Planet Eyes: Part One

About This Book: 

The crew of the Hiraeth, the most advanced spaceship known to man, has entered orbit around Icarus III with the task of terraforming it. If they were wise, O Reader, they would have kept on flying, past the planet and into the great void beyond. If they were even wiser, they would have stayed far away—on the tiny, blue dot called Earth—and they would have purged all thought of distant suns from their minds. But they were not wise, O Reader. 

Are you?

 

1

Only as you enter orbit around Icarus III and see its crescent curve rising before you, does it begin to feel real. You stand at the threshold of this untouched world, yours now for the taking, and you feel warm—first in your stomach, then your toes, then everywhere. You will take this red-dirt planet and mold it into something green and blue and vital. 

Excitement turns your blood to fizz. You strain for the next moment and the next—every step up this ladder—because you do not know to cling to this one. 

Probes dive through the blackness separating the Hiraeth from Icarus III and disappear into the sulfur clouds. They are the drones to your queen bee, O captain, my captain. 

They won’t tell you what you need to know. 

2

Mark this, the moment when your fear begins. 

Later, in the dark, retrace your steps. 

Your stage, a corridor with more windows than wall, beginning in the flight deck, ending in the engine bay. The floors hum beneath your feet; the machinery sings. Outside, space is silent. No, more than that. There are no words to describe the absolute absence of noise. 

In the corner of your vision, the planet watches you with inquisitive eyes. 

Craters!

Your skin crawls. Whose mind is touching yours? Tiny hairs stand tall on both your arms, on both your legs, along your spine, inches of you you forget when there’s nothing to remind you. 

Who is watching you? 

A glance to the right, a glance to the left. Just you and the corridor and the planet. A glance toward that, then a laugh under your breath because, you silly thing, it’s a planet. A desolate, lifeless planet. You will tread its soil in one hour exactly, scrape off bits of its skin to study under microscopes. It will not cry out in pain. 

You take a step back. 

Tap tap against the window. Soft, hesitant hand of nothing. You flinch, muscles tingling. You hear sound, through synthetic glass so thick vibrations cannot pass, electrically charged so space junk cannot violate. Your eardrums echo with the tap tap. There is no one else in here. There can be no one out there. Still, you look out the window and are met with the twin of your face, mouth tight, brow a question mark, skin freckled with stars. You lean in, press your ear to the glass. 

Tap. 

Though you do not name it in this moment, I will name it for you, the thought that runs through your head before you shake it loose. Maybe you shouldn’t open the hangar door; maybe something is waiting outside. 

3

As you stand in the pressure chamber, prepping your team for departure, you consider how the anticipation of this moment always thrilled you. Now your feet are roots, digging into the deck. In your mind’s eye, you watch yourself leave the safety of your tin can shuttle, swathed in your EVA suit, watch dark shapes stalking you across the horizon, watch teeth sinking into your arms, your hands, your face. Every horror film you’ve ever seen, reprocessed and synthesized into your own personal nightmare; you will regret opening this door. 

You reach for the latch anyway, but it hits you, the realization that this is your last chance, that this is a monumental decision from which there will be no going back. True, you don’t have to go on this surface mission, could send anyone else in your stead. But the wheels are in motion, were in motion long before you left orbit around Jupiter, and you cannot stop them now simply because you are afraid of something unquantifiable. And you didn’t agree to this captaincy so you could act as little more than an observer. 

You indulge in one last moment of hesitation, tug on a strap, tuck and retuck the end. Then you pull the pressure release valve before you can stop yourself. 

What have you done? 

Your foot finds red planet dirt. For a second, you forget your anxiety, your misgivings—in their place, you remember the first time you stepped on foreign soil and realized you were in someplace Other. Today magnifies that feeling a thousand times. You are not in Kansas anymore. 

You are lightyears away from all that is familiar, suspended above this oddly-shaped lump of nothingness where you will live out the rest of your life. This feeling puts homesickness to shame; you understand why people are willing to die for it. 

Around you, your team, your friends, your closest compatriots in this mission, take in the landscape. Lieutenant Markowitz, the woman who is always laughing, who is so beautiful it hurts. Lieutenant Parsons, the mousy woman who rarely says more than two words in a row, but who writes the most elegant prose. And Lieutenant Maugrim, the man who speaks in mathematics and hypotheticals. 

Once you get your bearings, you snap into business mode. Together, you and your team will walk a quarter of a mile in a straight line, take soil samples along the way, and then return. Simple as that. The first step in terraforming a planet is getting your hands dirty. Beyond the long range and the short range probe readouts, the numbers that tell you everything and nothing, you need to squish the earth between your fingers before you can truly understand the task that lies before you. You need to breath its air, to sink down between its molecules and find its soul. 

You allow yourself a hesitant step forward as you feel gravity press its hands down on your shoulders, insistent that you sit. It is harsher than you would have imagined; somehow you feel it in your bones, a dense heaviness. You ignore the slow slide of sweat down your left temple, then your right, because this is what you were born to do, what you trained to do, every thread in your life leading toward this moment. 

Bit by bit, you and your team advance toward a distant rock spire, tall and spindly, black against the bright, pink sky. In the pit of your stomach, you feel fear rising, acid in your throat. It doesn’t stay there, this nameless dread; it finds your joints, turns your movements into mockeries of movements, so you feel like a marionette in the hands of an unskilled puppetry student. To stall, you take more samples in this area than you had originally planned. Soon your bag hangs heavy with strange rocks and innocuous containers of dirt, and you tell yourself that you’ve been working, that this is what the mission requires, that everything you’re doing is not a carefully designed avoidance. Of what? Avoidance of what? Your eyes stay on the ground; they do not like the horizon. Your feet want to keep close, close, close to the shuttle, doors open like arms. 

Eventually you have to stand. The stiffness is too much. Your crew will question you—they are probably already questioning you in their minds—if you do not venture deeper into the planet. Just as you straighten, a shadow flits across the distant horizon, and you blink, scan the readouts on your EVA suit screen, because how could that possibly be? There is no life on this planet, not animals, not birds. 

You are the only people here. 

And there is just the one rock spire, and the one sun, casting the one shadow. 

But you could have sworn you saw something. 

With a sinking in your stomach, you look to your team, find them passive as ever. No one else saw the shadow, just like no one else heard the tap tap on the window, like someone was knocking, asking to be let in. You are in charge, you remind yourself, but if you let them see how the edges of your mind are cracking, that will change. 

This is your mission. You will not lose it, not for anything. So you keep your lips pressed tight around this secret, hide it down inside your rib cage where maybe it will dissolve into your bloodstream and disappear. 

Only there it is again, a shadow flitting across the horizon, something living. The sky above is clear and empty. 

That’s when you see it in their faces, the way they stand, limbs splayed in surprise, like they have never been surprised before. This time, they saw it too. 

Somehow your voice remains steady, as you glance between your crew and the shuttle, pulse thrumming in your throat. “Let’s go back to the ship and run more scans. It’s possible we’ve missed something.” You frame it in a clinical way—these new findings may alter your terraforming efforts. Inside you are a seven-year-old, hugging a teddy bear, hiding on the floor of a closet. It is not real, this fear you have—there is nothing to be afraid of. 

Another shadow flits, but only in your periphery, and maybe it is a floater or a trick of the light, but you find your feet hurrying despite the gravity, your satchel of rocks banging against your hip. Once you’ve ushered your crew into the shuttle and locked the doors behind you, you expect to feel relief. 

But you don’t. 

And you shouldn’t. 

4

Back on the ship, you listen to the quiet hum of noise, hear the distant chatter, feel the thrumming of the engines through the floor. You come so close to laughing at how frightened you were, just minutes ago, of the sterile void outside, of the desolate planet below. Imagining life where no life is present—you have spent too much time on the simulations, read too many dark novels at night. You have worked too hard for too long, and you need rest. Nothing more. 

Still coming down from the adrenaline high, you stow your gear with hummingbird hands. Around you, your crew is somber, silent. You feel eyes on you, asking eyes. Do we say something? Do we talk about this? 

You realize you have to make a statement, allay their fears somehow, contain the damage. If there is any damage, if there is anything to contain. You resist the urge to ask them, did you see it, did you see everything I saw, am I as crazy as I feel? Instead you compose your voice into something with the veneer of calm. 

“Report to Medical Bay B,” you hear yourself saying, the thought you are trying to communicate still in its nascent phase. It is regulation to have a check up and blood work done after each of the first twenty-five trips to the planet’s surface. It seems excessive, and it will be bothersome at first; you were briefed on this. But you also know that it is necessary, that long-distance scans can tell you only so much about the planetary environment that you are dealing with. Even with all of your costly tests, you can only do so much to ascertain, ahead of time, that this mission will succeed. What you experienced on the planet is proof that you can never be too careful. 

You turn to Maugrim. “After you’ve finished there, I want you to run a full equipment diagnostic. Make sure the oxygen lines were functioning properly. Make sure the tanks weren’t tainted.” The unspoken assumption: sickness, hallucination, rogue toxins. A bad trip. “Make sure no one else touches the gear until it’s been cleared.” Another breath, a pause where the air tastes more stale than it should, and there’s a moment where you think you catch the scent of something sulfuric, but then it passes. “All of you, don’t mention this, what you saw, to anyone. Not until we’ve looked into it. We don’t need rumors damaging the ship’s morale.” 

Once they’ve left, you lean into the bulkhead, let your forehead rest against the cool metal. When you visit the med bay, you tell yourself, you will ask for something, just a little something to ease your nerves. 

5

The lone lab technician slices the rock with a diamond saw and places molecule-thin pieces on slides, crumbles fragments and mixes them with yellow and blue solutions, grinds a portion into dust and mixes that dust with liquid before putting it in a centrifuge. As you watch her work, her skin glowing almost yellow in the strange lighting, you notice that there are no windows in this room. Which you knew already. Before being assigned to this mission, you were required to memorize the ship’s schematics, right side up and upside down, and backwards to boot. Even if you hadn’t been required to, you would have anyway—that is who you are. Star soot in your blood, alien soil in your bones. 

Fear in your belly. 

A breath, in through your nose, out through your mouth. 

Until this moment, the significance of this windowless space never struck you. It is one simple, idle thought that brings this to your attention. At least nothing can watch you here. 

There are other peculiarities to this room. Almost as if as an afterthought—although you know it’s one of the most important places in this ship—it’s sandwiched between two storage bays on one of the lower decks. Everything of interest happens on other levels. Consequently, there’s very little traffic on this deck. You have the briefest sense that if you had to hide from something, you would want to hide down here. 

This lab technician’s job is beyond the scope of your knowledge. Like a distant star, her work is something you have not discovered, an entity you can view from a distance and make guesses about only. Although you were required to show a working knowledge of the crew manifest, you no longer remember all five hundred and twenty-six names. It occurs to you that you could complete this mission, live years and years after this, and because of the command structure, you could die of old age still not having met some lone ensign down in the belly of the ship, whose work you will never glimpse. It is an alienating thought. You will have to do something about it. 

To ground yourself, you glance surreptitiously at the lab technician’s name tag. She is Alice Fay. Just like that, clarity returns, familiarity. You recall, in vivid detail, her personnel file. Although she wasn’t your most important, and therefore, not your most exciting acquisition to the team, she was someone the admiral let you handpick for the mission from a pool of fifty lab tech hopefuls. You remember the night you found her file and knew instantly she was the one for the job, when you saw her head shot, the gleam in her eyes that mirrored the gleam in yours. The panel of psychologists who reviewed her after your decision gave her the highest marks of everyone on this crew, including yourself, indicating her mental strength and stability. 

She should be captain, you think, and you think it only as a joke, so it bothers you when a tiny corner of your mind agrees. 

You realize you’ve been standing here, awkwardly, for too long, that she will maybe begin to wonder if you don’t trust her, if you disapprove of her. And anyway, you have work to do. 

6

As you step into the tech lab, filled with every kind of gear imaginable and then some, you try to slow your breathing. Take your uncertainty, the tremors—bury them deep and mask them as curiosity. What you witnessed on the surface has not left you shaken up, only intrigued, you tell yourself. Whatever this is, you don’t want to kill it—you just want to know its name. 

You pull Lieutenant Bernard Spencer aside. Although you don’t know him well, you feel like you do, because every day for the past three years you’ve received numerous reports from him, all the data from the probe readouts, condensed and translated by his precise mind for your benefit. If anyone will know what went wrong with the scans of the surface, why they missed what they missed, why they showed you a lifeless planet where there seems to be life, it will be him. 

Before you can ask him anything, you are arrested by the sight of the massive monitor spanning the far wall. On screen, you see a snapshot of planet landscape, the horizon, spread out red gold, a spire in the distance. You don’t know if it’s the same spire you saw on your visit to the surface, or if it is a different one, if Icarus III is a planet of spires, a church of towering rock steeples devoted to an alien god. But you think that it is the same one. It draws the eye. On some level, you think you can almost recognize several distinguishing features, trace some pattern, find the familiar whorls of a specific fingerprint. It takes you a moment to realize that you have been staring at it for some time, have been camped out in a separate portion of space than everyone else in this room. 

“You needed to talk to me about something?” Spencer asks, the moment you resume eye contact. 

“I did, yes.” You reach for words, imagine them scattering, running from you like frightened mice. Your eyes want to return to the monitor, the breathtaking image. If you press your nose to the screen, so there’s no distance between you and the spire, you think that maybe you will be able to discern its meaning. “I’ve been following your probe readout analyses.” 

He nods, expectant, with a gleam in his eyes that tells you he’s proud of his work. 

“But I’m wondering if you missed something.” 

The gleam fades. “What do you mean?” 

You search for a way to frame it so it won’t come out sounding like an insult, like you’re angry with him. “While we were on the surface, we observed some elements that scans indicated would not be present.” Of course you realize it’s confusing to word it this way, and you wonder why you can’t bring yourself to tell him what you witnessed in plain and simple terms, just lay it out and let him read into it what he will. But it would feel like whispering an awful secret, a confession to some heinous crime. You can’t do it. 

“Could you—” He catches himself, seems to struggle with his words. “Could you be more precise?” 

With a strange sense of conviction, you tell yourself that he knows more than he’s letting on, that whatever he’s keeping from you, maybe even under the admiral’s orders, is vital to this mission. The thought passes in an instant. You hardly remember it once it’s gone, can only glimpse its barest outline. 

“Nothing major.” You keep your tone casual, conversational. This was something interesting you saw, so you’re looking into it. Nothing of what you witnessed evoked any fear. You have to ask, but you regret coming here, wish you had swallowed your questions, kept them all to yourself or sent an emissary instead, to speak on your behalf. “It appears that the scans were not as comprehensive as we believed, that certain details might have been overlooked.” 

His face takes on an odd expression. When he finally answers you, he talks slowly, like he’s fighting not to say the wrong thing. “No, Captain, no, it isn’t possible. We scanned the planet for a total of five years, top to bottom, inside and out, ran thousands of tests. We have its molecular structure mapped down to its core. Icarus III is what the scans say it is, nothing more and nothing less. 

He indicates his screen, where he has pulled up a log of every scan that has ever been used on the planet. It runs for over fifty pages. 

You feel a headache forming, down near your brainstem, picture it like thunderclouds. “I know—I know it’s highly improbable you’ve missed something. But there’s still a chance you did, so I want you to develop entirely new scans. Widen your search parameters, your definition of life. Pull in tech heads to code new software, if you need to. Search for movement, for strange chemical reactions, anything behaving differently than it should. I need to know for certain whether or not there is life, in any form, on Icarus III.” 

“Captain, is everything okay?” When you meet his eyes, blue and bright, you see only confusion. You tell yourself it’s his fault, that whatever you missed on the surface, it’s because he was sloppy, though you know that’s not the case. 

“Yes,” you say and wonder why it comes out as a lie. 

You’re halfway to the door when you think of something else. “Oh, and Lieutenant? Set up a broadcast, on all frequencies. Frame it—frame it like you’re asking if anyone’s home. Relay, on all bandwidths, that we’re peaceful.” 

There’s no way to hide it now, at least not from him, this suspicion in your gut. This feeling that you’re being watched: it’s like entering a dark room and knowing instinctively that you’re not alone—you sense something living, pressed up close to you, holding its breath and waiting. 

“Report back to me the moment you find anything.” 

You leave the tech lab feeling like your stomach is full of hot stones. 

7

Night has begun to fall by the time you leave the lab and make your way back to your quarters. Here in space, night is a subjective concept. To say it falls is to be inaccurate. The concept of night still exists, and you can even observe the rise and fall of a foreign sun over the face of a foreign planet. But you have since lost the feel of dawn, soft rising sunlight, and dusk, light leaching into blackness. These are luxuries you have put aside for the time being. In space, it is easy to lose track of the clock. But the hour has grown late, and tonight you sense it. Somehow, despite everything, your body insists it remembers the weight of dusk. Still, it’s like sitting inside a closet, knowing that it’s dark outside. It’s not the same, and it leaves you feeling unmoored, like you are in a different sort of ship altogether. 

In an effort to maintain everyone’s circadian rhythms as best as possible, your ship’s computer is programmed to simulate twilight between 21:00 and 06:00 hours. During the night, the illumination strips in the ceiling dim by several degrees, enough to remind your inner clock what the passage of time feels like, but the light is blue, to keep those on the graveyard shift from getting too drowsy. It is not the same as it would be on Earth, but it is an acceptable alternative. In the three years it took you to reach Icarus III, you have found solace in your night walks. There is a sense of peace in the quiet hours, in the imperceptible movement of the ship. At least, there used to be. 

Tonight you feel as though ants are crawling underneath your skin. If you look at it now, you are sure you will see it moving. The chilly, pressing, someone-is-watching-me feeling remains lodged between your shoulder blades, no matter how much you attempt to shake it off. The shadows where the walls meet the deck seem pregnant with fear—they reach out for you, cling to the soles of your feet. 

You know that there are six thousand windows on the Hiraeth. Until recently, you had not realized exactly how many windows that is. It is a staggering number. You can avoid them a great deal during the day, if you stick to the inner portions of the ship. Where they present the most trouble for you is when you are on the flight deck, which contains the largest window of them all, and when you walk to your quarters at night. For whatever reason, the ship’s designers built your quarters on the outer ring. You must walk along a corridor of windows to reach your room, and once inside, you are faced with another. It is almost as if they thought you would want to look at the stars. 

Over the past couple nights, you have considered relocating, but for a long list of reasons—the first being convenience and the last being your desire to maintain an appearance of normalcy—you have decided not to do that yet. 

With every window you pass on the stretch of corridor, like an endless house of mirrors, you feel eyes on you. It’s subtle. If you force yourself to focus on other things, you can even forget it for a while. But then, inevitably, you remember—you feel it again. It’s less a sense of being watched and more of being observed. Not like being seen, like being looked at. So there it stays in the back of your mind, an adrenaline drip building up in your blood. 

“The loneliness of space can get to anyone, even the most introverted person,” the ship’s head doctor, Lieutenant Johnson, told you when you referenced, in evasive terms, your dilemma. “You are under a lot of stress, physically, mentally, emotionally. What you are experiencing is a symptom of that stress, and it is manifesting itself in unique ways due to your unique environment. It’s nothing to worry about, Captain.” 

He gave you a pill, when you asked, a mild sedative. After you’re rested, you tell yourself, you’ll feel better. He’ll have the results of the blood analyses back at 08:00 and then, maybe, you’ll get some answers. 

He is probably right, about the loneliness. Probably right about the stress, too. You originated in a world filled with eyes, drowning in cameras and people and sounds, so many sounds, everywhere you turned. In many ways, that’s why you left. Still, it’s natural that you’re having some difficulty adjusting. Maybe it’s a little strange that it has taken you three years of relative peace to feel so strongly about this, but it could be that walking on the desolate landscape, devoid—completely and utterly devoid—of life, woke something in you, some latent grief for what you left, as it were. Plain and simple, you are seeing ghosts where there are none, because that is what you expect to see. 

Still, it is with a measure of relief that you reach your quarters. The sound of the doors sliding shut behind you is reassuring. The window in front of you, two meters long and a meter tall, is a gaping wound. But inside your small bathroom, you can pretend it doesn’t exist. You can cocoon yourself. 

After showering in a dry soap mist, a chem spray which hurts far more than you would expect when it gets into your eyes, yet remains regulation, you wrap yourself in your flannel sleep uniform and climb into bed. For a moment you sit there, contemplating the view port, the vast array of stars, the hulking crest of the planet just at the bottom of your line of vision. You try to make peace with it, to replace the fear with wonder. It used to be that humans thought the stars could be numbered in the thousands. And here you are, lightyears away from home, stars strung out before you like a broken necklace, diamonds spilling everywhere. Your heart stutters, pulses momentarily with the realization, anew, that you have set foot on alien soil, begun forging a path many will follow for years to come. 

But as you rest your head against your pillow and force your eyes shut, you tell yourself that you will install a set of curtains tomorrow. 

8

Sitting at your desk, your screen ready for your video chat with Earth, you begin to experience a new anxiety. Until today, you haven’t considered what you’ll tell Earth, if you’ll reference your fear and the shadows you and your crew witnessed on the planet. If this were not a scheduled check-in, you know you wouldn’t be here, eyes averted from the window directly in front of you, hand half-locked on a steaming cup of coffee. On some level, you know that you have to tell them everything. There is always a chance that they will review your findings and demote you from captaincy, and you think, with a painful swallow, that you would have to respect their decision. There are rules that govern the order of operations, and if you try to subvert them, it will only prove to everyone that you are unfit for duty. 

You know you should have prepared for this, written notes, roughed out some sort of speech. If nothing else, you should have taken something to calm your nerves, because your head feels scrambled, your heart a pulped mess. Before you can second guess yourself—check the clock to see if you have time to do something, anything—the call icon pops up on your screen. You allow yourself only a moment of hesitation—half a second, no more—before you click on it. And then the red light above your screen flashes on, and you are transmitting through subspace. 

The admiral’s face fills your screen, and you reflect that, with all of humanity’s advances in technology and training and production, you still cannot manage to have a conversation with him where his camera doesn’t find the worst possible angle for his face. For all you know, it might do the same to you. It’s a funny thought, so simple and innocent, and it strikes you that it would have mattered before. It does not matter now. That alone is enough to rattle you, a little, down near your foundations. 

“Captain,” he says, just that. In a position like yours, you do not have a name, not anymore, you do not even have a gender, not to those in charge. You are merely a captain, the third arm to the admiral with a longer reach. “Report.” 

“We arrived at Icarus III, as scheduled, and began testing. Analyses are coming back generally within normal parameters, although we have had some unexpected results. For instance, gravity is 3% stronger than our scans previously indicated. We’ve visited the surface once already.” Here you pause, lose a measure of your professional decorum. 

“And?” So much impatience, packed into one word. 

“It did not go as anticipated. There were…complications.” Now that you have committed to telling him, it strikes you that this is a mistake. He will not understand. Not only because he does not like you, but because he is not here, so he cannot feel the change in the air, the electric charge. He will not understand the difference between fear and fear, and you will not be able to explain it to him. But it is a mistake set in motion, no way to undo it now. If you try to talk around it, make up a prosaic explanation on the fly, it will be stilted—he will recognize the lie, and then it will be worse for you. There may still be something you can do about it, though. 

“Sir,” you begin again, before he can grow more impatient, “long range tests, both from Earth and en route, have all shown that Icarus III is uninhabited. Orbital scans concur.” Here you allow yourself to spin a lie, just a tiny lie, to explain a truth that would be too indistinct to translate from sight to sound. “However, on our first trip to the surface, we found signs of life.” A shadow flitting across the dead horizon, and maybe it could have been anything, but the point is that it was something. 

“Do you care to elaborate?” he demands, and you cannot tell if he is surprised or dubious. 

“We’re unsure, as of yet, about any particulars. We’re not done running tests.” Here your gaze drifts to the clock. 07:12 hours. Not long before the blood test results will be ready. This meeting was as poorly-timed as it could have been. “Tomorrow we’ll return to the surface, and we’ll bring multiple cameras to record visual evidence. It’s possible yesterday’s events were due to an equipment malfunction.” Not a lie, if it is your brain that is failing. “We’re looking into that as well. The majority of our scans continue to show that this planet is incompatible with life but has immense terraforming potential.” 

“You don’t need to repeat these facts for me,” he says, with all the bored arrogance you have come to loathe. “I wrote your briefing notes myself. But clarify this for me, if the majority of your scans are coming back within expected parameters, how did you find signs of life?” 

“Visually.” The word is an insect in your mouth. You sound like a toddler, sullenly admitting to misbehaving. “We saw movement.” 

“Check your eyes, Captain. Eyes will lie. Numbers, I find, do not. Until you have something more substantial, don’t waste my time with conjecture. Do what we pay you to do. Don’t make us regret sending you on this mission.” 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks