Planet Eyes: Part Six

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here. 

For Planet Eyes: Part Five, click here. 

 

22

On the surface below, a terraforming team is hard at work, laying the foundations for another round of machines, with great care, at great cost, for great gain. You want to be there with them so badly you process it as a humming in your bones, to be present, to watch it happening. The camera sits in your desk drawer—its presence is palpable. The clock on the wall measures the seconds, counting down till the day when you will have to call the admiral for your next check in, and if you don’t have proof then, you know he won’t be understanding. 

Last night you rested, or tried to, but dreams found you—ugly, unsettling ones—and this morning you woke up clammy and anxious. So no, you are not down there with the sane people, living their sane lives amidst their insane jobs. Instead you are here, on comms, pretending that you can see them from your window. 

Once upon a time, you were highly recommended for this mission by someone who had great faith in you. 

After hours, you tell yourself, you will visit the medical bay. Maybe there is a simple solution, an imbalance in your nutrition, causing all of this mayhem in your head. Maybe a dose of medicine, taken once daily, will mend you and your crew. You will look back on these days and feel stupid. You are not seeing things as they are—you know this. You don’t know what’s real anymore. Maybe you never did. Maybe that’s why the admiral hates you. 

Still, you have trouble stomaching the thought. It’s not defeat, nothing so dramatic as that; it’s only shame, the realization that you are less than you thought you were, more feeble. It’s like finding a stain on your favorite garment. Something valuable is ruined. 

Your comms unit chirps, releasing you from your thoughts. 

“Captain, it’s Lieutenant Lawson. We’ve looked into every possible way the doors to the brig could have been opened.” 

Immediately, you are back in the blue-lit hallway, herding the big-eyed children back to their home after an escape that wasn’t really an escape. “What did you find?” 

“We found nothing. Far as we know, it was the power surge that caused it—we do have record of a power surge at the time, but we haven’t been able to diagnose the cause of that surge. There’s no evidence of tampering and no real reason to spring four peaceful adults with nowhere to run and no apparent inclination to incite mutiny. We will, of course, report any new findings to you.” 

You end the call and force your gaze back to the data on your screen, the completed rock analyses from your first surface mission. Ensign Fay sent you this data packet over twenty-four hours ago—you hardly remember why you cared about receiving it, haven’t even opened it until now. But somehow you have to pretend that you’re still interested in terraforming this planet, that you haven’t forgotten why you came here. These analyses may be boring enough to shock your brain back into a sense of normalcy, you tell yourself. 

But your eyes glaze over as you scrutinize the numbers, the graphs. Instead of interpreting the readouts, you find your mind wandering, your attention repeatedly shifting back to the window and the vastness beyond it. 

It’s only stars, you tell yourself, only stars and a planet. 

You know that the view should be beautiful; it should give you hope. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, humans will thrive on this surface, build skyscrapers, pave roads, grow plants. Families will form, as they did in the old days, before space became so limited children were grown in test tubes like crops, quantity control. Before you die of old age, there will be numerous young ones who know their parents—who have parents. All because of your efforts and those of your crew. 

This is a marvelous enterprise, a star-studded glory. Your hull contains more than oxygen and carbon beings, it contains untapped potential, the very essence of life. And you cannot put a price tag on that. 

Had you stayed on Earth, given in to the fear that creeps, creeps, creeps at the back of your mind, you would be missing out on this. Another would have stepped up and taken your place, and you would have faded into the background, lost to time and memory. People would have swept the world into a newer, brighter age that included you only by default. But you have made yourself immortal. 

So you cannot allow yourself to give any more room, any more quarter to this nameless dread. To whom much is given, much is required, and you have been given much. 

By the time you stand to brew coffee, you have almost convinced yourself that you’ve made all this up in your head, seen connections where there are no connections, turned small emergencies into ship-wide terrors. 

As the smell of coffee permeates the room, your mind begins to feel almost normal, begins to function. You should take up painting or sculpting—you need an outlet for all this pent-up stress. If nothing else, this situation has been a wakeup call for you. 

It is only when you turn to your desk that you hear the thunk, coming from the direction of the window. At first it strikes you as inconsequential. Noise in a ship this size is a fact of life, no matter the sound dampeners, the thick walls. You have overheard so many things in your young captaincy, you’ve learned how to tune most of them out. But this thunk does not leave your mind. Instead it echoes in the space between your ears, over and over, louder and louder, until you can’t ignore it anymore. 

It’s only when you turn your head to look out the window that you realize you have frozen mid-step. You pivot on your heels and scan the room, check the door. You are alone. Of course you’re alone. 

Your gaze drifts to the window, the expanse beyond, the deep deep blackness between all these points of light. But you are alone, you tell yourself. 

Inching toward the door, you try to divide your vision, to miss as little as possible. But you have to tear your attention from the window in order to look through the peephole, only to find that there is no one in the corridor, at least not in sight. 

You are alone. 

You are…alone? 

With a nervous laugh—silly you—you turn back to your desk. There is work to be done. 

But your screen has filled with code, white on blue. And before you can fix the problem or stop the cascade of text, it blinks out, blank as the spaces between the stars. 

23

Evening is falling by the time the tech heads finish working on your screen and you return to your quarters with a cup of hot milk-substitute in your hand. Somehow you have managed to go all day without running into Fleurie, which feels like its own small miracle. Now you have to wait to hear back from the med lab—it will take a while for them to analyze your test results. So you have all night to worry about what’s wrong with you, if there is anything wrong with you. 

You lock the door behind you and reposition your armchair. It had faced your bed. Now you pivot it so it’s looking out on the window, it’s back against the wall. Next you find your screen—this is your personal one, reserved for your logs and your reading material—and flip absentmindedly through the files. 

Wrapped in your blanket, sipping your warm milk and wishing it was coffee—because you don’t want to be drowsy, you want to be alert—you settle on Machiavelli’s The Prince. His convoluted, manipulative mind has always appealed to you, a fact that you have kept to yourself. But tonight you can’t focus, not on that or on the half-dozen other books you open and then close. You’re only pretending to read, pretending for yourself, as if you won’t notice the difference. 

But the entire time your eyes don’t want to leave the window and the blackness beyond. It presses up against the synthetic glass, a presence all its own. Why haven’t you had curtains installed yet? There is so little privacy in space. When they built this ship, with all its viewports, no one ever considered that something might peer inside. 

You can’t stop thinking about what happened in your office. It was a glitch in the system, is all, your computer tech confirmed it, a string of broken code that caused a cascade failure. After he got in and rewrote the code, your screen rebooted just fine, glowed happily at you like it had never failed in the first place. These things happen. Ignore the memory of the thunk on the window, the tap tap from before. Ignore the paranoia, uncoiling like a snake. 

Except you can’t. 

If you tell Fleurie about the sounds, he will only hear what he wants to hear, the burgeoning insanity in your voice, the call of the captain’s chair. He isn’t interested in seeing you better—he wants your job. 

In the darkness of your room, with the stars as your witness, you are, at last, fully honest with yourself, and it feels like jumping into cold water, letting your mind recognize every aspect of your fear, the parts you have been trying to hide. You admit now what you could not earlier. You do not believe—not in your bones, where it matters—that you are alone in this frigid sector of space, that you are simply being paranoid, that you are even the slightest bit insane. The cold going around, the idea of sabotage, of technological failure, these are stories you’ve been telling yourself to keep the nightmares at bay. You know what you have been sensing, what you want to deny. You do not believe that you and your team were the only ones to board the Hiraeth after your first surface mission. You were right to fear opening the doors. Something got inside—it got into MacAvoy, it got into Fleurie, and it wants to get into you. 

It shouldn’t make sense, but the moment you let yourself think the thought you have been dancing around for days, a weight lifts off your shoulders. Your mind has been trying and trying and trying to tell you something, and now you’ve finally listened, it can stop screaming. 

When you drift off to sleep, still curled in your armchair, you dream you are strapped to a table as faceless shapes remove your skin, strip by strip, until your organs are laid bare. 

24

When 05:00 comes, and with it the end of your twenty-four-hour timeout, you rally yourself enough to shower away the cold sweat and iron out the wrinkles in your uniform. Every step you take in this daily ritual is a denial of what you let yourself admit last night, the thoughts that slipped past the filter in your mind. 

As you brew coffee in your office, you inhale the aroma of possibilities and step to the window like you’re back on Earth, soaking up the sun. The crescent curve of Icarus III is a sliver of blood orange on your plate. Your immune system will thank you. Fleurie’s reports are waiting for you on your screen, but you don’t open them yet. The moment you open them, you will descend back into fear, lose the fresh feeling from last night. Right now you want to pretend that it’s business as usual. 

You walk to the flight deck with your head held high, and you greet your crew, but you cannot bring yourself to sit down just yet. Maybe later, once the coffee has worn off. Fleurie is nowhere to be seen. Briefly you wonder if he’s been hiding from you, though you brush the thought aside. You thumb your comms. “Commander Fleurie.” It takes only a split second for the system to patch you through to him. “Where are you? I want to debrief you before my surface mission.” 

“I’m on deck two,” he says, and his voice sounds different, somehow. “A fight broke out between several tech heads. I figured I’d deal with it, let you focus on other things. But the surface mission went well. Nothing to report. We’ll have plenty of time to talk after you get back.” 

Sweat breaks out on your upper lip, on the palms of your hands. Something about this doesn’t sit right with you. There’s a crawling feeling, in your bones, that tells you to pursue the matter further, to demand that Fleurie meet you right away. You force yourself to take a deep breath and remember your calm from before. You have worked with Fleurie for years. Despite the pressure building up inside you, the fear leaking from your skin, you know that you can trust him to make the right call. He has never let you down. If he says there’s nothing to worry about, then there’s nothing to worry about. Hold on to that, and ignore your misfiring instincts. 

“I expect you to take the flight deck while I’m away,” you tell him, after too much time has passed, and for a moment you’re not sure he’s heard you. 

“Oh, don’t worry.” Still the strange note in his voice, the otherness that you can’t name. “I’ll be there.” 

“I’ll want to brief you about Ensign MacAvoy when I get back.” 

“I wouldn’t miss it.” 

You end the call, then turn your attention to your flight crew. Is it just you, or do they seem on edge? Do their eyes slide over the massive viewport, only to skate away? Does everyone stand a little bit too straight, walk with a little too much purpose—does everyone jump at the sound of their own feet on the decking? 

Perhaps you should say something to comfort them. You are vulnerable, exposed at the outer tip of the galaxy, so very far from home—no wonder you’re frightened, every last one of you. Instead you check and recheck your itinerary, though you drew it up yourself yesterday and could read it on the insides of your eyelids if you so chose, you have gone over it so many times already. 

Here is the song and dance of the day: 

06:00 Breakfast, which you will attempt to fit in your stomach, though your gut feels full of spiders

06:15 Begin preparations for surface mission

07:00 Surface mission begins

09:00 Surface mission returns

People experience a sense of release from crossing off everything they have accomplished in a day, so let me add one more item to the middle of your itinerary: 

08:23 Chaos ensues 

25

The doors to the shuttle click shut behind you, and you imagine that you can hear the oxygen being pumped into the pressure chamber inside. It feels permanent, like you’ve passed the point of no return. Around you, your team gets to work, removing equipment from heavy bags on their shoulders. 

You see sweat shining on Markowitz’s brow through her faceplate. Her eyes are wider than usual, her pupils dilated. You can almost see the fear rising off her, heat waves hovering over tarmac. You don’t let yourself look at the others, in case you might see the same fear there. It’s too much to know that it exists outside yourself—you want to be wrong, want only to be paranoid. Forget how you felt earlier, seeing your fears confirmed. You take it back. 

What could be explained away as an isolated phenomenon in your own mind cannot be swept aside so easily when it’s ubiquitous. You want to return to the time when this was a spaceship, not a madhouse. 

Don’t dwell on that now. You have two hours to map the geography of this little valley on this large planet that will be Earth 2.0, the saving grace. Fear has no place here. You banish it from your mind, stab it with sunlight. Fleurie was right—you needed that break. Today there will be no rock samples, no video files. 

Before even half an hour has passed, your back has begun to ache. No amount of weight training on the Hiraeth could fully prepare you for this labor, carrying your heavy pack in this dense suit under the broiling, alien sun, driving markers into the ground for another round of machines. No doubt about it, the gravity is stronger here. But even with the heat, you cannot bring yourself to wish for clouds. Clouds cast shadows. 

Your scans have already shown you what your muscles are telling you now—this soil is denser than Earth soil, heavier. And it does not crumble as it should; it is elastic. 

It does not like you meddling. 

You push the thought away, try not to wonder where it came from. This is a planet—it has no thoughts of its own, no innate personality. It does not care whether you walk its soil, whether you drink its water. It is rock and potential, nothing more. 

Another half hour passes. The horizon glares at you, light reflected in full force. The sky is blue and orange, like a never-ending sunset. The longer you work, the more convinced you are that nothing lives here: not bacteria, which you will have to introduce, not people, not animals, nothing. This is a wasteland, a lump of clay for you to mold, a blank slate. 

It is watching you. 

The sweat on the back of your neck turns ice-cube-cold, and you straighten, as if a string is pulling you upward. This void, this desert of possibilities contains nothing living, you are sure of it, you are, but it does not feel lifeless anymore. And you do not like the way it is looking at you. 

Parsons, who has been digging with a laser to find the water table, trips on her pack, loses her grip on the laser emitter, slips and nearly slices open her suit on a sharp rock. Standing, she brushes herself off and stoops to collect her equipment, then freezes instead, breathing so heavily her faceplate mists. Her shoulders start to tremble. 

“Are you okay?” Markowitz asks, as the three of you rush to Parsons’ side. 

You see it before the others do, the line that the rogue laser emitter carved into the soil as it fell, a deep upside-down U, like a frown. As you help Parsons to her feet and ascertain that her suit is undamaged, you try to ignore it, how this feels like a sign. 

When the four of you go back to your respective tasks, you allow yourself several deep breaths to return your heart rate to normal. As time passes, you notice Maugrim can’t seem to take his eyes off the horizon, though maybe he’s following your lead. No matter how often you force yourself to look at your work, your gaze inevitably slides up after a few moments. 

Not once have any of you angled your backs away from the shuttle. You have stepped out in a defensive formation, eyes toward the threat, your safety behind you. What is happening? 

What have you done? 

Hostile is an adjective. 

No. 

Hostile is a state of being. 

Failing to recognize that subtle nuance will be your downfall, O Captain. 

The clock on the upper left corner of your faceplate clicks to 08:23, and following this cue, which you do not know to watch for, your comm chirps, so loud in this breath-filled silence that adrenaline jolts through you. “Captain, trouble on the flight deck. One dead. Request immediate assistance.” Lieutenant Mel’s voice, strangely taut, an elastic pulled almost to the breaking point. 

Renee Mel is your primary pilot, next in command to Fleurie. She wouldn’t have any reason to call like this, unless… 

Unless—

Since you’re on open comms, your crew has heard it too, does not require an explanation when you abandon your equipment and sprint to the shuttle, despite your bulky EVA suit. They pile into the airlock behind you. You barely wait for the pressurization sequence to finish before you yank open the second door and dive inside. 

Your heart races through the five-minute flight to the ship, your hands jittery. You press them against your thighs, try to trap the muscles into calm, but then every part of you starts shivering uncontrollably, caught in a panic you don’t understand. All you know is that something terrible has happened. 

As your shuttle approaches the ship, you stare at its gleaming skin, its rows of windows—teethmarks in its sides. You feel as if you should be able to see it, whatever trouble lies within, as if it should be evident from this vantage point. But it’s a mystery to you. From the outside, everything looks peaceful, so calm it’s almost dead, though the ship is flying in a lower orbit than you would like. And then you’re docking and powering down the shuttle, your heartbeat racing in your throat. 

You hear sirens blaring the moment you board the Hiraeth. 

You’re already too late. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks