Chapter 20: Judgment
Zim stared as a rocky blue planet loomed on the horizon. Judgementia, the planet and what it symbolized, had always been something he'd tried to banish from his pak. This time re-encoding was the least of his worries, however.
Claret eyes darted to the rear feed. A swarm of ships with weapons trained on his ship greeted him. It was obviously too late to turn back now. That they hadn't fired already was a miracle.
His eyes slowly slid back to the planet in front of him and the dash of his cruiser. A shaking claw steeled itself before putting in the commands and identification codes required to land. Defective or not, Zim was not a coward.
Still, he awaited the approval of his landing request with a mixture of anxiety and dread. Following his landing request's approval, he'd lose control of the ship and would be delivered to the hall of judgment.
His thoughts settled back briefly on GIR. Would his efforts to hide the little robot do any good? What would happen if they found him? Would they destroy him? Would they fix him up and assign him to a new invader?
And what about Dib and the Gaz-beast? Though he tried to muster up some amount of contempt or hatred for the two so that he wouldn't have to worry about the fate of their stupid planet, he found himself coming up short. All he could think about was the pool of blood he'd laid in as he listened to the cadence of his life clock, thinking nothing would ever touch the sensitive connections in his spine ever again.
Dib finally should have had everything he'd ever wanted, barring his autopsy. He would have died then and there and would have been unable to conquer the human's filthy planet… Despite everything he'd done to the human, however, Dib had taken it upon himself to save him.
He did a quick scan of the pak affixed to his back. It was a patchwork quilt of parts, and yet the Dib had accomplished a feat the Irken wasn't sure he would have had the nerve to even attempt.
One oddity did arise from the scan, however. Memories from shortly before his activation made themselves available for viewing. Memories of two dead Irkens.
When the fires had been extinguished at Membrane Labs and the dead were carted off, Professor Membrane finally sat down to review the personal phone messages he'd missed. There were roughly twelve, and he braced himself for the inevitable voicemails from the skool regarding Dib's most recent outburst. As he listened, however, he discovered both of his children had been skipping skool for days. The skool had had an incident recently involving Dib's green friend and the student had been released for medical reasons. Dib had followed the student and hadn't returned. The next day Gaz had also failed to make an appearance despite the IFATS exams' continuation. The two would have to make up the exams and would have a week of detention for skipping during mandatory exam days, unless the professor could vouch for their absences and arrange for them to arrive for early lessons on Monday.
Dib's unruly behavior was a common occurrence, and to be expected at this point, but the fact that Gaz had also been skipping her lessons worried him slightly. He normally allowed his daughter a measure of privacy and refrained from accessing her private security system feeds. However, after trying her cell phone to no avail and being unable to reach Dib, he found himself panicking to some extent. What if the reason things had gotten so out of hand at the lab had nothing to do with the incompetence of his staff and instead had been some kind of revenge plot against him and his family for one slight or another. He had to admit that he wasn't always the best judge when it came to the feelings of others, and his high expectations resulted in the dismissal and destruction of many careers.
He'd always come out of things unscathed for one reason or another, but this was the first time his lab had undergone this type of destruction when an experiment hadn't been listed on his agenda. That was also odd now that he thought about things further. He had several important projects that could have easily filled his schedule the day of the fire, and yet his schedule had been clear.
He hadn't scheduled the day for family time as his children should have been in skool. Before he could speculate anymore, he successfully hacked into the remainder of his daughters security system. Remainder… that was odd. He'd created multiple robotic sentries for his daughter and yet only three seemed to remain. Partial feeds had uploaded from the remaining robots and from the robots no longer responding to commands, but the majority of the footage from the night of the fire was suspiciously absent.
He frowned as he worked to restore footage deleted from the archive. It had also been encrypted. What had his daughter been up to that she didn't want anyone knowing about?
Finally, a few short clips emerged. The first seemed to be his daughter ordering the sentry to find and retrieve Dib's foreign friend. That seemed odd but not exactly worthy of the heavy encryption. The second clip, however, seemed to show a naked and bleeding alien covered in both human and some sort of pink alien blood.
Normally he would have dismissed the clip as something of Dib's. However, the alien appeared to be standing next to one of the dead scientists he'd found in his lab, and the footage was dated the day of the fire.
Horror slowly began to take hold as he accessed the final clip. The rabbit sentry appeared to be issuing a high frequency wave to pacify those in the area, but the rabbit appeared to be standing atop Membrane labs, facing his son and a pair of what appeared to be floating blobs of energy in the form of tennis shoes. The feed was then cut as one of the shoes turned toward the robot and began overloading and melting its circuits.