’t know how well he’ll be able to answer your questions. He’s not going to remember much of what happened, and anyway,” you can hear the judgement in his voice now, “I don’t know why you need to interrogate him. It’s not like he’s done anything wrong.”
You almost automatically concede to this before you realize that you haven’t actually announced that you were planning to question Montez, that you have lent even the slightest credence to MacAvoy’s claims. To anyone looking on, this visit would have the appearance of a concerned captain checking in on an injured crew member, and in fact, it would be a little strange if you didn’t do something like this. So you find it a bit disturbing that this is where Vice’s mind jumped.
“Ensign Vice.” You try not to let your fear show. Instead it comes out sounding like irritation. “What makes you think I’m here to interrogate Ensign Montez?” You try not to think too hard about the fact that Vice might be in line as the next person to snap. The closer you examine his eyes, the more you begin to see how bloodshot, how dilated they are. They shift too much, like his gaze can’t rest on anything for longer than a couple seconds.
“It’s just—” He starts to back off now, and at least he has the decency to look a little embarrassed. Already you’re glancing at the other two med techs, gauging how well they’re holding up, so you don’t hear the rest of his sentence, though you know you should be paying attention.
“You and your teammates are relieved,” you say, as gently as possible. “Head back to your quarters until the end of the quarantine. When I leave, I’ll call in replacements for you. Can you promise me that you’ll get several hours of sleep?”
He starts to protest, but you shake your head and eye the door meaningfully.
Once he’s gone, with the others trailing behind, you make your way over to Montez’s cot, grateful for the opportunity to question him without witnesses. You wince at the sight of his face, half-swathed in bandages. At first you think he’s asleep, are worried that he’s slipped into a coma, that he will die and leave you without answers. But then his eyes open, painfully slow, sand under his lids, and then he’s looking at you, first with confusion, and then with something too much like resignation for comfort.
“How are you feeling?” you ask, trying to sound as non-confrontational as possible. You don’t want to put him on his guard, especially if he has nothing to hide—it will only prolong your suspicion unnecessarily. And it feels cruel, questioning him, suspecting him of anything—however slightly—while he’s down like this.
“Rough,” he says. The words come out as a spill of gravel. You glance up at the x-rays, taped far above his bed where he can’t see them. His nose was pulverized. Even with all the miracles of modern medicine, you can’t bring yourself to believe that Vice was right when he said they could fix his face. You feel a surge of anger toward MacAvoy. Before now, you have experienced only a mix of fear, understanding, guilt, and compassion when you think about him. But now you find something boiling deep in your bones—that he would do this, that he would start this nightmare, that he would cause permanent damage to someone.
“Can you tell me what you remember about yesterday?”
“Well, I don’t—I don’t remember everything.” He says it like it’s a question. “I know that I was in the galley. I was making food. I heard yelling.” Watching him talk is an exercise in vicarious pain. “I could make out enough of what he was saying to know it was about me, so I headed out to see what was going on. And then I don’t—I don’t remember what happened after that. Not until I woke up here. Just, I remember seeing Ensign MacAvoy’s face, and it looked crazed.” He stops for a moment, and you think that maybe he’s done, but then he locks eyes with you. “Everyone saw what happened. And you had Commander Fleurie question me already.”
This brings you to a standstill. Suddenly your feet are separate entities, rooting someone else’s body to the floor. You are riding a shockwave of sound—the burst of adrenaline is a punch to the gut. The words come out before you can stop them. “What questions did Commander Fleurie ask you?”
He goes still, and his eyes turn curiously blank. You are starting to realize that the more you scrutinize everyone, the crazier everyone looks. “He wanted to know what interactions I had with Ensign MacAvoy over the past few days. But I don’t really, I don’t remember. It’s all a blur right now. I know he told me that my food always tastes better than the other cooks’, but it could have been ages ago that he said that. In case you hadn’t noticed, I just got my face smashed. I’m a little foggy.”
“Why would your food taste better? It’s all from mixes.” You try to ask it conversationally, like you aren’t clinging to the answer and what it will spell out
“It’s just that I don’t over mix it.” He sounds a little angry, and his words have begun to slur. You recall learning about concussions after getting one in training, how they can interfere with your emotional regulation. “The compounds are delicate—you can’t just beat them. The other cooks don’t understand that. It’s an art form.”
Your joints cry out as you straighten—you hadn’t realized how hunched over you were, kneeling down to be on his level. “I see.” You don’t see. “Thank you for sharing with me. I understand that you’re on pain killers right now, but is there anything I can get for you before the next shift of med techs arrives? A glass of water, maybe?”
“A new nose.” He chuckles. It’s a wet, coughing sound. “I’ll accept Ensign MacAvoy’s.”
Once the door is closed behind you, you page Medical Bay A and tell them to send up two med techs, ones as close to the beginning of their shifts as possible. Then you check the hallway, in both directions, though you try to make it seem casual. You’re not looking for eavesdroppers—you’re just maintaining a normal, captainly awareness of your surroundings.
As you make your way back to your office, you consider that you have less to go on than you had hoped. The first piece of information you’ve gathered on Montez is tenuous at best. He’s admitted that he does something different with the food. The admission is benign though, only suspicious by association, only suspicious because you are looking for something to suspect. The other piece is even weaker. He got angry when he talked about mixing the food differently—you know that people sometimes compensate with anger when they’re hiding something. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got.
Then there’s Fleurie. Now that you’re out of the med bay, you can let yourself get angry. Not only did he go behind your back and question Montez without your leave, he did it under your name, claiming it was by your orders. Before now you had thought that he was one of the few you could trust wholeheartedly, your right-hand man. But now you feel a creeping coldness at the thought that he, too, might be a suspect. Because here is another hypothesis to tack onto the corkboard alongside the card labeled the cook is poisoning the crew—sabotage. You’ve considered it already—first when you had Maugrim inspect the equipment after the initial surface mission, and then with regards to the camera and the damaged vid file. But it’s different, adding a name like Fleurie’s to the equation. It leaves you wondering exactly how untethered you are, how little backup you have. The number of people you can trust diminishes by the hour.
21
As you wait in your office for Fleurie to arrive, you tell yourself that you’re not stalling, that you will visit MacAvoy once you’ve dealt with more pressing matters. You glance at the clock. Already you’ve been awake for five hours. It feels longer.
When Fleurie announces his presence with a soft tap on the door, you’re in the middle of brewing a pot of coffee. By the time the coffee is ready, you still haven’t looked him in the eye. You take a seat and slide his cup to him, feeling like you have something lodged in your throat. Which is the problem. You have spent too much time on your emotions over the last few days—feeling this, feeling that, reacting with your gut instead of your head. You are not here to feel things, to be hurt by betrayal, to make everything personal. You are here to keep this mission from falling apart, and right now, you’re not doing a good job of that.
Rather than hedging around the subject, you decide not to try to break it to him gently. Part of you wants to see how he reacts when it’s right before him, bald and exposed. “I spoke with Ensign Montez.”
Right away it’s there, the flash of understanding on his face. You’ve caught him mid-swallow, cup of coffee still raised to his lips, and he chokes a little. Something like satisfaction sparks in your gut.
“Maybe you can help me out here. It’s just that I don’t recall giving you orders to question Montez, but that’s what he remembers.”
Fleurie ducks his heads—at least he has the decency to look abashed. “I apologize, Captain. I should have run it by you first. But I figured it was insane for me to consider that MacAvoy might have been on to something. I wanted to talk to Montez and see if I could come up with anything substantial before I brought it to you.”
“You shouldn’t have used my name.” It comes out sharper than you had meant for it to. “You had the med techs paranoid.” Here’s what you don’t want to admit, because you know you wouldn’t be able to take yourself seriously if you said it out loud. He put you in danger. You know what you saw, even though you don’t know if it was real—the look in Ensign Vice’s eyes, like he was ready to snap at any moment. If he had gone after you… You don’t let yourself finish the thought; you shut it down when Montez’s bandaged face rises up in your memory.
“I know. Like I said, I should have told you. Don’t really know what’s wrong with me.”
“Don’t—just don’t do it again.” You catch yourself rubbing your temples and force yourself to stop, wrap your hands around your coffee cup and try to convince yourself that the warmth is calming.
Tell yourself it’s your center—tell yourself it’s your anchor. Captain, it will not save you.
Even back in high school, when you were young and anxious, so jacked up on adrenaline half the time you couldn’t stomach anything but decaf, the ritual of making coffee was your safe haven. But this—you don’t like what this means. You won your battle against anxiety over ten years ago, and you haven’t felt a touch of it since, until recently. Now you’re falling back on your old defenses like no time has passed at all.
You try not to blame Fleurie for this, try not to confuse him in your mind with the source of your anxiety. But you’re not sure you’ve absolutely succeeded by the time you speak again. Maybe it’s not a kind thing to do, but you frame what you say next as something obvious, a given, even though it’s only a front to hide your growing paranoia. “I guess it didn’t occur to you that, as captain, I would have to investigate the possibility, however far-fetched, that Montez really was messing with the food.”
Again, you feel a sense of satisfaction when the surprise registers on his face. It’s stupid, really, to equate control over his reactions with control over your surroundings, but there it is. If you can surprise him, nothing else bad can happen on this ship. It’s weak, and you know it. You cling to it anyway.
The silence stretches to the point where it’s awkward. When you first planned to call this meeting, it was with the intention of sharing the video of the surface. And you can still do that. Even though he’s admitted on the spot—and apologized as well—it’s shaken something in you. You can’t quite divorce the thought that he’s not trustworthy. But you need to share what you’ve found with someone, and after everything, he’s still the best choice. He’s still your second-in-command, just as capable as you are, qualified to run this ship if something happens to you.
You compose yourself, take a deep drink of coffee, and ask yourself if you really want to go through with this. As you watch him squirm, you consider that you can still say nothing. But then you’re speaking, the words coming out in a rush. “There were some interesting developments during the surface missions.” You realize that, with all of the commotion over the past twenty-four hours, you haven’t given him the slightest intimation that what happened on the planet was anything beyond what was expected.
“There’s a video file I need to show you,” you preface yourself, though you know it’s a bit misleading to put it this way. There’s nothing of worth to show him in the vid file, no great revelation, no discovery explaining everything that’s happened. What you wanted him to see is not even there—that is the whole point—but you want to highlight what happened, the eeriness, the mystery. You want to tell at least one person your theory.
“We saw shadows on the surface, moving shadows with no obvious source. We thought we had caught it on video—we had the camera pointed right at it—but, well, you’ll have to see for yourself.”
After you’ve shown him the file, you watch his face as the static blurs into oblivion. You remember your own response, the knot in your gut, the twisting, twisting despair, so deep it’s almost comical in retrospect. There’s a strange look in his eyes now, something you don’t remember seeing before, like the static has spread to his pupils, like it’s his brain that’s crashing now.
It’s a strange connection for your mind to make, maybe, but all of a sudden you’re thinking about what a digital virus might do, a string of bad code wreaking havoc with your systems, jumping from machine to human. It’s possible the flaw in your logic is that you’re trying to pin all of this on one cause when it could be several.
Nothing you have to give the admiral will hold atmosphere.
Then you remember what you were gearing up to say, before the look in his eyes changed the course of your thoughts. “I think that there might be some sort of life form on the surface that damages our technology with its very presence—that’s so outside of what we’re used to that it’s simply incompatible, hence our inability to even catch it on camera.”
He blinks at you, still trying to clear the static.
“There’s another surface mission scheduled for tomorrow. This time I’m going to use infrared as well. I’m going to bring multiple cameras, record everything from every angle I can. If there’s anything to catch on film, I’ll get it.” You’re talking quickly now, getting swept up in the excitement. Infrared? As if shadows give off heat. You’re reaching, and you know it. Voicing this feels too raw, like you’ve stripped down naked. You find it’s difficult to maintain eye contact.
When he finally speaks, his voice carries a hint of concern. “Captain, I think you’re working yourself too hard. When was the last time you slept?”
“I’m not.” It comes out too fast, too sharp, ends up sounding like you’re proving his point.
“You don’t delegate enough. I believe you, I do—I believe that you saw something on the surface. But you’re going to drive yourself crazy if you don’t take a break. You need to take a break.”
“I can’t,” you snap. “Not right now. It’s the worst possible time. This ship is falling apart.”
His voice is too soft, too gentle, like he’s speaking to a wild animal. “That’s the thing. It’s not. You only think it is because you can’t even see the big picture. There’s a cold going around—it’s got everyone on edge. Your camera stopped working. You visited an alien landscape. A crew member snapped; it’s space psychosis—it happens. You’re making a big deal out of something small, seeing a pattern where no pattern exists.”
You open your mouth to speak but close it again because there’s no way you can talk yourself out of this. Now that you’ve laid yourself bare, he’s agreed with the voice in your head. If you’d listened to yourself sooner, this wouldn’t be happening.
“I don’t want to have to do this,” he says, and you see it like a distant star, its light a long time in coming. Before he’s even spoken them, you feel the weight of the words, hot stones sinking in your gut, burning holes in your insides. “Captain, I have to invoke medical code 11-01. I’m ordering you to stay on the ship tomorrow. Rest. Do boring, paper-pushing work. Don’t touch this problem for a whole twenty-four hours, at least.”
He’s being kind about it, giving you leeway that isn’t allowed within the parameters of the code itself. That doesn’t change the fact that you still want to punch him, want to grab his collar and haul him across the desk so you can yell in his face.
There’s nothing you can do about it, you tell yourself, in a vain effort to head off the rising panic at the pass. The code is clear. In some ways, it’s a quirk of the system that the code even exists, a rule necessitated by the advent of extra-solar travel. As long as ships have been leaving the solar system, first officers have been looking out for their stubborn captains, and this rule has survived in all its many iterations for that reason. But this particular code was written by the admiral, so it contains all the coldness and shame that he brings to the table.
The rule itself, beneath all the legalese, is clear. If the first officer judges a captain unfit for duty, they are allowed to confine that captain to their quarters for a period of twenty-four hours, during which time they will be subjected to full medical and psychological workups. Regardless of whether or not medical staff clears the captain for duty, the results of these workups are to be reported to the admiral, or a similarly high-ranking individual in the next data stream, as a safeguard so no first officer can take advantage of the code.
There are more nuances to the rule, what to do if you’re judged fit for duty, what to do if you’re not. If Fleurie wants to, he can invoke the code with force, have you restrained, inform the admiral before he even informs you. If he feels he has to. Once it’s set in motion, there’s no way for you to stop it short of mutiny, nothing you can do to save yourself. Until now, you’d never thought you had to fear this possibility, never thought it would apply to you. Now here you are, staring into its ugly, ugly eyes. Fleurie hinting to the admiral that you might not be fit for duty is the last thing you need right now.
“Please don’t,” you beg. You try to arrest yourself, you do, because you can hear in your tone how desperate you sound. It feels like a confirmation of his opinion. Desperate is the cousin of unhinged. “The admiral is already frustrated with me. I reported the shadows in our last data stream, but he refused to take it seriously. I need solid proof to show him.” You shouldn’t have trusted Fleurie; you should have gone with your gut. It was stupid, really, the reason you told him—you were lonely, being the only one thinking what you thought.
“I can cut you a deal,” he says, and you hate him, hate that he’s in a position to be merciful toward you, hate that he has the power now. It doesn’t escape you that this might be retaliation, his way of getting back at you for reprimanding him just minutes ago. “I haven’t said anything to anyone else yet. I wouldn’t undermine you like that. I won’t even have you visit Lane, just Johnson, and it would be in an unofficial capacity. No one has to report anything to the admiral, if you let me take over for the day. I’ll go to the surface; I’ll set up cameras. I’ll do everything you were planning to do tomorrow. I’ll even interview MacAvoy, read his logs, and collect Lane’s notes on him. In return, all I ask is that you see the doctor, get some rest, limit yourself to light work for the next twenty-four hours.”
If he had your arm twisted behind your back right now, you don’t know if you would feel more powerless. Any effort on your side to bargain will likely lose you this deal he’s willing to make, which is a horrible deal, but is somehow still better than the alternative. The admiral has become an all-pervasive thought for you, the boogeyman in your closet. You’ve had nightmares about him coming out all this way just to strip you of rank and send you back to Earth. Even if Fleurie reports everything to him and you still check out, it might be enough to upset the tenuous balance that you’ve maintained for yourself.
It’s too much. You realize, with a sense of horror, that you are in danger of crying.
“Okay,” you say, past the tightness in your throat, the strangling hand. “But I want Lane’s notes, and all your findings from the surface, on my screen the moment the twenty-four hours are up. And I want you to record your interview with MacAvoy.”
He nods, has the gall to look relieved. “I can work with that.”
You can’t see the future, Captain, so I won’t tell you what you’ve just done.
Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks