New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!
She felt tears suddenly well up in her eyes, and looked down.
“Take a moment, Ms. Nor. When you can, we can continue,” Kernos said soothingly. “But may I ask why you’re upset?”
She could not get herself to admit it. But now that she had put into words just what that thing was, she felt a profound sense of horror.
It had been a baby. A baby being that wasn’t human, but that was alive, that wanted to exist. It had wanted so badly to exist, and all she had done for it, rather than try to solve the problem, was to convince it to go back. At the time, it had seemed so reasonable. ‘Just don’t do that’. But what choice did it have?
It was not a human baby, but something intelligent, something beyond her understanding, and it had understood its own fate. Yet that didn’t mean it had any power over it.
In a horrible moment of clarity, she knew, on some level, that it had not even asked to be put into that situation. Or maybe it was just her own guilt, consuming her . . .
She took some deep breaths, struggling to calm herself. After a few moments, she raised her head, looking back over the room. Her eyes might be moist and red, but she had hardened herself as best she could.
“I’m okay now,” she said, avoiding the question.
Admiral Vandoss signaled. “May I ask the young lady a question?”
Kernos ascented, and Vandoss stood. “Ms. Nor, there is no need for you to be tortured over everything that occurred. I only need to ask you one question; did Captain Brooks send you to speak to Michal- to the thing that was in Michal Denso’s body?”
“No,” she said.
“Did he ever task you with any action involving Michal Denso? In solving that issue?”
“No,” she repeated.
“I am finished,” he said, sitting.
Nuuan spoke again. “Ms. Nor – if not Captain Brooks, what made you go back onto MS-29 after your initial hysteria upon going onto the station?”
She swallowed. “Ambassador Kell and I spoke. It . . . we both felt something was wrong. I couldn’t understand it, but when we spoke, it helped me understand just what was going on.”
That brought some murmurs of surprise.
“Are you saying,” Nuuan said slowly. “That Ambassador Kell of the Shoggoths told you to go kill Michal Denso?”
“It told me that I had to deal with it . . . or it would,” she said. “And . . . and that’s what happened. I didn’t kill Michal Denso or achieve . . . anything, really.”
Cressin threw up her hands. “We come to this every time. These claims that some sort of supernatural force killed this man. But none of this is logical, none of it can be proven. Ambassador Kell was not even on MS-29 when Denso died-“
“Nevertheless,” Director Freeman said softly. “The Ambassador told me the same thing, to my face.”
The Tribunal fell silent, watching the man.
“Permission to speak to the witness?”
Kernos nodded, and Apollonia saw that everyone seemed spellbound by the man somehow.
He rose, walking closer. No one else had done that, that she had seen.
He stood near her. “Do not worry if it sounds silly, Ms. Nor. Please tell me what happened in that room. Everything . . . in that space and beyond.”
Apollonia swallowed again, but her throat was dry. “I communed with Michal Denso,” she said softly. “I tried and failed to convince it not to be born, but it wanted to be. It . . . it wanted to live. I don’t know what it was like for it before, but it was aware even before it was in that state, I think. And whatever place, whatever state it was in before that, it did not like it. It was like . . . torture.”
“And after you could not convince it?”
“Kell appeared,” she said, her voice barely a whisper now. “Just suddenly. It wasn’t in the room, we were . . . in a different space. Some place where Denso looked like a normal man, and . . .”
“And then?”
She felt the tears burst from her eyes. “And then Kell killed it,” she said. “It ripped that . . . that baby apart. I felt its pain, I heard it cry out. But there was no one there for it. No one helped. Not even me.”
Twisting in her seat, she looked up at Kell, sitting in the observation seats above.
“We committed infanticide!” Apollonia yelled to Kell. “We did it! You and me – I knew what you were going to do and I let you. By the Dark . . . I knew, and I let you.” She looked away, struggling to stop the flow of tears, as she had so often done.
She’d long ago learned how to hide them when she was angry.
She heard the gasps of the assessors, murmurs arising among their number, their eyes stuck fast, not on her, but on Kell.
The Shoggoth was looking at her, she could feel its gaze even without looking, but its face was entirely impassive, carved from granite.
“In some senses,” it said. “You are correct.”
The voices all faded, the silence giving testimony to the horror.
“But not entirely,” Kell continued. “It was, as you say, an unborn leviathan. For lack of a better term, it is what we must use. It was not, however, like any child, animal or human, that you think of. It was not a being ignorant of the world – innocent in every way.”
Kell shook his head. “Before it even anchored itself to the wretched shell that had been Michal Denso, it knew more than all of your kind combined. It understood the universe in a way that even I never will.
“And it knew, as did I, that its entry into our reality would kill everyone on MS-29 and the Craton. These facts meant nothing to it. We meant nothing to it. It would have done this in full knowledge that we were all intelligent.”
“Ambassador – you include yourself in this theoretical list of casualties?” the Dessei representative asked.
“That is correct,” Kell replied. “I would not have survived.
“And I must add that I did not truly kill it. It is not possible to kill such a being as that, even in such a state.”
“What is the phrase you would use?”
“I returned it to non-existence,” Kell replied.
“Euphemisms are a terrible thing when used thusly, Ambassador,” Cressin said, her eyes narrowing.
“It would simply be incorrect to say that it was killed when it is beyond life and death,” Kell replied.
The voices of the assessors were distraught, confused.
“What does that even mean?” one man asked. He looked horrified, but also unable to even quantify what he’d just heard.
“This is insanity,” another man said.
“It makes no sense,” a third chimed. “We have no evidence of any of this!”
“Quiet,” Chairman Chung said. His voice echoed, and calmness returned to the chamber. Apollonia looked to him, and in his old eyes she could see the same profound sense of horror that still was inside her.
“As . . . as upsetting as this is,” he said. “It is not . . . relevant to the question at hand. I . . . These statements are truly disturbing, and are novel to this court. To our laws – to our very understanding of reality itself. But that cannot distract us from what we do know.”
He took a deep breath and sighed. “We will take a recess for two hours.”
Apollonia felt a flood of relief and guilt. The horror had mostly bled from her, leaving her feeling empty, and it took a lot of effort to stand. She could not make herself look at Kell, but she still felt its eyes burning into her.
Angry with her, she thought. Well, she was pretty damn angry with it as well. Guess that made them even.
Other Terrestrial 