Planet Eyes: Part Nine

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here. 

For Planet Eyes: Part Eight, click here. 

 

37

The soil is more yellow, here in this section of the valley, than it is where you previously visited. This is where Fleurie stood the day before he died. There is no rock spire on this horizon, nothing to break the steady curve of land as far as you can see. You imagine the distant ridge, or what you think might be a distant ridge, furred with trees under a sky so blue and filled with cotton-spun clouds that people on Earth would use it as their desktop background. You envision orchards burdened with fruit, fields of corn growing tall. You see children playing among the greenery, and you have to catch your breath. 

Something in your heart lifts, when you picture this imaginary vista, when you calculate the time it will take for this dream to be realized. It is a heavy, awesome thing, a future that, when viewed directly, precludes fear. This momentary peace surprises you. 

The planet has tasted blood. It is happy, for now. 

The idea is there and then it’s gone, and you have this sense that this has been happening a lot, over the course of this mission, your mind brushing up against a different mind, your thoughts against different thoughts. But they’re just that, words with no tether, no real meaning outside your brain. They disappear the moment you look at them, leaving nothing in their wake. 

Even with the heavy, sometimes unbearable bulk of your EVA suit, too hot and stiff for comfort, the world feels quieter here, softer, like sound has no power to carry, like you could live forever in this moment and nothing would happen, either good or bad—time would stand still. 

Aside from the solitary crew of five working on a partially-constructed terraforming machine, you are alone. Even unfinished, the machines are goliath, too large to carry down to the surface in anything close to their entirety. Each machine requires six trips to transport all the necessary components, and it takes longer than that to piece them together with painstaking care. They look like broken teeth, like bombed out buildings, splintered and incomplete. 

The two in this valley are listing, which is why you’re here, on the surface, thinking about Fleurie and trying not to think about him. Your scans were wrong, your soil tests were wrong—the ground here is not strong enough to support the weight of these machines, even half-built. The earth beneath them is compressing the way peat would, though it is not peat. Already they have sunk several meters deep, past what your scans showed as bedrock, like the planet is intent on swallowing them. Tests will have to begin anew. Another location for these two machines will need to be selected from a long list of potential sites. 

You have to take a deep breath and tell yourself, in clear and certain terms, that this mission is not a failure. The machines on the other side of the valley are holding strong, are doing their job well. But you can’t shake the feeling, no matter how hard you try, that they will fall too. This planet is indomitable, unconquerable. All your work cannot touch it. Your efforts will leave no lasting mark. Once you’re gone, it will erase all traces of you from its surface, as if you had never been. And it will not feel sorry. 

What ran through Fleurie’s mind when he was down here, doing your job? As he watched the initial placement of these machines, as he watched your crew begin their construction, was he already gone, inside his head, was he already lost? Could you have stopped it, somehow, even after he spoke with MacAvoy? If you had caught the thought before its conclusion, could you have undone it, erased its harm? 

These are pointless questions, now, meant only for bruising you. Whether or not Fleurie died because of you, whether or not you could have stopped it, this is all conjecture. It makes no difference in the end, what you choose to believe about what happened. A man is dead. That is the truth, laid bare, with no possible resolution. 

38

It takes a couple hours, but eventually you convince yourself to open Fleurie’s reports, the notes he sent to you the morning of his death. You start with the taped interview between Fleurie and MacAvoy, because it seems like the most obvious place, like you’ll find whatever answers you’re looking for there. You could wait for Lane’s report on the personal logs, when she gets around to reviewing them, but you don’t think it will do any harm to watch the interview now, and the need to know what happened, the absolute need, has overtaken every other thought. It will not let you rest. Anyway, if you were willing to risk Lane’s life, then you should be willing to risk your own, at least to some degree. 

As the vid file begins, you notice right away that the camera is focused solely on MacAvoy, who sits across the table from Fleurie. All you can see of your former first officer is the back of his head. Two ghosts talking, sharing death. 

MacAvoy’s lids are heavy—he’s been sedated—but it makes his eyes look hooded like a reptile’s, and you don’t like the cinematic effect. There is a crawling dread in the pit of your stomach when you consider how his words might have impacted Fleurie, how you could be watching the moment Fleurie chose to die and take everyone else with him, if that’s really what happened. 

Aside from the drooping eyelids, MacAvoy looks almost put together. This time, he isn’t rocking himself or muttering under his breath. The only detail that belies his outward calm is his gaze, fixed intently on the camera, like he’s staring you down. 

“How are you feeling?” Fleurie asks, which is such a benign way to start such a heavy conversation. He learned that technique from you. You, in turn, learned it from your doctor, when you were a child. 

“Top of the world,” MacAvoy slurs, with this strange sort of half smile. “So beautiful, so bright—I saw the truth, Commander. It’s like my mind wasn’t working before, and suddenly it has opened onto endless expanses.” 

“And what is this truth you saw?” Fleurie asks, doing an excellent job of sounding like a seeker, rather than a skeptic. 

“Icarus.” The ensign’s eyes close for a moment, then open again, wider and more intent than before. “You want to kill me because I found out.” He leans in. “I know now.”

 “What is it that you know?” What Fleurie doesn’t say, We don’t want to kill you. He must have realized that no amount of reassurance would alter the course of MacAvoy’s thoughts. He was already well down that road, past any point of return. 

He laughs. “Icarus told me what I was missing. It was right in front of my eyes. When I looked out the window, it was there.”

 “What did you see?” 

MacAvoy starts cackling. “I think I need to speak with my lawyer.”

 “There are no lawyers in space.” 

“There’s no water in space, either. Why did you bring me to this angry desert?”

“There’s water on Icarus III.” Fleurie sounds tired now, like they’ve been over this. For a moment, you wonder if he’d spoken with MacAvoy before this interview, in sessions he’d failed to tape, if he’d hidden this investigation—or MacAvoy’s growing sickness—from you longer than you had realized. “It’s just under the surface. We’re drilling for it.”

 “No, that’s blood.”

 “It’s not blood, MacAvoy, it’s water. That’s why we’re digging wells.” 

“He doesn’t like it when you cut his skin. He says it tickles.”

 “Who says that?” 

“You know who. You’ve seen him.” 

“Who are you talking about?”

 “I wrote the truth in my logs, wrote it all down, that’s why the cook wanted to kill me. I could tell because he was sending codes in my food.” 

“Why would the cook want to kill you for what you wrote?”

 “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t live here anymore.” 

That’s when you stop the video, even though there’s over twenty minutes left in the interview. You imagine it’s all the same, more word soup, in various iterations, pus from an infected mind. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid that whatever MacAvoy has to say will harm you too, worm its way into your brain like it did Fleurie’s, but you can’t listen to another word. You guess it doesn’t work that way, just hearing it, otherwise MacAvoy would have been less focused on what he wrote in his logs. You remember how you felt when you started to read what was on his screen, like you were encountering something living and parasitic, something hideous and familiar. 

You hadn’t realized you were crying, but you are. You don’t know how you could have prevented this, not really, but you know that it’s your fault, that if you had handled things differently from the start, Fleurie might not be dead, and you might not be the captain of a sinking ship. 

39

“Ensign Fay,” you say, sticking your head into the samples lab. This place felt safe, you remember, a stronghold against your budding fear, so long ago it seems like a distant memory, but the fear is everywhere now, compressed between the walls like flowers preserved in a book. It strikes you that you have not seen Fay since after your first surface mission, and you had expected, on coming here, to find the same dark circles under her eyes that you see under everyone else’s. Instead, you’re surprised to find her almost vibrant, a sip of water in the desert. Her hair is in somewhat of a disarray, but that’s Fay for you, so focused on work that everything else fades into the background. 

Almost instantly you experience a measure of relief, like the moment you dip your toes into water expecting icy cold, but find, instead, warmth. You want to ease your whole body into it, feel the tension in your muscles melt away. You have to remind yourself that this slice of repose is still threatened by what lurks outside. 

“How can I help you?” she asks, setting down a tray of samples and hastily clearing a jumble of test tubes and data tabs off the only spare chair in the room. 

You sit. Almost the next instant, you feel fatigue loom up, jaws open to swallow you whole. Briefly, you consider standing, leaping to your feet and pacing. But you have the strangest feeling that if you were to fall asleep with her in the room, you would not dream—at least you would not have nightmares. You would be subsumed by her peace. So you remain where you are, and you let the words come to you. 

“As I’m sure you’re aware,” you say, feeling a sense of remove, “there has been ship-wide unrest. I’m trying to root out its source.” 

“I’ve noticed,” she observes, like someone who doesn’t understand the language of fear—maybe you will need a translator. 

You sit up straighter, had not even realized you were slouching. “You mean to say, you’ve not been experiencing it yourself?” 

“No,” she replies hesitantly, like the answer is so obvious she has to wonder if she’s falling for a trick question. You are slow to reassure her, only because for the next few moments, you are too baffled to react. This revelation is so small it should be insignificant, and yet it shifts your entire perspective, throws every single one of your assumptions into disarray. Now you’re glad that you did not prepare a speech—you would feel foolish, consulting your screen, consulting your notes. 

“I mean, I’m nervous about the unrest,” she continues, “don’t get me wrong. But I don’t—I don’t understand the paranoia. I lock my quarters—it would be unwise not to, at this point, but I sleep fine at night.” 

I sleep fine at night. They are the five most beautiful words you have ever heard. Already your mind is racing with possibilities. You will have to run blood tests, compare hers to yours, to others of the crew. You will have to study Fleurie’s autopsy reports, compare the blood readings on that as well. But you may have found something. Somewhere along the way, you had discarded the theory that this could be caused by a mutated cold, given the technological malfunctions, but now it’s staring you in the face again. Now you have someone who is immune. You have the potential for a cure. 

You feel something sharp and unkind rear up in the back of your head, and it takes you a moment to name it, the thought. Of course, of course Fay is not paranoid, she would have no reason to be paranoid, if she was the cause of all of this, if she was the root of your distress. And you know this isn’t true, because no one gave you the fear, left it gift-wrapped inside your quarters for you to stumble upon—it was its own messenger. But for one brief space, anger, cold and righteous, tells you that if you were to throw Fay out the airlock right now, everything would be okay again, would go back to the way it was. And maybe Fleurie would still be alive, salvation worked retroactively. 

It is such a little thing; you swallow it like a stone, where it lands hard in the pit of your stomach. No, you think, no you must be wrong. Fay is only clueless because she never leaves this room, even when her body does. Her mind is always working, reviewing samples and planning tests, and she does not have the space for anything else, certainly not for something as expansive as fear. You feel ugly for having thought badly of her, and you want to apologize, even though she wouldn’t understand why. So you swallow your words, too, find different ones—better ones. 

“How interesting.” You sound like an actor, woodenly reciting a script. “I’ll want to run some tests on you. It’s possible that—well, we suspect that there’s a mutated virus going around, and it seems like maybe you have a natural immunity to it. I’ll need you to go to Medical Bay B and have Lieutenant Johnson take some blood samples, probably do some other tests as well.” 

Because even if it’s not a natural immunity, it could be something else. Maybe one of the substances she handles daily is causing a previously-undiscovered chemical reaction that’s keeping her safe. The solution to everything could be painfully simple. 

Unbidden, your nightmare returns to you, in flashes, you on an examination table, tools slicing into your skin, removing strips of you to reveal bone. A shudder, unconscious. “If we can synthesize a cure…” And just like that, hope has returned, a white hot flair in your belly. 

Captain, you fool. 

40

While Fay’s blood is jumping through hoops in the lab, beyond your control, you need something to fill your mind, something for your hands to do so you don’t gnaw your nails to bloody shreds. Last you looked in the mirror, your eyes were so bloodshot, you looked strung out. You had to laugh. If the admiral saw you now…

There it is, on your screen, a message from Lane. Maybe it’s your newfound hope, or maybe it’s the caffeine pill you took ten minutes ago, but you find yourself sitting at your desk and opening the file, courageous for the first time in a long time, scrolling through her evaluation while trying to pretend the window isn’t demanding—claiming—half your attention. 

Read a line. 

Look up. 

No one is there. 

Of course. 

Laugh, so you know you’re being ridiculous. 

Read a line. 

You take a sip of the coffee substitute you grabbed from the galley. You were surprised to find Montez back at work, though his face was still swathed in synthetic skin. You didn’t have the heart to ask when he would be able to get it removed. The coffee substitute tastes stale, though you saw him mix it—everything tastes stale at this point. You have an uneasy suspicion that the water reclaimers are not filtering the water properly before returning it to circulation. You thumb your comms unit, clip out a quick order, and attempt to get your hazy eyes to focus on the word bugs scrawled across your screen. 

“I have attached several relevant portions of Commander Fleurie’s personal logs, as well as Ensign MacAvoy’s, for your inspection. I found these particularly disturbing.” 

And there it is, the blinking icon. You click on it before you can stop yourself. There are several entries, all written in the space of a single day, but they aren’t very long—Fleurie was by no means a poet. This lightens your workload, but increases your dread. You have less to wade through before the final entry Lane has included, which feels, by virtue of what happened—the reason you have the files in the first place—like it has to be monumental, ground-shaking. Part of you believes that you, too, will be persuaded by Fleurie’s preserved voice to paint the flight deck with your own blood. You remember how you felt, when you started to read MacAvoy’s logs, the imminent danger, like hands reaching out from the text to grip your mind, how you knew you needed to stop reading or something bad would happen to you. 

Deep down, among your cluttered thoughts, so disorganized you will never be able to wade through all of them, there is a tiny sliver of you that feels the faintest burst of—excitement?—at the thought. The taste is reminiscent of the effervescent expectation you drank daily, every morning upon waking, as the days counted down to your upcoming take off. New discovery, a world beyond the known. 

It takes you a moment to realize that you’re not just thinking this, that you’re reading it too, so caught up in the ambience of the room that everything has adhered together, words bleeding into thoughts bleeding into stares out the window, stale sips of coffee substitute, all poured from the same dispenser. 

“Death is a new terrain,  a paradox, the most-visited, yet least-known place. When we talk of exploration, why do we never turn our sights there?” Fleurie writes, and you have to stop for a moment to find your own headspace again. His musings grow, in scope, in oddity, in certainty, until you can feel them on your skin, a layer of grime soap won’t touch. 

You power off the screen and stand. You don’t want to read the last entry. Another time, you tell yourself, but you know, with certainty, that you never will. Whatever is written in that last entry, it contains the culmination of a contagious thought—once exposed to it, you will be sick too. No amount of reasoning can convince you otherwise. 

Your comms unit chirps, and you thumb it. “Captain,” the tech head says, “the water reclaimer is broken. We need to send an advisory to the crew—no food, no water until we have this fixed. Probably everything is contaminated. Do we have your go-ahead?” 

You nod, remember you have to speak and give a clipped yes. “How long do you expect this fix to take?” 

You don’t hear the response because your comms unit is chirping again. It has to be the test results, you tell yourself, and hope rises in you, a sickening wave. It’s Maslov instead. “Captain, you need to come see this.” The tone of his voice yanks you out of your tired haze. 

“Where am I headed?” you ask, already halfway out the door. 

“Lieutenant Lane’s office.” 

You lose feeling in your legs, momentarily, have to catch yourself against the wall. 

Somehow you find yourself in Lane’s office with only a fragmentary memory of how you got there, a phenomenon that has been repeating itself ad nauseam over the past couple weeks. You see the blood before you’ve fully entered the room, find her body slumped over her desk. Her screen is still awake. Since all screens are set to fall asleep after fifteen minutes of disuse, a quick glance at the wall clock gives you a more accurate time of death than the coroner would be able to calculate. Eleven minutes and thirty-seven seconds ago, you received her email. She would have killed herself mere moments after that. 

You hear yourself speaking, through the roar of your heartbeat in your ears. “Bag her screen and send it to my office. Nobody is to go through her logs. Task security and medical with the cleanup. Grab Lieutenant Mel and meet me in my office in twenty minutes.” 

You are shaking, every muscle in your body spasming to its own rhythm. You did this. You gave her permission to read Fleurie’s logs—you let her take the bullet for you. 

41

No words adequately describe the collective feeling in the room as Mel and Maslov seat themselves on the far side of your desk. Their uncertainty, their horror bleeds through their skin like sweat. It sticks to you, no matter how hard you try to ward it off. When you look at them long enough, you see it, how their posture is too perfect, their pupils too dilated. You are surrounded by a cast of actors, pretending calm. 

As you seat yourself in front of them, you indicate your coffee carafe, the last of your stash for the moment. Maslov makes a tentative foray into his coffee, and you see some of the muscles in his shoulders loosen, but no one relaxes aboard this ship. You are in a war zone, the delineation of sides unclear, the enemy vague and nebulous. Caffeine and stims, you have found, are the only mercy, though a thin, transparent one. 

“Lieutenant Mel, how much did Lieutenant Maslov tell you about what just happened?” 

“He briefed me on everything,” she whispers, her throat hoarse. When you focus on her eyes, you see how pink they are. 

“So you both know why I’ve called you here. Good. It’s not like either of you is unaware that we have a ship-wide problem.” You have an odd moment, a sudden feeling of unspooling, molasses drifting. Your head feels stretched, caught between alternate dimensions. And then it passes, and you are left with clammy palms and the ever-present twist in your gut. 

“Whatever the cause, we are experiencing mass hysteria, ranging from minor panic attacks to three confirmed suicides.” Somehow you managed to gloss over Lane’s death, in the wake of it, managed to turn the details into numbers and all-but-forgot the numbers. You let the security crew clean up the mess in her office. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought you were dealing with a serial killer. “Our situation is untenable. We have to keep the peace.” A hollow, nonsense phrase. There is no peace to keep. You all know this. Still you administer lies like novocaine to keep everyone numb. 

You wait a beat to gather your thoughts, find they are too scattered. “Aside from the hysteria, which is difficult to ignore, and the deaths, we have been experiencing mechanical failure beyond the incident on the bridge. Most recently, our water reclaimers have stopped working, but I’ve been receiving reports of other systems breaking down all over the ship, as well.” You fight the urge to put your head in your hands. The more you ponder this problem, the more you feel a pounding, throbbing pain in your skull. “I think we’re dealing with two separate issues here, though they may be causally linked, and I have some hypotheses as to what’s happening.” 

Mel and Maslov stare at you. You had expected them to be more engaged, to have more to say right off the bat. Instead, they look scarily close to people who have had all the spirit beaten out of them. 

“Lieutenant Mel, I need you for an additional task. I ordered several tech heads to backtrace the code responsible for the overload on the flight deck. However, I don’t know them as well as I know you, so I want you to go behind them and check their work; do it without their knowledge. Circumstantially it looks like Commander Fleurie was the one responsible, and if that’s the case, then we have no more cause to worry. That’s ignoring the various mechanical failures we’ve been experiencing, though, especially the ones traceable back to computer errors. And Fleurie was not a hacker. Whoever orchestrated the flight deck incident was talented enough to get ahold of my command codes—that leads me to believe that we might even be looking for more than one person. There’s a chance that something of that magnitude will happen again, and next time I don’t expect us to be so lucky.” 

“Why would someone do that?” Maslov asks. He’s hunched over his coffee, glazed eyes trained on the brushed-steel table, his skin cadaverous. “Everyone on this ship trained for years for this mission, gave up their lives for it. None of us is going back home. Why would someone want to undo all our work?”

 “Whoever it is, I don’t think they set out, three years ago, with the intent of destroying us. But just as Ensign MacAvoy went crazy, I think this person has, too, only we haven’t caught it. Somehow they, whether singular or plural, have managed to hide their crazy.” 

“Have you considered that it might be something else?” Mel asks. Here, you feel instinctively that she is dancing too close to your nightmares, to the thoughts you only allow yourself to entertain when you’re alone in the dark—when you can no longer deny them. It’s not dark now. “Have you considered that something on the surface is causing this distress?” 

“I’ve considered that.” You try to say this as casually as possible. It comes out defensive. “I’m looking into every option, sickness—originating on this ship or on the planet—phase shift from inter-dimensional travel, space psychosis, contaminated food, off-gassing from the planet, even…well, even some sort of alien entity our sensors failed to log.” You say this last bit so lightly—you are adding, for the sake of scraping the barrel, even the silliest of possibilities. Your quiet nights, alone with your fear, threaten to betray you now in the artificial light, what passes for day. 

“There could be something on the planet,” Maslov says, head lifting, finally, eyes so bloodshot they hurt to look at. You can’t help but wonder how close he is to breaking. “Or, I guess, that something could be on the ship now, in here with us.” 

“I’m not saying that’s impossible,” you begin, “because there’s so much that we don’t know about this universe.” Hence your mission. Hence your job. Hence your dreams. “Which is why we’ve been exploring that option. Whatever is going on, we will find out the cause and put an end to it. We will be okay. But we are rational people. I don’t think that it’s anything extraterrestrial—our scans have continued to show nothing out of the ordinary. It’s certainly nothing supernatural. We’re dealing with phenomena easily explainable by science, and we’ll see that—we just have to look in the right place.” You pause, take a deep breath. “I found someone yesterday who has somehow remained resistant to this ship-wide paranoia. We’re testing her blood to see if it differs from samples from others in the crew. I’ll also be looking, and keep your eyes peeled as well, for anyone else who remains unaffected. There’s a chance, however small, that we’re dealing with a mutated virus that manifests as paranoia and psychosis, and that, using her blood, we can synthesize a cure.” 

When you were younger, fear followed you, creeping cold, melting ice down your back. This fear is familiar, more you than you are. And you had thought, how silly you were to think, that you had left it on Earth with all of your possessions. But it is here, somehow, a stowaway on this ship. It has found you, and it is not going to let go. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks