Planet Eyes: Part Seven

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here. 

For Planet Eyes: Part Six, click here. 

 

26

Wild lights strobe on the flight deck, red and white. Consoles smoke, lit by flying sparks. For one last moment of ignorance, however lacking in bliss, you do not see it, and then you do, and the sight is palpable, a line dividing everything that happened before from everything that happens now. Hedged in by personnel lies a body. Motionless. Commander Fleurie, soaked in red. Your brain insists upon his unfamiliarity, insists you do not recognize him. Catalogue that under Things To Deal With Later. 

“Report.” The word is glued to your tongue, resists its grand entrance. And anyway, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve managed to say it out loud. The roaring in your ears drowns out any possible response. Already the pool of blood at your feet has been dwarfed by the view from the window, also growing. You see the citrus slice of Icarus III rising to fill your field of vision, only it’s not rising—you’re falling. The planet wraps its arms around you, pulls you to itself like a lover. The ship lurches, losing orbit. 

Your breath hitching in your chest, you run to the nearest console and punch in a string of commands, tell the ship’s computer to reverse thrusters, to fire stabilizers. Your pulse a thrashing animal, you wait, count the seconds, one, two, three, fourfivesix, and you almost feel relief when you hear the thrusters firing. Firing, misfiring, firing, misfiring. Misfiring…misfiring… Silence. You see your face reflected back to you in the dead, black screen. None of the consoles are sparking anymore—there is no more power flow overloading them. There is no more power. You are dead in the water, caught in a whirlpool. No way out, no one to save you. 

With no shields to protect your hull, if you do not burn up as you enter the atmosphere, you will explode on impact, colonize the planet with your dispersed atoms. All your bright dreams will incinerate. 

You feel someone tugging on your shoulder and almost brush them off before you turn to see that it’s Lieutenant Mel, standing there with the remote override clutched in her hand. It’s little more than a glorified tablet, never plugged into the system, so it shouldn’t have been fried by the overload. “Captain,” she says, “some systems are still running. If we vent the atmosphere through a storage bay—” 

You don’t let her finish—there’s no need. Your racing mind has already filled in the rest. “Seal off all inhabited decks, then do it.” This will present a potentially significant loss of equipment, but you can’t even think about that right now. Whatever happens, you will be lucky to survive. “Brace yourselves!” you yell into your comms unit. 

Her hands race across the remote override, fingers tapping in commands, and then the ship bucks. Your skin feels stretched tight against the bones of your face. You see a jumble, a flurry of limbs and bodies tumbling in your periphery as you lose your grip on the rail, lose your balance. As the ship lists, your feet become sharply estranged from the decking. You fall into the wall like it’s the floor. 

When the ship finally levels out, you have to strain to see past the smoke and the sparking behind your eyes. Outside the window, Icarus III stands at a distance, rebuffed. Somehow, by some miracle, you have resumed orbit. 

You allow yourself a moment before you survey the damage, the blood, now spattered and spread, though you cannot find the body in the aftermath that is the Hiraeth’s flight deck. Sound becomes memory. Splayed limbs, starfish-like, surround you—how many dead, how many injured, you don’t know, don’t want to know. Among them, the corpse of your first officer—you can’t think of him as Fleurie right now—and you will have to interview witnesses, consult camera logs, piece together what happened while you were on the surface. 

You’re still sitting on the floor, slouched against the wall, and when you stand to brush yourself off, you feel a strange coldness, all over, where you know there should be pain. You thumb your comms unit, waiting for the slight crackle of static. Nothing. Past the ringing in your ears, you hear the hum of voices, interspersed with groans. Comms are down. That fact disturbs you more than anything that’s just happened. 

You stumble toward the door, though you know, with your systems fried as they are, it will need to be opened manually. To your right, you spy Lieutenant Maslov, your hulking nav tech, who lifts weights while plotting course adjustments, and you catch his eye, tilt your head. Let it never be said that Maslov is not clever. Before you even reach the door, he is there. Unless they’re locked, the doors are designed to be easily pried open, but you can see that he’s encountering some sort of resistance. He strains until his face is bright red, but the doors won’t budge. 

You swallow thickly, which does nothing to get rid of the taste of copper in your mouth. Now that the initial surge of adrenaline has passed, you are beginning to feel a bright edge of pain, deep inside your head, another wrapped around your ribs. When you catch sight of your left wrist, you see mottled bruising, and you don’t have to ask to know that it’s broken. 

Questions form a sort of jumbled chain in your mind as you try to figure out the next step. Somehow, you will have to get your injured crew to a medical bay. You treat this as its own problem, divorced from any obstacles. You will get them to the nearest med bay. You ignore the fact that you’re trapped on the flight deck, that there could be any number of additional sealed doors en route. It’s not your problem. From your existing functioning crew, you will pick a small team, and you will let them tackle that. 

You clench your teeth and survey the deck, forcing yourself to take in the shapes, prone, huddled, count the ones who stand waiting for orders. On this deck, at any given time, you have thirty officers, which seems like too many people, until over half of them are out of commission. Then you begin to feel like a skeleton, held together only by dried-out ligaments. You have to determine what exactly happened, what failure led to this impromptu sky-diving session, so that another won’t follow on its heels. In order to do that, you need to figure out who you can trust. Because you have a body on your hands and a critically damaged ship, and you have to guess that the two are inextricably linked. 

And then there’s the thought you’ve been skirting around. You let yourself look only at its outline, name it in the barest sense. With a body, surrounded by so much blood, on a bridge that was designed for the utmost safety, console edges rounded for minimum damage, projectiles nonexistent, this couldn’t have been an accident. 

You know Lieutenant Maslov better than most people here, spent years in flight school with him, back when your greatest aspiration was to be a flight officer. If you had to choose someone as your backup, it would be him. And you remember that it was Lieutenant Mel who summoned you to the bridge—you decide that you will trust her as well, because she would not have called you to the scene of the crime if she had had anything to do with it, you don’t think. She’s tech savvy, lives and breathes codes, started out her career programming the computer for this very ship and moved up from there. You swear she bleeds binary. Regardless, she’s another pair of hands, another set of eyes. You see her picking her way across the room toward you, dazed but upright, which is more than you can ask of anyone at this point, so you will take what you can get. 

“Lieutenant,” you whisper, as she comes up beside you, “what happened? How did the commander die?” You try not to think about the way the question sits in your gut. None of this feels real yet. 

“He killed himself,” she says, without any hesitation, and you can tell she’s trying to keep her expression neutral, professional, but it’s obvious she’s been crying. 

He killed himself. Of all the possibilities that crossed your mind the moment you saw the body, this was the one you didn’t consider. 

You will have to go over the video file with a fine-toothed comb. Since all the consoles on the flight deck are fried, your only hope of salvaging the files would be to pull them from the backups down in the engine bay. And then you stumble upon a thought, which you have to follow to its conclusion, even though it feels like a train heading toward crazy-town, population you: you don’t know for sure that no one on this deck would be interested in erasing those files, in altering the narrative so you never find out what actually happened. You try to tell yourself you have no reason for thinking this, that Fleurie killed himself and the ship broke down and that’s the end of it, because you’re supposed to be able to trust your crew. But this thought has become your primary motivation for getting out of here—you will have to get there first. 

All at once, with a grinding, mechanical scream, Maslov has the doors open. You hear a smattering of applause and allow yourself a deep, albeit shaky breath. “Okay,” you say. “Maslov and Mel, you will accompany me.” You leave out your destination. It’s paranoid, you know, but you can’t shake the thought of the staticky vid file, the idea that there’s still a chance someone tampered with  it. 

“Dietrich and Marlow,” you continue, taking stock of whoever’s left standing, “get the mobile wounded to the medical bay. Once there, send whoever you can to retrieve those who can’t walk. Anyone unconscious, anyone…” You do not say dead, but there are dead. “Carlisle and Buford, stay with the people here, help however you can. Keep people calm. Make sure,” you clear your throat, “that no one touches the commander’s body until the security team arrives. Hanson and Strange, I want you to begin a comprehensive report of all systems failures, in order of occurrence, and every possible cause. And I mean comprehensive. I want a log of every keystroke, every message sent, every word spoken.” You pause to take a breath, then realize you’ve already said everything you needed to. There are no more crew who are able to receive orders, and no more orders left to give. 

27

By the time you reach the engine control room, you’re starting to notice something unsettling, and you’re hoping it’s just you, while at the same time hoping it’s not. Everything around you has begun to turn blurry. Holding hands with this, the pain has become less an impression and more a reality, no longer vague, more white and slicing. But as you do with every unwelcome interruption, if you can, you reschedule it for later, when you will have, if not more time for it, than at least the idea of more time. 

The control room is a mess of blinking lights, some blue, mercifully blue, but many more an angry red. The moment you enter the drive room, a small offshoot, you notice two things. The first is this: the smell of ozone, of Earth pavement after a rainstorm—a bit like crayons or almonds. The second thing is less of a thing and more of an absence—there is no one in the engine room, no one in the drive room as well. No one to herd the blinking lights. 

“Lieutenant Maslov,” you say, with a sudden realization that you’re leaning on him ever-so-slightly, that you are unable to remember which of you initiated first contact. “Lieutenant Mel. Do either of you remember if we passed anyone on our way here?” Because now that you think of it, you didn’t log anyone’s faces as you raced down the corridors. And here is a fact that your aching body is all too aware of: the flight deck is at the far end of the ship from the engine room. Along the stretch of hallways, especially after a shakeup like this, you should have run into any number of crew, everyone rushing about addressing emergencies and looking for answers. Without comms, there should have been a mad scramble, even a panic. You walked through a ghost ship, and until now, none of you thought to ask why. 

The fog in your vision has become a little hazier, a sheen of oil over everything so your gaze does not stick, only slides off. 

“Captain,” Mel says, her hand on your arm, “let’s take you to the medical bay.” 

“No.” The word comes out with the force of a bullet. “I mean, not yet. We have to pull the vid files for the bridge before anyone else gets them.” You are aware of how you sound, but they are not reacting to this like it is too cautious. Which reminds you that, along with Fleurie’s autopsy, you will need to review dozens of statements, and you will have to do all of this with a concussion blooming in your head like a flower. This all while still dealing with the MacAvoy situation. You do not think you will ever have time to sleep again. 

Even with Maslov’s help, you are not walking in a straight line, but you make it to the data banks, and wonder of wonders, they are functional, the blue glow of the input screen so warm and welcoming you want to cry. Hold yourself together; now is not the time for relief. 

Once you have the data tab in hand, with all the necessary vid files, and bonus, console logs, you allow them to escort you to a medical bay, where you are not prepared for the sight of the wounded from all over the ship, cots filled and bodies on the floor, so much red this must surely be an abattoir. 

28

When the reports finally begin rolling in, they find you in your quarters, banished there by harried med techs insistent that you rest, that your broken wrist and concussion need time to heal. Although you hate every aspect of this situation, it’s the idea of being trapped in this windowed space that bothers you more than the idea of inaction. Here you can still review the files while the medicine you take every two hours accelerates your healing—the bone will mend in a day—but here you cannot escape the window.

Though your head is ringing so badly you can barely think straight, you link up your screen to the data tab and watch the files unspool before you in chronological order. There is so much information, you hardly know where to begin, and you don’t know what to prioritize or what would be easier to bear. What do you want to know first, how your ship was almost destroyed, or how Fleurie died? Pick your poison.  

You grit your teeth and select the flight deck video log, rewind it to five minutes before you received Mel’s distress call and hold your breath. In school, you remember learning about outdated surveillance cameras, with such low picture quality that sometimes you couldn’t even be sure what you were looking at. But this, your flight deck camera, is state-of-the-art, with a picture quality so impressive you can watch in crisp, high definition as your first officer shouts, at the top of his lungs, “They’re watching!” before removing his metal badge of rank and using it to carve out his own carotid. Arterial spray paints the nearest section of wall, as well as an unsuspecting officer, and then, before you can brace for it, your mouth floods with bile. Dry heaves, one after another, diminishing like aftershocks. 

Once they’ve passed, you go to the moments after his death and watch the fallout. You still have to know. Even if you no longer want to know, can’t get the acid taste out of your mouth, don’t want to be captain anymore. 

On screen, Dietrich rushes to Fleurie’s side and attempts to apply pressure to the wound, even though it’s clear there’s nothing that can be done at this point. It strikes you as a metaphor for hope. To the side, you see Mel, paging you on comms. Hearing her message, the same message you heard in your earpiece before everything shattered, gives you a strange, disembodied feeling. 

You rewind it again, let the whole scene play out, this time waiting for the exact moment the sirens come on and the consoles start sparking. You missed it the first time, because the overload and Fleurie’s suicide happen almost simultaneously. There is maybe a fraction of a second between the two. 

 You play the scene over, again and again, first in slow motion, then frame by frame, and each time it’s the same, and each time it makes less sense to you, because for two whole minutes before the overload, no one is at their stations. No one is close enough to touch a console, much less program the Hiraeth’s demise. 

You have to sit back for a moment and consider why no one was at their stations, not one person. Right now, you don’t have a single suspect. No, that’s not true. Anyone could have set the overload on a timer. Had you noticed, for instance, only one person studiously avoiding their console during that time frame, you would know to suspect them. But everyone? Is it possible everyone was involved? Or, and this should have been the obvious conclusion, was this sabotage Fleurie’s doing? Did he mean to take the entire ship down with him? 

Again you watch the video, this time imagining what you were doing offscreen. Now you are receiving the comm. Now you are on the shuttle. Now you are removing your EVA suit. Now you are in the lift. Now you are racing down the hall. As you watch yourself burst onto the bridge, you study everyone’s faces, running the gamut of emotions. 

When you review the command logs, every keystroke from every console for an entire twenty-four hours, a process that takes three hours and depletes most of your coffee stash, you find nothing but an innocuous collection of course adjustments, comms, and the like.

It’s only when you’re just about to give up that you find it, a sub file, buried so deep you must have glanced over it a dozen times like it wasn’t even there. Until, suddenly, it was. 

Naturally, you open it. 

Cold sweat breaks out on your forehead. All the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It’s tagged like a personal log, something accidentally swept up in the data stream, a stray, mis-directed file. The markers say it was grabbed from your screen—not from your personal one, where you keep your logs, but from your office one. The moment you open the file, your screen fills with code, white on black, scrolling so fast you can barely read it.  

You catch only snippets. 

</Command>

<Fail>

<Rerouting>

</Command>

</Command received>

</Adjusting course=‘nav’ locked id=navigations>

</Disable shields>

</Disable helm>

</Command override>

<Fail>

<Fail>

</Overload>

</Systems kill>

29

Three Years Ago

In the dim light of your apartment, with the smog outside your window, black and endless, you cannot see the stars, only the faint outline of your reflection against the city skyline. Far, far down in the street, sirens wail. Up here, it is too quiet, with the news ringing in your ears. 

“Could you—could you repeat that?” you ask, because you heard him, the man on the phone, but what he said could not possibly be true. 

“You are now captain of the Hiraeth.” 

“Sir, the admiral is in charge of the Hiraeth. I’m the first officer,” you tell him. He has to be confused, has to be calling the wrong person. Somehow you’ve stumbled into some alternate dimension where dreams actually come true. 

“There was a hovercraft crash. He will have to have his leg amputated. If we suffer another delay, the government will cut our funding. The Hiraeth launches in a week. You are now the captain of this mission.”

 You try to sit with this information, to let it sink into your core, to distill it into some sort of sense. Of course you knew you were in line to replace the admiral, should something happen to him, but that was all conjecture, a failsafe intended for a disaster that was never meant to come. 

“What about Lieutenant Major Galveston?” you ask, because he’s still higher-ranking than you, even though he was supposed to remain behind to coordinate the mission from Earth. He’s the gentle to the admiral’s bitter, and you would prefer to serve under him. 

The man on the other end of the line clears his throat. “He was in the hovercraft with the admiral when it crashed. He did not survive.” There is a long pause while you take in this information, so cold and bare, laid out like this before you. “Lieutenant Salvatore Fleurie will be your first officer,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, but you hardly hear him. Your head is already climbing through the clouds, up toward the hidden stars. They are your stars, now, instead of the admiral’s, and he will never forgive you for it. 

30

It takes the admiral one hour and thirty-seven minutes to respond to your pings. “This had better be important,” he says. He looks like he’s just woken up, and you almost laugh at this, that a mission so vital and groundbreaking and impossibly, impossibly expensive is run by a man who could not seem to care less. No wonder it’s starting to feel like you were doomed from the start. 

“It is, Admiral.” You don’t bother to hide the steel in your voice. “Commander Fleurie killed himself on the flight deck, in front of the crew, and do you know what he said right before he sliced into his carotid with his badge of rank?” 

Finally this grabs his attention, and you can’t help but notice, with a strange, sideways feeling, that this may well be the first time you’ve ever seen him surprised. Another first: he’s at a loss for words. You seize the chance and fill the space before he can recover. “‘They’re watching.’” And for a moment  you’re not even quoting Fleurie, only saying what you’ve both been thinking. 

Just like that, the admiral’s impatience is back. “He went space crazy,” he says. “Regrettable, but it happens. I’m assuming you dealt with it appropriately. I’m assuming that you’re taking precautions so it won’t happen to anyone else, especially you.” He gives you a pointed look. 

You imagine what he’s been doing all this time. Probably going through the list of crew, picking out the next candidate to take your place. No doubt he’s been waiting, hoping, praying—if he were a religious person—for a moment like this. If he could have, if it weren’t for the accident, he would be here instead of you. For the first time, you don’t feel smug about this; you feel sick, just a little, in the pit of your stomach, like you have swallowed something whole and living. 

“I haven’t finished,” you interject, and it’s a miracle to you, this strange, unexpected boldness in this sea of fear, “because right as he killed himself, the grav thrusters failed. We came within moments of crashing into Icarus III.” You don’t dive into the specifics. Something tells you you have bought yourself a window in which to talk, but only a small window. “I pulled the logs. No one from the flight deck was responsible—I’m not even sure Commander Fleurie was, either, although that was my first suspicion. We’re still tracing how the commands were routed, but we have the codes. Admiral, it is my opinion that we have a hacker, someone intentionally sabotaging the entire mission.” 

You want to believe your own words, you do; your rational mind loves it as an explanation, a sip of water in the desert. Someone good with the ship, someone messing with your mind. Someone who got into Fleurie’s head. It is an explanation that ignores your primal fear, that allows you to pretend there is no monster in your closet, no face peering through the window while you sleep, and so it is an explanation you can swallow without difficulty. 

However, you don’t know if you have lied to the admiral or not. Your techs are back-tracing the source of the code, yes, and they have already found the backdoor the hacker used—a weakness in your own screen, a line of broken code on which to piggyback. But you still have no reason to suspect it was anyone but Fleurie. 

You have not been able to bring yourself to open Fleurie’s personal logs, to trace his madness to its inception. It isn’t lost on you that he killed himself after interviewing MacAvoy in your stead. The thought tastes a bit too much like guilt, rests a little too heavy in your stomach when you try to swallow it down. 

“I’m listening,” the admiral says. “Do you have any other evidence for this?”

 You don’t want to say it, because no matter how you look at it, it reflects badly on you, but you have to. “Yes. We discovered that at the time the grav thrusters overloaded, the engine room was unmanned. Apparently engineers received a text transmission requesting their presence in the conference room. When they got there, the door locked behind them, trapping them there until the crisis was over. Crew members across the ship obeyed similar transmissions sending them to the cafeterias. All these transmissions were sent under my seal.” You hold up a hand. “And before you start pointing the finger at me, I was on the surface the whole time, surrounded by witnesses. Whoever it was, they had access to my command codes.” 

“And how am I expected to believe all of this?” 

“I’m sending you the records now.” You tap the button, wait a moment, watch as the message icon glows on his screen, reflected in his glasses. “Whoever this hacker is, if indeed it was not Commander Fleurie, they’re holding the reins. I’ve changed the command codes, but if they were good enough to get them the first time, they have access to everything. I am trying to keep my crew alive. Whoever this person is, they want to kill us all. Think about that.” 

“So far, you’re not doing a very good job. It says here—it says that there were seven fatalities that day, including Commander Fleurie.” His words sting—they are meant to. You want to reach through the screen and yank him into this room so he can feel the tension, smell the acid tang of dread and antiseptic in the air. You want him to taste the wrongness, the sickly sweet odor that has permeated the ship since the disaster. 

“I’m not calling to waste your time.” You attempt, too late, to control your tone, to hide the growing fury. “All I ask is that you let me put a hold on surface operations until we’ve dealt with the matter.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous, Captain.” He laughs the words. You see flecks of spit flying from his mouth. “You have a crew complement of over five hundred people, more than enough to chase down a hacker and still continue business as usual. If you’re getting cold feet, just tell me—I can relieve you in a heartbeat.” 

There it is, out on the table. Everything is so much plainer in space, stark, outlined in black and white. Even red dwarf stars look colorless from far enough away. 

It’s only after you’ve ended the video call that you realize you forgot to mention MacAvoy. 

Don’t be too hard on yourself, O Captain, my Captain. It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether he believes you or not. Your fate was sealed the moment you entered orbit around Icarus III. I would offer my condolences, but I know, wherever you are now, that you can’t hear me. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks