Planet Eyes: Part Ten

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here. 

For Planet Eyes: Part Nine, click here. 

 

42

The chirp of your comms unit startles you awake, and you’re on your feet before you know what’s happening. How you managed to fall asleep behind your desk, with all the stims in your blood, is beyond you, but how you managed to avoid nightmares is the real miracle. It takes several tries to thumb your comms, and when you open your mouth to speak, no words come at first. “Report,” you finally manage. 

“Lieutenant Johnson speaking.” Three days of waiting, anticipation burning in you like a fever, and now you’re afraid to hear what he has to say. “I have your test results. I think, well, I don’t want to get your hopes up, because we haven’t even tested it yet, but I think we have a cure.” 

He sounds so giddy, a kid hopped up on sugar. You almost allow yourself to smile. Even so, as you fight to keep calm, you feel it rising up in you, something too much like hope to stomach. You try to walk like a normal person, at a normal speed, to the medical bay. Inside your head you’re sprinting. The trip to Med Bay B has never been so long. 

There’s color in his face, actual color, when he greets you at the door, beaming like he’s just solved the Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap problem. He beats you to the chase. “We can start testing right away. We have three doses—we can test it on three crew members. That should give us enough information to start with.” 

This gives you pause. Of course you knew that it would need to be tested on people, and your first, greedy thought is to take the cure yourself and give the others to Maslov and Mel. But it doesn’t work that way. If the test doesn’t go well—which, why would it not go well?—all three of you will be removed from the playing field, leaving the ship without a leader. So no, you will have to choose three people you can spare, lowly ensigns from the bowels of the ship. 

“Do you have any test subjects lined up?” 

“As a matter of fact, I do.” But, oddly, his face falls a little at this. 

“Then what’s the problem?” 

“After choosing the first three, I asked them if they would be willing to take an experimental treatment. They became extremely paranoid. They were—they were convinced that we were working with them. Who’s them? They kept repeating it, we’re working with them, we’re trying to poison the crew. I mean, isn’t that along the lines of what Ensign MacAvoy was saying about Ensign Montez? I think I’ll need to speak with Lieutenant Lane about these phenomena.” 

He doesn’t know. Of course it has only been two days since she died, and he has been sequestered away all this time, working on a cure, thoughts focused on that and nothing else. But still, it’s a fist to the face, a blow from out of nowhere. 

“She died.” You don’t mean it to come out as bluntly as it does, but once it’s said, there’s no way to retrace its path. “She killed herself. We’ll have to do this without her.” 

He pales. “Oh,” is all he can manage. But then, miraculously, and you can see it happening in real time, he pulls himself together, files away the news for reviewal upon a later date, and collects his screen from his desk. He pulls up a chart and tilts the screen toward you. “So, with my first group of three—I had to let them go back to duty. There was no way we were going to be able to use them as test subjects after that. But I’ve picked another three.” He indicates the screen. You see three faces, headshots, text underneath with names and relevant data. You wish you knew everyone on this ship by sight. 

“Have you contacted them yet?” 

“No, not yet.” He squirms a little at this and starts to turn bright red. “I know it’s, well, I know it’s absolutely unthinkable, goes against every rule in the book. And I wouldn’t be able to do it myself, you would have to, but my guess is, we’re going to have to test them without their knowledge, somehow.”

 Your mind races ahead of you, following all the various trajectories. If the admiral ever catches wind of this conversation, you will be court-martialed immediately. “I’m listening.” 

“Well, I’ve been calling people in, per your orders, as I have opportunity. It’ll be a while yet before I’m done collecting blood samples from everyone. I’m tracking this virus as it progresses—whatever we’re dealing with, it’s a mean one. Personally, I don’t—I don’t think it’s responsible for everything that’s happening.” He says it like it’s a question. “But it’s definitely not a virus that I would want to mess around with.” 

“Okay, so with the test subjects?” 

“Say I call these three people in, give them the standard spiel. I’ll draw blood, as per usual, but while I’m doing that, I give them the shot when they’re not paying attention. I mean, I wouldn’t do it—I swore an oath that I would do no harm, and this has the potential to harm them. You would have to be the one with the syringe. Of course I would be there to supervise, and I would run through the whole process with you beforehand until you have it down pat. After that, we wait a day, call them back in—say their blood tests were unclear and that we need to draw new samples. We’ll wait another week to monitor symptoms before we make any decisions on mass-producing the cure.” He chuckles. “I’m not—it won’t be FDA approved, no matter what.” 

It’s a beautiful plan, open to streamlining, clever, inspired, and wrong. It is the most morally reprehensible act you have ever considered being a part of, truly considered, in your entire life. This could be the best thing for your ship, and you are confident that the cure will work, that soon everyone will be like Alice Fay, including you. But, if it fails, if something goes wrong and these people die, it would be on you. It would be murder. It wouldn’t matter if it was Johnson’s serum and Johnson’s idea, you would be the one with your fingerprints on the murder weapon. 

“This will, of course, be done off the record, I assume. No one needs to get thrown under the bus if this goes south.” 

“Yes, yes of course.” He’s starting to sweat in earnest now. Maybe he’s finally thinking his suggestion through, to all its possible conclusions. 

“And you understand that our jobs are on the line—not just our jobs, our freedom—if anyone finds out. Even if this works and the crew is saved. No one can know. This is completely unethical. Are you sure you’re okay with it?” 

You’ve never seen him this serious before, you don’t think. “Captain, I understand what this means. I understand that it’s wrong. But we need to test this cure, and we can’t afford to do it on senior staff. I doubt anyone will take it willingly, but it might be our last chance to salvage this mission. So yes, this conversation never happened. But I’m in.” 

43

“And you depress the plunger, like so,” Johnson says for at least the fifth time. “You’re sure you’ve got it?” 

“Lieutenant, I’m sure.” You tuck the filled syringe up your sleeve as Johnson pages Ensign Maverick. Your heart plays jump-rope inside your chest. When the doors to the med bay slide open, you see that she’s shorter than you had expected. Her body language tells you everything you need to know—asking nicely wouldn’t have worked. And anyway, you reason, this won’t hurt her. 

“Ensign Maverick,” Johnson greets her. “Good to see you. Have a seat.” 

“Why do you need to run tests on my blood?” she asks. And then she sees you. Her eyes go wide. “Captain,” she acknowledges you as she sits down. Muscles tensed and ready to run, she perches on the chair, eyes darting to and fro like she expects a trap. Of course you had anticipated this reaction, but still, seeing her paranoia shakes your confidence in your ability to pull this off. 

“There’s a cold going around,” Johnson says. “We’re conducting routine check-ups on all the crew, to make sure everyone’s okay.” You can hear it now, in his tone, the reason he’s so good with patients despite his bumbling ways. His voice is warm—his voice is gentle. If you were to let yourself close your eyes and listen to it, you might even be able to convince yourself that he’s telling the truth. “Now if you could roll up your sleeve.” 

“I haven’t heard about a cold,” she says, but she complies anyway. 

“It’s a particularly nasty one. We’re trying to isolate it, to keep it from spreading.” He swabs the inside of her elbow with antiseptic and ties a rubber strap around her bicep. “The captain will be taking your blood today, if you don’t mind. It’s a routine cross-training exercise.” 

“Oh.” Her eyes travel, once more, to you. She studies you with the awe inherent in every lowly ensign when confronted with the ship’s leader. Even if she wanted to say no, you don’t think she would. You have an unfair advantage. 

“It’s okay,” you assure her, as you ready three vials for her blood. “I know what I’m doing.” 

Do you?

As her blood fills the first vial, you feel your heartbeat escalating once more, feel your palms growing slick with sweat. If you fumble the needle, if you drop it, if she finds out—all the possibilities culminating in disaster. If she talks, even to her friends, sooner or later the admiral will catch wind of it. Were it possible, he would come out all this way just to strip you of rank. 

After the second vial, you pretend that you need to reposition the needle in the vein. At the same time, Johnson drops a tray of metal test tubes, distracting Maverick from your hands at her elbow. You do not fumble the needle. 

All she feels is a prick. She jumps a little, but when her gaze returns to you, the syringe is back up your sleeve and the third vial is filling. You offer a rueful smile. “Sorry, I’m not as good at this as Lieutenant Johnson is. Part of why I’m practicing.” 

“Lollipop?” you hear Johnson ask, and when you look up, you see he’s carrying an old-fashioned jar of lollipops, like your pediatrician kept in his office—you always went for the blue ones. He’s smiling a huge, disarming grin. 

One down. Two to go. 

44

“How are they?” you ask Johnson, before you’ve finished stepping into the room. It’s only after you’re inside that you realize he’s not alone, as you had expected. There’s been a new influx of patients. The two cots closest to the door are full, and you see at least one med tech at the far side of the room, tapping away at the screen. You’re getting sloppy. You’re so tired you can barely stand upright—of course you’re getting sloppy. 

“They’re doing well,” he says casually, as if he has no idea that you’ve just slipped up. “Our test results yesterday showed that all three of them had the same bacterial infection, which of course was suspect, so we went ahead and redrew blood. Turns out our samples were contaminated. They are doing exceptionally well. In fact, it doesn’t look like their immune systems are fighting anything, not even a cold. They are in perfect health.” 

Of course you hear it, the subtext beneath his clever cover. You’re starting to wonder if this man is a closet psychopath. 

“But there is a question I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why don’t you step outside with me, Captain?” You know what he means, but you’re so tired, you almost laugh at the thought of casually exiting the ship, mid-orbit, to have a private conversation. How many words could you say before space turned your lungs inside out? Would it be enough to convey any sort of meaning? 

“What is it?” you ask, once you’ve checked the hallway. 

“They seem well. Beyond well. Ensign Maverick was glowing. She was—she was well-rested.” The shock in his voice is what sticks with you, as if you’re seeing it for yourself. It leaves you reeling. You’re tempted to bolt past him into the lab and take the control cure before he can stop you. The thought of sleeping—you imagine this is how a recovering addict feels, opening the bathroom cabinet to find a single, overlooked pill, water in a wasteland. The creeping need, deep in your bones, more essential to you than your own atoms and molecules. 

“So, then it’s working?” 

“Looks that way. Of course we’ll still need to monitor them for at least another seventy-six hours. But this could be it, Captain.” He beams at you. 

It takes you a moment to realize you’re wearing a matching smile. It feels foreign—you had forgotten your face was even capable of any expression but worry. “Keep me posted,” you tell him. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you mix me up a sedative, something that’ll keep me from dreaming.” 

45

The moment sleep claims you, it clamps its teeth into your spine. You drift in and out of consciousness, unable to escape. The ship is made of windows, the walls of glass, revealing everything. Eyes on you from all angles, space a naked wound in the background, in the foreground, everywhere you look. 

Sometimes you are running through the ship, pursued by unknown entities. Other times you’re running from an angry crew. You wake, briefly, fall asleep again, and this time little green men chase you down and strap you to a table, remove your organs and place them in see-through jars. 

The worst is when Fleurie shows up, face bloated and dead, fixed in an angry rigor mortis. He stalks you, sometimes inside the ship, most times outside, face pressed to the window every time you look out. There is a badge of rank embedded in his neck. 

You wake with your jaw clenching tight around a scream. Your comms unit is chirping, has been chirping for who knows how long. Then it falls silent, and someone is pounding at your door, yelling your name. 

As you sit up, drenched in icy sweat, dripping with it, you recognize Johnson’s voice. You feel a horror colder than space. 

46

The moment you open the door and see his face, your heart stops. It’s not that he’s pale, although he is, it’s not even the fact that he’s still in his sleep uniform. If anything, it’s the pure, raw terror in his eyes. 

“How many?” you ask, nausea growing in your stomach. It’s a marvel you’re able to speak past the fist in your throat. 

“All of them.” It’s like he sobs the words, but maybe it’s just because he’s still gasping for breath. He must have sprinted here, paging you all the way. It isn’t enough—it isn’t enough to hear it, you have to see it too, the tableau, so worn out, so tired. Your crew turns violent death into a cliché. 

“Where? 

“In their rooms.” 

You’re running now. You try to listen to him past the roaring in your ears. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. It doesn’t matter. 

“They found Ensign Savoy first,” he says, struggling for air as he jogs to keep pace with you. “I got the call. Two minutes later, Ensign Maverick’s roommate paged me. I didn’t hear about Ensign Jackson until I was halfway to your quarters. I’ve been getting updates from the med techs since.” 

Savoy was the last person you dosed. You remember that he has—had?—beautiful black eyes. You remember you had to avoid looking at them so you wouldn’t feel guilty about what you were doing. The first room you enter on this horrible haunted house tour is Savoy’s. It is a slaughterhouse. This is not what you expected when you heard the news; this makes Fleurie’s suicide look like a peaceful death. 

He hacked off bits of himself, scattered them across the floor like he was using his own finger bones to tell his fortune. Somewhere along the line, before he exsanguinated, he wrote, in smeared blood on the window, “They’re watching you too,” with a smiley face to punctuate the end of his sentence. 

Bile fills your mouth. The copper stench of blood is overpowering; it sits thickly in your nose, refuses to let any air past it. You would give yourself a moment to collect your thoughts, but this is your doing, and so you have to look at it, take it all in, let it seep in through your pores. You did this. 

Maverick’s room is better until you see her roommate, Ensign Steeple, the one who paged Johnson. She must have tried to stop Maverick. With the medics surrounding them both, and the lake of blood on the floor that could be Maverick’s or Steeple’s or, more likely, both, you’re not sure whether they’re alive or dead. So you force yourself to ask. You did this. 

“Steeple was DOA,” Johnson says, and he’s burning with anger, you can see it now, don’t know if it’s directed internally or if it’s meant for you. “Maverick had a razor blade. Steeple tried to stop her—must have been right after she paged me—and Maverick eviscerated her. Steeple is a full thirteen inches taller than her, sixty pounds heavier. Didn’t matter. It looks like, after that, Maverick beat her own head against the wall until she went unconscious. We don’t know the extent of the brain damage yet. But it doesn’t look good. Her pupils aren’t responding to light.” 

Your hands are fists, nails carving lines into your palms. This is a level of cruelty you never expected from the universe, even after all this. 

Ensign Jackson’s quarters are the closest thing to mercy you can find in this whole situation. For whatever reason—chalk it up to personality—he decided to take an entire bottle of sleeping pills. The only reason he was found so soon is that his roommate, Ensign Anders, wasn’t feeling well and called out early on his shift. With prompt medical care, it looks like Jackson might pull through. 

Once the two of you are sequestered away in your office, Johnson turns to you, eyes wild and awful. “Captain, I’m stepping down. You’ll have to choose a new ship’s doctor.” 

47

Three Years Ago

Taking the captain’s chair for the first time is one of those defining moments that will stick with you for however long—however short—you live. No sight will ever match your first view out the sparkling window, polished to a high shine that will soon be smudged with space dust, despite your velocity. For now, you are at a standstill, docked near Jupiter. 

This is where everything begins. 

The chair is leather, such a small detail to notice, soft and comfortable. It molds to you like it was built for you. It feels right in the same way that the view feels right. You experience a swelling in your chest. 

All of a sudden, you are overwhelmed by this, this joy, at seeing your crew, on standby, awaiting your orders. You can still hear the echoes of the goodbyes you shared with everyone you will never see again, no matter how well the mission goes, because this mission is forever. Once you settle on Icarus III, you are married to its soil—it will seep into your blood. After you have terraformed the planet to support life, you will dismantle your ship to build homes. And maybe, if all goes well, other ships will come, but even so you sense the finality. Sometimes distant events, however obscure, are so big you can feel their reverberations from miles away. 

This is too much for one person, the flair of your life so bright you will combust, become ash. Are you able enough for this mission? Of all the candidates, every one of them just as qualified—if not more so—you are the one sitting in the chair. Whatever that means to you, it is beyond your understanding and wholly outside of you, and you have come too far to obey the chill in your feet. So you give the order to take off, and you stand with your hands clasped behind your back as the gas giant spins away behind you. 

O, Captain, my captain, you deserve all of it, everything that happens next. 

48

Arrayed before you, around the circular table in the conference room, are eleven faces, only smudges. You can count them in the moments when the world stops lurching, stolen seconds between heart beats. You feel yourself plummet, even though you’re sitting still. Your coffee cup has become fused to your hand, always full, always emptying, the sour tang of coffee substitute a permanent fixture in your mouth. 

“We have to go, Captain. We have to leave this planet, and we have to leave now,” one of the faces insists. He’s just a larger blur, a talking head saying the same thing as all the other talking heads. 

Instinct grabs hold of these words, grips them like a life saver. Yes, it insists. Yes, turn back. Run away. “We can’t.” You don’t even know who you’re answering, them or yourself, or if the distinction matters at this point. “In all our history of space travel, there has never been an instance of such cooperation among so many companies, so much money poured into one endeavor, so many lives devoted to a single cause. Aborting this mission is unthinkable.” And anyway, you won’t be welcome back on Earth, if this mission fails. You live a life of voluntary exile, but it is exile nonetheless. 

“We have to,” someone says, and this time you experience a moment of clarity, enough to know that it’s Maslov speaking. You hold your ground as he makes his way around the table, don’t react as he grips your arm, towers over you. “Listen to me, Captain,” he begs, because he is not angry, he is scared, and that is worse. “We have had numerous casualties, multiple deaths. In this past week, we’ve had more suicides than days. Our ship’s systems are failing across the board. Whatever is happening, we don’t have the resources to handle it. Our only option is to return to Earth. At this point, we might not even make it, but if we stay here, our crew is lost—the Hiraeth is lost. That’s a bigger waste.” 

Maybe he falls silent now, or maybe he continues and you simply stop hearing him, start talking over him instead, all the while aware of the shift in the group, the unrest, the eyes looking at you without a scrap of confidence. They’ve seen your terror, wild and unrestrained; they see it in their own reflections, every morning. All they can think of is the pain in their guts that feels endless, and the thought of home as the only possible mercy, full stop. 

“We are not going home,” you say, like you’re talking to a toddler, and he pulls away as he starts to cry, this man twice your size. Objectively, you know that the sight alone should destroy your resolve. But if you break now, you will not stop breaking; you will disintegrate. It doesn’t matter what you want—an end to the sleepless nights and the stims and the coffee substitute and the agony in your gut. It doesn’t matter. You are more afraid of running away than you are of anything else. 

So you shake your head a second time, address the entirety of the room with all the steel you can muster. “Each of you was chosen for this mission because Command believes that you have what it takes. I know this is harder than you had anticipated; none of us were trained for this. But we don’t have a choice. We will figure out what is happening—we will fix it. We will colonize Icarus III if it’s the last thing we do.” 

It’s all a lie, your claim that you will fix this. There is nothing left to fix. The cure was your last chance, you know that; there will be no other attempt. 

49

If disaster reports were a trickle before, they are a cascade now. Except everything melds, so it begins to feel like the same malfunction, over and over. First the less essential systems are affected, nothing so big and important as the grav drives. The mixers in the galleys fail to turn on; the storage systems in the pantry stop functioning; the doors to the cafeterias won’t open. 

Then a jump to something a little bigger. Ship-wide comms begin to malfunction in strange ways. Crew members receive transmissions from other crew members who then insist—cross my heart—they never said anything. Others won’t hear actual transmissions, important ones. Screens fizz out and die, only to be in perfect working order the next day. An endless litany, a new disaster on the hour, every hour, and you’ve stopped trying to keep up with them. 

Sometimes you sleep, always you dream. There becomes no distinction between your nightmares and your waking life. They have bled across the borders; the quarantine is breached. You have stopped begging, in your private moments, for an end to this. You have ceased to believe in any sort of end. 

You don’t know what it says about you, that you let this go on another week. 

Your breaking point comes only when you grab a shower, your first in who even remembers how long, and the chem spray scalds so much worse than usual, because it is not chem spray, it is a special cleaner meant to keep the chambers in the engine bay from rusting, which leaves burns on your back, red and blistered, even after the burn gel is applied. Hitting rock bottom doesn’t bring you any sort of relief. It gives you a sense of release only in the way that finally sucking in a lungful of water when you are drowning brings release. Something vital in you stops screaming, and the sudden silence echoes. 

It is meant to. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks