Looseleaf's Diary - 20 / 02 / 2120

I saw the dead give rise to the living,
In the wrath of the living the dead were consumed.

"Fire," I answered, and the Intrusion Countermeasure shimmered and faded into transparency.

My avatar stepped through the codewall into the restricted database. Such riddles were child's play, barely enough to keep out teenagers with their first cyberdecks. Not that many people had much interest in this particular database. The Morgul Vale Police Department was the closest thing to law to that part of Mordor, short of Barad-dûr itself.

It's my nature to be thorough. To look where other people wouldn't dare. Public databases had little on that particular stretch of nothing. The United Megacorp had finally decided to open the region up to settling three years ago, parceled sections off for veterans. Lonely, desolate country, a long way from nowhere, warg-ridden, with very few takers. Nomadic orc bands still passed through the area from time to time. I'd pulled the military landgrant for Rowana Rowethasdottir. Little public on her, and I wasn't ready to crack the Army computer network unless there was a reason to do so.

The cops had almost nothing. Rumors of trafficking: Men and Orc slaves crisscrossed the plateau between the Morgul Vale and Barad-dûr, though not often that far south. There was no law to speak of, and the Orcs and wargs made it just dangerous enough to discourage most civilian traffic. My eyes flicked through files of missing persons, teens that had disappeared, rumors.

Then a hit. Almost three weeks ago, the burning hulk of a van was found near the highway. Two corpses recovered, too burned to tell if they were Men or Goblin-men. The car had been on automatic pilot. The highway patrol had logged it, but the vehicle wasn't registered, no ID on the bodies. Some firearms recovered were logged, and there was two red flags—thought it took me a sidewise dip into the evidence archive to confirm. Both weapons were logged as evidence from a couple murders in the White City. Which meant they should have been in an evidence locker, not in a burned-out van in Mordor. That suggested somebody had taken the guns out of the evidence locker and sold them on the black market—

—and that might be why the suspicious deaths of these two crispy corpses had been very quickly closed and buried. I made a note of the cop who closed the case: Quillian Daleman. It's always good to know which cops were corrupt enough to maybe be useful.

Either way, the forensic computer specialist who had gone over the car before the case closed had logged a projected route, which ran very close to Rowethasdottir's homestead. Cross-checking with toll data indicated that they had died the same night that the ex-ranger should have arrived. Also revealed the presence of pretty robust restraints in the rear cabin. That suggested Orc trafficking.

That was one red flag. The second, and more interesting, red flag was when I checked the logs for these files. I wasn't the only one that had accessed these files. Someone else had made this journey of discovery; because after Daleman had closed the files, user UnitedAdmin had accessed the files. And I knew that UnitedAdmin was a corporate backdoor account used by United Megacorp techs to access systems for maintenance. So somebody with tech ties had probably figured out that this ex-ranger had probably killed two mooks, who were probably trafficking at least one Orc.

More-than-idle curiosity made me find out which satellite passed over that stretch of nothing. I bought a little access time on it, checked the cache of photographs. The latest one was dated 07 / 02 / 2120. Fuzzy, low detail. Yet there was something that might be a tent, an area of partially-cleared vegetation—and what was very definitely two figures. One of them was yellow-green. Could have been an Orc. Could have been the crispy corpse's passenger.

Which didn't mean much as far as I was concerned. There was nothing that tied these dead Men to the subterranean structure that Tû might be interested in. That was research sometimes. You never know what might be relevant.

I logged off to find Aubert fucking me.

My legs and arms were both off and charging. They were Shire SynthLimbs, 2016 models. Held eight hours of charge for fourteen hours of charging. Hobbits still held the lead in civilian cyberlimbs; it was amazing how many bits of themselves the Shire farmers lost to typical farm equipment. I'd heard that some of the military limbs they had now were so efficient they could go twenty-four hours between charges, but I was about as likely to get a set of those as I was to touch the hem of Manwë's cape.

Aubert was lost in the zone. His dick stretched my cunny out, the ribs adding a pleasant additional bit of friction. I remember when we had first met—the White Hands had snatched me up on my way home from work. Kept me for a little over a month as punching bag and fucktoy. Poured their home-brewed dope straight into my veins with rusty needles. When the necrosis set in, they didn't even bother taking me to a street doc. Just dumped me straight into one of the garbage trucks headed for Rivendell's understory. The rats had already reached bone when Aubert found me, on one of his scrap runs.

I'd woken up to four stumps and an IV drip. Antibiotics and some kind of narcotic antagonist that was supposed to help strip the chemical addiction from my brain, though he said the liver and kidney damage was permanent, and they'd need to be replaced. Aubert had been plugging the catheter tube in place as I woke up, and his eyes had that kind of feverish look in them as his gloved hands fed the tube into my urethra and tipped it down. The massive cyber hard-on had been intimidating, then.

Now? Well, I'd gotten used to it. His purple pecker punched deep with every stroke, and I grunted and shook enough to snap him out of his fogue state. Aubert looked down at me, open mouth, and I craned my head and spat, straight into his mouth. That shocked him so much that the floodgates opened. His scrawny frame quivered as hot wetness flooded my pussy, and I grinned wide.

I sat up, his dick still inside of me. While all of my grip strength was in the cyberlimbs themselves, my shoulders and buttocks still needed to haul all that mass around. My arm-stumps gripped his torso and I twisted, used my weight to roll him over the bed until I was on top, his dick still inside of me.

Sure, he could have grabbed me and lifted me off. But I hadn't cum yet. So I ground my body against his. Used my stumps for whatever leverage they could give me as I whispered to him what I had found out in today's research. That interested him, even as I ground my cunny against his cybercock. He was still thinking about it when I gasped and bucked, my squelching, cum-filled cunt clenched tight around that magnificently engineered fucktoy. Until we both lay, sweaty and slightly shivering in the cold, sticky and sated. For the moment.

One of these days, I'd ask him exactly who had made him this way and why.