An orderly came into the observation room. “I need you to follow me, Ms. Nor,” he said.

He whisked her off to a room where several officials from the Justice Bureau were waiting. They gave her instructions, but she felt suddenly almost overcome with nervousness.

“Remember to be concise in your answers,” one said.

“If you are uncomfortable answering a question, you do have the right to refuse,” another said.

“Can I just refuse to go out?” she asked.

“You may,” one told her carefully. “But there may be repercussions for refusing such a summons. I highly recommend that you consider the service you will be doing for

the Sapient Union. This is part of your duty as a citizen.”

“Okay,” she said, feeling light-headed.

They told her other things that she immediately forgot, then took her through a door. She found herself in the courtroom, and her knees felt weak.

With exaggerated motion, she forced herself to move with confidence. Never show weakness, she thought to herself. Pretending she was back on Vitriol, in an area rife with cutthroats and thieves, helped. She couldn’t ever show weakness back then, and she refused to now.

Just because these people were government officials with more power than her entire civilization . . . well, that line of thought didn’t help.

It seemed ungodly loud as she sat down in the chair behind the witness stand. All the eyes were on her.

“Apollonia Nor of New Vitriol, you are hereby sworn in as a material witness,” the Chairman told her. He continued on, but her mind caught on a point.

“Excuse me,” she said, once he had stopped. “I’m an SU citizen now. Please note that.” Her head swam with nervousness; she’d just corrected the triple-centenarian master judge.

There was a silence at her words for a moment, and she imagined everyone was looking at her with horror, contempt, or a mix of both.

“So noted,” Chung said with a nod. He seemed entirely undisturbed by her correction. “Do you vow to tell only what you believe to be the facts and truths of what you have witnessed?”

“I -I do,” she said, swallowing heavily.

“Very well. If the Tribunal has questions, they may now pose them.”

Kernos spoke first. “First, Ms. Nor, may I offer the apologies of this tribunal for having to take part in such a difficult event as this, when you are such a new member of our Union.”

“Ah . . . thanks,” she replied.

“Now, if I may – what happened on MS-29? I know you may not have all the information, but I would like to hear in your words what transpired.”

She hesitated, trying to collect her thoughts. “We went to the station. Captain Brooks wanted me to come along to meet Verena Urle – Dr. Urle. Something felt really weird about the place. It was . . . dark.”

“Dark?” Kernos asked. “Do you mean in some sense related to your Cerebral Reading abilities?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “No one else seemed to notice it. Except Ambassador Kell – on approach it agreed with me that it was weird. Cursed, is the word it used to describe the feeling.”

That got some interest; Nuuan’s crest rose, and so did Cressin’s eyebrow.

“When you went onboard was when you had an episode and passed out, is that correct?” Kernos asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I see. Do you have any idea why?”

“I thought at the time that it was the suffering on the station. It was very, very real, but my perception of it wasn’t clear-cut. Not like a dark room and a lighted room. After awhile I realized that the darkness wasn’t just on the station, and it wasn’t coming from the place – it was just coming from Michal Denso.”

She shook her head, the feelings and memories so alien, so against her own real experiences that they seemed false even to her. Yet she knew they were real, would have sworn everything on it. She had.

“Denso was . . . he was something else. I worked up my courage to go onto the station and tried to . . . well I tried to convince him to not do what he – it? – was doing. It didn’t . . . it didn’t work.”

“Excuse me,” the woman, Cressin interjected. “Is ‘him’ Michal Denso?”

“Yes,” she clarified.

“From what we have heard, you did not have such a conversation with Michal Denso. When do you say this happened?”

“When I went into the room with him. Dr. Urle was with me.”

“It is Dr. Urle who says that no such communication took place,” Kernos added, frowning. “Are you saying that she is lying?”

“What did she say happened?” Apollonia asked.

No one answered, merely staring at her.

Idiot! They wouldn’t tell her what someone else said if she wasn’t cleared to see it . . . And clearly Verena had not told them of the communion with whatever Denso was. There were only three witnesses of that, after all – Verena, Kell, and herself. At least still alive.

“I mean – well, I’m a CR,” she said. “It was . . . I don’t know how to describe it – spooky action at a distance?”

“That phrase was once used to describe quantum entanglement,” Cressin noted. “I do not believe it serves here.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Well it’s the best . . . phrase I can use to describe it,” Apollonia said, catching herself mid-sentence, trying not to sound hostile.

“Some kind of extra-sensory communication method?” the Dessei, Nuuan, asked. His voice sounded dry. “Like telepathy?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that,” she said. “But I suppose like that.”

There was a moment of people looking back and forth, mumbling to each other. She looked at Brooks, who regarded her calmly. Seeing her gaze, he offered a soft, reassuring smile. It did make her feel a little better.

“Were you then, responsible for Michal Denso’s seeming death?” Nuuan asked her.

“No,” she said.

“What was your goal?”

“To convince him to stop what he was doing,” she said. “He was . . . changing.”

“Please elaborate,” Cressin commanded.

“That wasn’t Michal Denso. I don’t know what else to call it, but the man who was called that was . . . mostly gone. Subsumed . . . or . . . maybe consumed? He was something else. Something . . . from the Dark.”

She’d never considered herself religious, but the terminology came to her readily. A part of her felt suddenly humiliated for even bringing it up, but then – it was true. That thing wasn’t Denso. Or at least, it mostly wasn’t. Maybe he was in there in a sense, she couldn’t even parse it all out in her own mind.

“What do you believe this being wished to do?” Nuuan asked.

“Be born,” she said. “It wasn’t in our reality. But it wanted to be . . .”

She saw Director Freeman’s eyes glint with excitement. He was leaning forward in his seat.

“If it was, though, it would have killed everyone on MS-29,” she continued. “Not even because it wanted to. It was . . .”

“It was what?”

“It was a baby Leviathan.”

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.