Beyond Limits – Part 2
It’s odd, being in the position I’m in. Technically, I’m still employed. As in, I can log into my computer, access my email, and interact with my co-workers. At the same time, I’m essentially a marked man. My last day is May 5th. In addition, all my access to the systems used to do my (former) job have been cut. So, I’m there, but I’m not able to do anything.
It’s good, in that I’ve been given the chance to collect pay for two weeks of no work. It’s bad, in that I feel obligated to sit at or near my computer, when I’ve nothing to do. Strange times.
In other news, soon to be lack of job has clarified a lot of things for me. My writing has sharpened and intensified in both breadth and scope. By that, I mean that I have been writing more, and planning more writing, than I would normally have otherwise. It’s deadened slightly by my need to get the house up to par for putting on the market this Friday, but it’s also going much faster than it had been. Nothing like having the right motivations.
I will have to find work, inevitably, as soon as we hit KC. I’m going to start looking this weekend, and job applications will begin dropping like rain. I feel sad that I don’t have more time to enjoy days off. I haven’t taken any from the day job in months. Yet I understand the situation I’m in. I have a wife, a child, and we are moving: I cannot afford to lay fallow.
It’s unusual, in that I want so desperately to be in this position: Captain of my own destiny, beholden to no one but myself and my own dreams and ambitions. It’s simply that the timing is wrong, and that I’m at the incorrect stage of my journey. I’ve not yet begun making steady revenue doing this. My first release is this Friday, and the next will be two to three weeks after it. Yet it is still far from secured. In an ideal world, I will develop a rotational release of short stories every Friday for the final three Fridays of that month. Sadly, that is still some distance away.
Be that as it may, I do not begrudge my position. Having the chance to find a new opportunity in my new city doesn’t frighten me: It emboldens me.
Without further ruminating…
Beyond Limits – Part 2
Cary nal-Tensire stood outside of the naglath nursery, hand hovering over the door controls, staring at the fiberous door as though it would attack her should she activate it. In truth, the door would iris open without savaging her, just like every other door aboard Sunchaser. Whether whatever was beyond the door would savage her was another question entirely.
Cary had been a pilots apprentice, and then a first mate, for almost 12 years before her current assignment. She had dealt with the enormous, three meter long wurmlings before. Usually with about five or six other crew members to help with sedation, wrangling, and restraints. But I’m a military envoy, and Sunchaser is only meant for one.
She would hardly be alone, however. The mighty tree, hewn from Yggdrasil itself, could aide her with the tempestuous naglath spawn. So long as she could convince it to look past the rather abrupt detonation of the previous wurm. Cary knew that Sunchaser hadn’t been injured when the naglath pool erupted, but that didn’t meant it hadn’t hurt. A lot. Steeling her resolve, Cary gestured over the controls, and her security override opened the door.
The room wasn’t large, maybe a quarter the size of the engine pod. It didn’t have one singular, enormous pool either. Instead, it had three long crates, each about a meter to a side, almost ten meters in length. The crates were membranous, in that it allowed for oxygen and carbon dioxide to permeate the walls of the crates, but it blocked all sunlight and noise from entering. The wurmlings, tricked into believing that they had entered the four months of darkness which comprised the cold season on their home planet, went into a deep state of hibernation. They could go for years without food, and all growth was paused while they slept.
Cary often wondered if it were the right thing to do at times. Naglath weren’t overly intelligent, but they were on a level of intelligence equal to that of Terra Prima’s original dolphins. Best not mention that to Commander Whayles next time I visit her tank. Keeping them in such a state of extended hibernation caused lasting damage to the nerve functions of the wurms. Further, when she managed to wrestle one into the pool in the engine pod, it would grow grotesquely overweight and become completely dependent upon the pool to maintain itself.
Maybe that’s why they fight so hard when we take them out of hibernation? Cary had thought that often, ever since she had been a young girl fresh out of base-ed. There was no alternative however. Only the Naglath, in exactly the torturous situation they suffered so, allowed for travel between the stars. Humanities appetites couldn’t be restrained to one planet alone, and as they propagated among the stars, other races had begun to catch their disease.
Our disease. No matter how she might quibble, she had never spoken against the abuse of Naglath spawn. Nor had she ever hesitated to put a wurmling into the pool, addicting it to the liquid within, mercilessly carving open it’s skull to implant the necessary equipment to allow it to interface with the ship’s engines. To take it’s waste tentacles, and hook all three up to the engine intake valves, slowly stretching them well beyond any biological limits, until they could never been undone from the valves because they would become infected immediately without the intake slowly sucking up the viscous waste liquid that the steady diet of the engine pool liquids created.
To be continued…
Humanfully,
Justin
