@mctiller is having another writing competition and I need to get to work on the Hammercalled fiction if I want to release it before the heat death of the universe. This one happened to be thematic to Hammercalled, though I'm cheating a little, because the prompt said Earth and we're not focusing on Earth. We're also not talking about what happens after the pilot gets home (it said "returns", not "has returned", so I think we're fine on a technicality there), but rather what happens leading up to the actual travel itself.
The ark drifted in space. Lazlowe was too afraid to touch any of the buttons, his hands held up to guard his face. He remembered the eye, the terrible eye, the great gaping maw at its center staring at him. He knew that they had gone so far astray. So very, very, far.
He gathered himself for a moment, looking over the panels and the display. Everything had gone smoothly, if it wasn't for the vision. He felt the shakes of norepinephrine beginning to set in.
But he was here.
He was live.
The eye–the Eye–was gone.
He accessed the stores. The drop pods were still active, and he was closer to the planet than expected. He checked the trajectory on the monitor, his hands becoming increasingly steady as he distanced himself from the terror.
It was just a figment of his imagination. It wasn't real. It couldn't be real.
Or could there be something watching in the infinitude of the void?
The thought wormed its way into his brain, resurfacing even as he focused on manual tasks to keep it away. He was at a perfect trajectory, even closer to the planet than they had thought would have happened. The ark would do the rest for him.
He pulled up the scan data.
It was interesting, he thought. The world below him had looked dead from so far away, but up close he could see the oceans and the mountains. He wondered if the brilliant teal surface was water or some plant analogue. Clouds hovered over the world. It looked a lot like home.
But he couldn't visit it. The ark didn't have the fuel to go down and up again. He would slingshot past it once, then return.
He heard the distant rumble of machinery, and startled. He closed his eyes to try to close off the specter that returned to his fancy, but it still hovered there. He froze in terror.
"Drop pods away."
It was just the ark doing its job. He looked out the window of the bridge, looking at the falling pods. Each carried hundreds of digital minds and the hardware to build them new bodies. He was sowing the seeds of Eden.
He saw something, a flash from the world below. He knew there shouldn't be anything down there. The sensors started lighting up across the board. Then the projectile passed through the atmosphere in a streak of flame, crashing into one of the pods as it flew.
He was the first to see signs of life on another planet.
The ark burned hard, trying to complete its jump before being shot out of space. More projectiles arced up from the surface, most missing. A few hit the pods, and he wondered if whoever lived on the planet would be able to find the surviving pods, and what they would do.
He wondered if they could follow him home.
He wondered if they knew about the Eye.
He wondered if they would ever know who he was.
For a moment, he thought that he could be just a reflection of the Eye for them. Their visceral reaction to the thing that lurked in the void.
The fire subsided, and he looked again at the planet. It was peaceful again. Apparently they didn't track the ark as a threat. The vessel turned rimward in its orbit, pointing back toward home. He only had a short while left.
As he sketched out a crude image of the Eye, it occurred to him that he might not survive the return journey. He reached over to the cabin recorder, and turned it on.
The switch locked in the engaged position with a satisfying click.
He stammered for a moment. What would he say?
He blurted out things about the world he had found. That many, if not all, of the pods had been destroyed. He confirmed the greatest finding in their history, in their science, with a casual sentence.
Then he described the Eye, where he could find words for its ineffable hunger, its inexorable malice.
He found himself sobbing like a child when it came time to activate the drive again.
"Five... four... three... two..."
Light, noise, and stillness. He recalled how otherworldly the space between felt. Not quite real.
Then it blinked.