Planet Eyes: Part Two

For Planet Eyes: Part One, click here.

9

Until your comm pings, you had not realized you were staring intently out the window, like you were looking for someone. Mercifully, from where you sit at your desk, you cannot see the planet. If you were to step to the window and look down, it would be there, its atmosphere an orange glow. You don’t remember exactly how it was possible, but mere days ago, you thought it was beautiful. Now it is an infected wound you want to keep covered—you tell yourself you will only feel it if you look at it. 

You glance up at the clock, an action that has become repetitive and meaningless, your good luck charm, your personal mantra, something you use to ward off the creeping dread. 09:15 hours. An hour and fifteen minutes late. But you know who it is before he even speaks. 

“Captain, I’m sorry we’re behind with the blood test results.” Johnson sounds out of breath, like he’s been running. During your various interactions with him, you have found he invariably seems nervous. It sets you on edge, more so than you already were. “There was a mishap in the lab. Ensign Halloway had a panic attack. She dropped Maugrim’s blood samples, all of them, and we had to track him down to get another set. Should have checked in with you sooner, but we were focused on cleanup. The lab looked like a crime scene.” 

You wish he didn’t use so many words to say so little. But your ears do perk up at the mention of Halloway’s distress. Even though it is, by far, not high on your list of priorities, you make a mental note to check in with her, if only because you feel her panic attack will somehow corroborate your growing fear, proof to yourself, if to no one else, that you are not going crazy. You should at least send her to Lane, the ship’s head psychiatrist. 

“Lieutenant, what were the results?” You think that you’ve succeeded in keeping the impatience from your voice. If you had been able to sleep better last night, you tell yourself, you wouldn’t be so on edge. 

“They were a little strange,” he says haltingly, and all of a sudden you realize that this is not a conversation you want to be having over comms, if only because you want to be able to gauge his face, not just his tone, want to read his body language and see if he’s hiding something from you. 

It is an uncharacteristically paranoid thought; you act on it anyway. “Hold on. I’ll be at the lab in five to hear this in person.” 

You leave your coffee on your desk, barely touched. It has turned stale and bitter, anyway. It’s possible that you poured it more for the comfort of holding a steaming cup than for the caffeine itself. Your pulse is unusually present in your throat as you rush to the lift and ride it up to the next deck, counting the seconds like money. 

By the time you make it back to the lab, you’re out of breath and Johnson has almost managed to catch his. “So you said the results were strange,” you say, as if he needs to be reminded. 

“I didn’t, I didn’t mean that they were strange in a concerning way. It’s not–it’s not an emergency.” 

“Just show me.” 

He tilts the screen on his desk toward you and scrolls through several lines of text to a set of columns. You can make out numbers and abbreviations, more word soup, to you, than anything else. “Everyone’s stress levels were elevated, but yours in particular, Captain.” He gives you a disapproving glance. “You’ll wear yourself thin.” 

He’s stalling, a little voice in your head insists. Stalling because he’s trying to hide something. You fight the temptation to snatch the screen from him and analyze it on your own time, just so he doesn’t lie to you. 

A deep breath, because you do not work on a ship full of liars, and you know that. 

 “But also, it looks like we made note that your blood showed poor oxygenation,” he continues, blissfully unaware of your thoughts. “It’s not enough to be worried about. We weren’t able to test Lieutenant Maugrim’s blood before Ensign Halloway dropped it, so we called him in for a fresh batch of blood samples. While we had him, we checked his blood oxygen again, and it had returned to acceptable parameters. It looks like, whatever it was, it was a result of an equipment malfunction while on the surface, rather than an underlying medical condition. I mean, check back in if you’re not feeling well, by all means.” 

He stares off into the distance for a moment, lost in some passing thought. 

You fight the urge to rub your temples. All of a sudden you are so tired; your fatigue rests like gravity in your bones. All you can think of is your bed and how much you want to sleep and how afraid you are to close your eyes. 

“The last thing we noticed,” he continues, “is that it looks like your immune systems are working extra hard. Because we were concerned that you might have been exposed to some sort of uncatalogued toxin on the surface of the planet, we took the liberty of sampling our own blood for comparison. Turns out we’re fighting off something too. My guess is, there’s a new cold mutation going around. I think it’s a good idea to tell everyone to start coming in for check ups, and we’ll compare notes between medical bays to nip this thing in the bud.” 

Colds used to be so normal on Earth, you reflect. Here they mean something more sinister. The strains that joined you on your stellar mission you have shared and reshared, despite your best efforts to keep the environment as clean and hygienic as possible. They have mutated and mutated again, with no end in sight, each round a little stranger, a bit more difficult to fight off. The common cold stopped feeling so common a year ago. Originally, medical bays A through C were all set up to serve everyone on the ship, each bay providing for its own five decks. After it became apparent that the cold strains weren’t going away, and were only going to cause more grief in the future—resulting, even, in two deaths—you dedicated Medical Bay C to full-time research with an eye to eradicating all shipboard diseases. 

This thought is sobering. It puts matters into perspective. You have such a strong immune system, it had not even occurred to you that you could simply be coming down with something. After all, a sense of malaise is a common symptom of a number of ailments. Objectively, you know it doesn’t make sense that a cold, however mutated, could cause everyone on your surface mission to hallucinate the same event. But it is the first explanation to give you even a measure of relief, and so you cling to it. 

First chance you get, you will ask for a full work up, down to the marrow. It’s time to stop giving in to this fear, to stop growing lazy with anxiety. You beat it on Earth when you were young, and you will beat it again now. The shadows in your closet took on epic proportions, but they were only shadows. 

10

Three Years Ago

The Hiraeth hurtles through space with the force of a wrecking ball and the precision of an artist. Down in its belly, the nuclear fission reactor burns hot, trapped in the glowing heart of subspace, held suspended by modern magic. When you stand among the firing engines, in this multi-dimensional ship, and feel the hot wind on your face, you still don’t believe that this ability to mold space like plastic, to slip in and out of its dominion, could be classified as science. This is something other, something wonderful and awful. 

Though you can’t feel it from where you stand, you have been told your ship travels like a rock skipping over still water, which is not entirely accurate, but evokes a powerful image all the same—the Hiraeth, 80 kilograms per cubic meter, gliding serenely over the surface of a pond. In reality, you are sliding in and out of subspace, a scalpel in the hands of a neurosurgeon. 

When physicists discovered a new dimension and engineers learned to tap it, that was how they originally planned for you to travel, all the way to Icarus III. In theory, this would have had you arriving at your destination in a matter of months, rather than years, but it is one thing to discover subspace, where the rules of physics don’t apply, and where light speed is only a suggestion, a speed limit with no one to enforce it, and it is another to commandeer subspace, to hold any lasting power over it. 

The simple fact is that the entirety of the Hiraeth is too big to hold in subspace for very long. The strain would be too much, the power flow unsustainable. So you can only visit in bursts, enough to travel just over a lightyear at a time. You skim, dip your toes, your ship’s interface automatically adjusting speed and course to augment your pilots, who are skilled beyond reason, and you would think you would know, on some level, where you are at any given time, if you are in space or under it, around or above or however it works. But the Hiraeth is impervious to physical changes, shields you from phase shift, from time warp, from every nasty quantum event hypothesized by naysayers. You have to fill in the gaps yourself, to imagine what’s happening in the black beyond your windows. 

Somewhere in the void behind you lies Earth, a footnote in your personal history. Before you waits Icarus III, your glowing future. 

11

You know your feet make noise as you walk the surface of Icarus III. Impact produces vibrations produces sound, the natural progression on any planet with an atmosphere. You know this, and it doesn’t matter. You can hear nothing beyond your breathing inside your helmet, nothing beyond the thumping of your heart. All is a blur, a roar so loud it’s silent. 

Your hands tremble on the vidcorder. A sideways glance tells you that your companions are not paying attention to you. Their gazes remain fixed on the horizon, on their scanners, on the shuttle behind you, growing distant as you walk. It is a hard thing, to leave your shuttle behind, to leave your safety, made harder by the knowledge that this is your call, your command, your fault if all goes wrong. Which it will. You have no proof for this, but nevertheless, you are burdened with a sense of certainty that overwhelmed you the instant you stepped off that shuttle, like diving headfirst into icy cold water and losing your breath. It was one thing to sign up for a mission of a lifetime knowing you would all be risking death. These were possibilities that were painted in the broadest of brushstrokes. It is a different matter to see the tableau before you, in all its intricate detail. 

The horizon is expansive, broader than an Arizona desert. It goes on forever, no end in sight, so flat you cannot even observe the gradual curve of the planet. You envision the changes you will impart, the flora and fauna you will introduce. Lizards will thrive well in this environment. You have cacti for storing water and for producing rich fruit. Everything you have brought with you is a joyous occasion, every single living thing, whether in seed form or cryogenically preserved embryo, everything a marriage between God’s creation and man’s imagination, and it will work. It should. 

It is, of course, so very doomed. 

While this trip to the surface is a two-part mission—the first, to demarcate the spots where two terraforming machines will be built; the second, to outline the area where your crew will begin digging for the water table—you have added another distinct part. For you it has become the main goal. Despite your scientific mind, composed of numbers and algorithms and logic, you cannot focus on your assigned task, because it is a mission that presupposes calm. In this moment, your sense of imminent doom supersedes your sense of duty. You find you have, however unconsciously, however unprofessionally, relegated your portion of the tasks at hand to your crew. 

Ordinarily, you would feel shame at this, but there is no room for shame. Fear fills the expanse of you, presses up against the edges and peers out your eyes. It wears you. You are the masquerade, forced calm and professionalism—fear is the reality. 

At first, despite your jumpiness, every square inch of your skin another stretch of live wire, you do not notice the shifting cluster of shadows on the horizon. Or rather, you do not register it as anything abnormal. Your Earth-trained brain, falling back on all its instinctual resources, logs it only as a passing shadow, a bird overhead, perhaps, or a plane. When you are on Earth, surrounded by the known, even if you are the type for vigilance, there will always be stimuli that you notice but do not observe. Your brain can only take in so much information; it learns what to filter out. So it takes you a moment, maybe two, to fully realize. You are not on Earth anymore—there are no planes and birds here. 

By the time you look, really look, at the area of interest, the moment has passed and the horizon is bare. There are any number of reasons why you might have been seeing things, dust in your eyelashes, for instance, floaters or spots where the bright sun has singed your retinas. But you do not think you are seeing things, not in that sense. You are, of course, seeing things. 

Why do humans use phrases like this, employing normal language to indicate the abnormal, to say you are seeing things as a way to imply the opposite? It makes no sense. Everyone sees things. Some people see things that aren’t there. 

As if to counter the screaming neurons in your brain, the firing synapses—and maybe misfiring, who even knows anymore?—you snap back into focus and remind yourself of the many tasks at hand, the ones in the moment, and the ones stretching into the future. In many respects, the lives of thousands rest upon your shoulders, everyone affected by this mission, in one way or another, the crew and the families they will build and the people who will come after and everyone who walks this soil. When you consider the future, in all its splendor, everything humanity has planned, fear seems such a small factor, only a blip. 

That’s when you see the shadows again, coalescing. This time, when your eyes swing back to the horizon, the shadows do not flee. You study their outlines, their form, as you hold up your vidcorder before you like a weapon, a warning, come no closer. They are layered and blurred, and there are so many, overlapping each other, that in the end there is only one shadow. You don’t know how to describe it, not in this instance. I will spare you the trouble. Maybe, if given the time and the chance, in some near and alternate future, you might sit down and consider that they had the same visual effect on you as a swarm of birds, tight and synchronized and vast. They are not a swarm of birds, and they don’t really look like a swarm of birds. Arguably, they might not even be a swarm of anything. 

You have this strange moment of calm as you watch the shadows, when you consider that this might be a trick of the lighting, that you might be witnessing nothing more than this planet’s equivalent to a dust devil—though the name, given the circumstances, feels a little too apt. 

Regardless, the moment passes. When you stop your vidcorder and replay the footage, after the shadows have disappeared as quickly as they came, you realize with a growing sense of frustration that, while your eyes were pointed toward the horizon, your lens had inadvertently fallen earthward, revealing only dirt. You have no evidence, no clear and solid proof, not on your end. A drop of sweat slides down your temple, trapped inside your helmet, so you can’t wipe it away. “Did you see that?” you ask, your voice unruly, your fear evident. You take a deep breath, feel that breath like a caged bird in your lungs and release it like a plea. 

“See what?” Markowitz asks, her eyes scanning the empty horizon. 

You are the source of your anxiety, of course you are.  

Then Parsons speaks, voice soft. “I saw it too. My camera was pointed at it the whole time.” 

For an uncomfortable moment, you have to fight the almost overwhelming urge to rush forward and hug her. “Show me,” you say, your voice so forceful it startles even you. 

“It’ll have to wait till we’re on the ship.” She indicates her EVA helmet. “I installed an internal vidcorder so I could have my hands free.” 

There had been talks, when the suits were still in the conceptual phase, of installing cameras in the helmets. But the admiral refused to sign off on the extra expenditure, insisted that there would be sufficient scans run to make up for the lack of visual processing, and anyway, the ship was being equipped with plenty of handheld cameras. Parsons’ presence of mind, to modify a camera in this way, impresses you—you should have gone behind the admiral’s back and done this sooner. Without the promise of footage to corroborate what you witnessed, you would have no way to prove your sanity, to yourself and to others. Now you will have something solid to report to the admiral, with evidence to back it up. 

12

The blood pressure cuff is too tight around your arm, feels like a hand squeezing you. You have to work to sit still. “Captain,” Johnson asks. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes, I’m okay.” The words come out in a rush. Whether you’re actually okay or not, you don’t know yet. Right now your thoughts are focused on the camera, which is making its way to the tech lab, safe in Maugrim’s possession. Not long and you’ll be able to review the footage. You try to imagine the admiral’s face when you show him what you saw, when you prove to him that he was wrong, but you find you cannot envision his reaction—it is a mystery to you, completely outside of your scope. 

A small, sharp pain in your arm draws you back to the present, and you realize Johnson was speaking to you, must have been warning you that he was about to draw blood. When you look down, you see that the pressure cuff is gone, though you still feel its presence. There’s a small clamp on your finger, monitoring your blood oxygenation. You glance at it meaningfully. “Are my levels normal?”  

He checks the readout, then shakes his head. “They’re lower than they were after your first surface mission, though not by much. Your carbon dioxide levels are also higher than they should be. It’s a little concerning. It’s not—you’re not suffering from hypoxia, but it’s too close for comfort. I recommend you have someone inspect your suits and your oxygen tanks, a new pair of eyes that might catch whatever flaw in the design you’ve been missing.” 

You nod as you consider this, run his words over and over in your head until you have, at last, caught the elusive thought you’ve been seeking. Once you find it, you realize it’s silly that you forgot it in the first place, such an obvious thing to ask. “Out of curiosity,” you begin, which is the worst way to begin any question if you’re trying not to sound like you’re hiding something, “can decreased oxygen levels cause hallucinations?” 

“Yes.” He looks at you oddly. “Yes, they can. Additionally, it’s not uncommon to experience feelings of euphoria when suffering from conditions like hypoxia or anoxia. Why do you ask?” 

You almost have to laugh. If you had been experiencing euphoria, you do not think you would be in this room, listening to your heartbeat, loud in your ears. You would still be on the surface, basking in the light of an alien sun. What you all witnessed was not a hallucination, you know this, so you’re not sure why you even asked in the first place. Maybe so you could tell yourself you were diligent, that you explored all the options. But you know what you’re afraid of, what you saw. 

“No reason,” you say. You scan the room. Parsons and Markowitz are in different sections of the medical bay, separated from you by dividers that are clear now, as their default, but can be set to varying levels of translucency, even made opaque, as the needs of the patients and the staff dictate. In the far corner, Markowitz looks on the verge of a panic attack, like she will be here for a while. A med tech is rubbing her back. Across from her, Parsons has an unhealthy glow about her, like she’s carrying an electric charge. 

For a moment you’re tempted to tell the doc what happened, to voice the confession that’s on the tip of your tongue, ready to be spoken. You think it would take a weight off your shoulders, to share this with someone else. 

You turn your gaze to Markowitz, make sure Johnson sees you looking, so he knows what you’re talking about. “I’m worried about my crew, is all.”

“I’m sure you already know that I had to treat several crew members for minor injuries after two separate fights yesterday.”

 “I know,” you say. When the reports crossed your desk and you signed off on the necessary punishment—two days house arrest, followed by a month of hard labor—you remember sitting back in your seat, unsettled by the fact of two physical altercations in one week, when your last incident was a year ago. The significance is not lost on you. 

“Over the past couple days, I’ve seen a rise in psychosomatic illness,” he adds, keeping his voice low. “A handful of people have come in complaining of numerous, unverifiable ailments. One patient was convinced she had a spider living in her ear canal. Another claimed she was infected with the bubonic plague. Med C is still looking into the mutated virus, though I think it will be a while before they have anything to go on. I’m concerned about the neurological symptoms people are manifesting.” 

“Hopefully it won’t get much worse,” you say. 

You make me laugh. 

13

You’re beelining it to your office to view the footage when Commander Fleurie stops you outside your door. The  moment you set eyes on your first officer, you know something’s wrong. His usual perfect posture has been replaced with hunched shoulders, as if he’s waiting for a blow. His normally pristine hair is disheveled, his uniform rumpled, his shoes scuffed. This jars you—a paradigm shift. You are stepping off a plane, expecting yourself to be in one country, yet finding yourself in another. 

Cold fills you, a resurgence of fear. Resurgence is maybe a bad word. You haven’t stopped being afraid. You only forgot, for a handful of moments. All you can think of is the data strip clutched in your sweaty palm, and the need, the need, the need to see what it is you saw on the planet, to play it in slow motion, in reverse, to memorize its lines and discern its meaning. But Fleurie is standing there, blocking your passage, so you will have to deal with him first. 

“Can I help you?” you ask. It comes out a little colder than you meant for it to. 

“There was an incident in Cafeteria B, about five minutes ago,” he says. “I tried to comm you, but it wouldn’t go through. I think it would be best if you saw it for yourself.” 

Another burst of fear, this one colder. The comms system is an intricate one, rigged with backups upon backups; it never fails. It always works. It has to. The success of this entire mission rides on everyone’s ability to communicate. Fleurie’s talking about it like he tried to make a cell phone call but didn’t have enough bars. It’s just not possible. You must have heard the beep of your comms, and in your distraction, filtered it out. With this thought, you allow yourself a breath to ease the tightness in your chest. Of course that’s what happened. 

Wordless, you step past him into your office and lock the data tab in one of your desk drawers. Only you and Fleurie know the codes to these drawers, to your office; it will be safe while you’re gone. Still, as he leads you toward the cafeteria, you fight the urge to run back to your office and grab the data tab. You want to keep it, to carry it on your person so no one can possibly tamper with it. Somehow you resist the temptation, but your palms are slick with sweat by the time you reach the cafeteria. 

You had expected whatever happened there to become immediately apparent, displayed before you, Exhibits A through E. Instead you find chaos.

The galley cook, Ensign Montez, is bleeding, gore dripping down his chin from a smashed nose. Vessels have broken in his eyes, leaving what little you can see beneath all the swelling a terrifying red. The distress on his face is almost more palpable than the smell of blood. At first it looks like it could have been an accident. Maybe he fell and hit his head on one of the sturdy counters. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has sustained a serious injury from a simple blunder on this voyage. You think, with a pang, of Lieutenant Nelson. And then you force yourself to stop thinking about him. 

Fleurie taps you on the shoulder and pulls you away from Montez and the crowd of med techs, hands gloved and filled with bloody gauze. He leads you to the pantry, where the raw materials are stored. You say raw materials because it’s not food, never grew in soil or pumped blood through veins. What this storage unit contains is a mass of glorified chemicals, nutrient solutions and component particulates, necessary for food construction on the molecular level. The vegetables you do get from the hydroponics bay make up a meager portion of your meals. So the cook is less a cook and more a mad scientist. 

Today the storage unit contains an unexpected addition. A man sits hunched in the back, like he’s hiding, his eyes wide. His arms move spasmodically—the more you look at him, the more you realize that he can’t sit still. Every muscle in his body seems to be moving of its own accord. 

You recognize him immediately as Ensign MacAvoy, a promising recruit you handpicked for the mission. You remember being especially impressed by how well he expresses himself, how level-headed and quick on his feet he is. 

The person in front of you may wear the same face, but you do not know this man. You realize he’s mumbling, and at first you hear only gibberish, but then you begin to make out words, one or two at a time, until you have enough to string together into something cohesive. “Poisoning the food, the brains,” is one line. He’s repeating a series of phrases like a mantra, so gradually you’re able to pick out his meaning. “They get in through the ears, and when you’re asleep they rip out bits of you. I had to stop him. He was mixing the food.” And then more gibberish–things you can’t make out even though he’s repeated them a dozen times. But you’ve heard what you needed to hear, enough to piece together what you think might have happened. 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks