Big damn snake

Lily's back. Consider it a right good thing too, but some part of me feels . . . I don't know how to describe how I feel. Distant, maybe. Not by choice. There was a time in the not so distant past when I would have been the one, boots on the ground, recovering one of my own. Now? Now I've got so much information flowing across my desk that I can barely focus tight enough to nudge someone else in the direction I should be going myself.

Does success as a Director level asset require failure at a more intimate level?

No. It shouldn't. It doesn't. I've got my finger on the pulse of half the Rim. The failure is being unable to pick out a single thread from a tangled web, not a failure of intent or will. I see the forest. It is just hard to keep sight of individual trees, even when they are what is most important.

What is most important to me? On a deep personal level, it's my girls. All of them. Daughter, sister, mate, friend. Role doesn't matter so much. Probably why it feels like failure to have not been the one bringing Lily home. Or not knowing half the time, in spite of the tracking, what AuroraBlue's up to. Not seeing Sabrina face to face in far, far, too long. Not being able to help x0x0 recover from whatever she's going through. Probably something of her brother's doing.

What I hadn't expected was the first time I see Lily after she gets back, is when she stops by to bring me a present. And, by present, I mean the carcass of a 30 meter long snake. At least the head. That's all she could drag into the office, leaving the rest of the body to trail out the door, down the hall, down the steps and out into the street. It was that gorram long.

Didn't even ask how she got it in, or at least for the moment, where she got it. I strongly suspected it was related to the snakes that had bit x0x0 and caused her discontinuity incident. Snakes didn't get this big. Not even on Blackburne, which had plenty of altered life from all the radiation damage. No, this thing was something else.

What'd it eat? Horses? Gorram thing was big enough to make cattle it's primary meal, and Hale's Moon simply didn't have enough large life to support a predator this big. Wouldn't even go into how something could grow that big in the first place. Close as I could find in the records were a couple in the 10 to 12 meter range, with rumors of ones approaching 16 meters. But 30? Here?

I had the carcass hauled off and put into cold storage in one of the old underground bunkers we used for warehousing sometimes. Need to get someone with a good deal more experience to look at it than I had, but I'd still have tissue samples stored some place safe. Chances were this big ass snake hadn't grown up on Hale's. Given it's bigger than record size, chances were it wasn't even a natural creature. Seemed like it was either released from, or escaped from, a lab somewhere.

Now that'd be a surprise.

I'd know more soon. But, for now, Lily home safe was what mattered to me most.