Carvedinstone's Saga - 22 / 04 / 2120, cont'd

Carvedinstone's Saga
22 / 04 / 2120, cont'd

Daleman's kitchenette was minimal, and apparently almost unused, but there was a teapot and two mostly clean cups. After Daleman emerged from the shower, I was ready with the medkit and the tea was steeping. She sat down in her last clean pair of boxers, letting me apply antiseptic spray and bandaids. A cold pack went over her swollen eye. The other one was tired ass he drank her slightly milky tea.

"So," she said. "What's really going on?"

I worked out from what she knew. The two burned bodies that had rolled up to her doorstep. The escaped Uruk-Hai. The ex-Ranger who had taken her in. The White Hands are trying to get her back. Drake Industries, which had grown the Uruk-Hai in a vat, was involved with the White Hands and the Crown Players.

The Beorning's frown deepened as I told her about the other hacker, Looseleaf, whom I had been collaborating with. She was patient, listened to me talk. Then she asked the question I'd been talking around.

"So, this Looseleaf got interested because they caught wind of something weird that Rowethasdottir was prepping her homesite. Looseleaf's interest led to this vat-grown Orc, which led to Drake Industries, which is how they met you. You whored yourself out to me to get access to police files on Drake Industries. Have I got all that?"

The brown eye held mine carefully.

"Yes," I said.

"So why, exactly, do you have such a hard-on for Drake Industries?" she asked.

There was nothing else for it. I had to tell her about Bob.

"I grew up in New Moria. My family wasn't rich, but we were educated. My parents wanted to sell me into wage-servitude to one of the big banks. I used to sneak away, down to the underground lakes that feed the coolant intakes of the Deep Cores, to tap into the dark nets. I learned to crack IC down there, learned how to tap into systems at unexpected access points, write my own utility programs."

I held her gaze steadily, heart thundering in my chest like the echo of a triphammer. I had never told anyone this before.

"There are things, down in the deep. Nameless things older than the world. Strange, intelligent. They swim through the waters, they watch, they wait, sometimes they grasp and feed—and—and one of them came up to me, as I was naked except for a toolbelt, trying to get at an access point that wasn't very accessible."

My teeth bit my lip for a moment as I relived that moment. It had often haunted my dreams.

"Small hands found me in the freezing water. Not trying to drag me under. Just...curious. Fascinated. Aroused. I let them explore, grope. I was barely out of high school then, but I was old enough. No one had touched me like that before. The fingers were strong and sticky as they grasped my tits...my thighs. I remember how I found the access port and hung on. The thing that swam beneath me surfaced, dark and sleek. It held me bouyant as its fingers explored my pussy...my ass...it was the first time I'd had anything in either. When it broke my hymen, the cloud of blood seemed to scare it, and it fled."

I sighed, sipped my tea. It had grown bitter.

"I went back. Sometimes it was there. We would see each other. I—I let it draw close. Near the shore, it would heave itself up out of the water. Barely the size of a backpack. Small, back it could be centuries old for all I know. The long limbs, the tentacles of an octopus, would stretch out to caress me. The little suckers would kiss my flesh. Eventually, I gave it a name. Bob. We would see each other almost daily for years."

"It was male?" Daleman asked, her first words in a long while.

"They're hermaphroditic. I think. Male and female in one. Bob can lay eggs. Inject sperm. That particular lake had been cut off from the others for millennia. Bob hadn't had any of its own kind to mate with. I thought at some point I might...help it reconnect," I said. "But Drake Industries knew about Bob. I snuck down there one night and they had captured Bob. I saw them load Bob into a truck, sedated, in some sort of water-filled tank. I saw his four-fingered hand pressed against the glass. I think Bob knew I was there."

I laid the teacup on the counter.

"It took time to get away. From my parents, from New Moria. To track the shipment as far as Moon City. Sex work paid the bills, and when I was looking for someone with access to the right files, it turned out to be a good way to approach you," I said. "And that's why I'm interested in Drake Industries, and ultimately why you had to kill Arnorson tonight. Drake Industries, the White Hands, the Crown Players—they're all working together."

"And the Broken Circle," Daleman said. "I think their relationships are more complex than that, but it does seem we've stumbled on something complex. Drake Industries sends this Uruk-Hai to the Crown Players via the White Hands. Someone—the White Hands, the Broken Circle, maybe both—breaks into the museum to steal the Morgul blade. That doesn't feel like a coincidence. More like somebody's trying to make a move. Maybe the White Hands are making a play against the Crown Players, but don't want to do it openly?"

"Then what about Bob? And whatever Rowethasdottir found beneath her homesite?" I asked. I had never seen this side of mama bear before. The smart side, the detective, putting the pieces together.

Daleman grunted. "Maybe nothing. Unrelated project, local weirdness. At least, I can't see that anybody had any interest in your ex-Ranger before she perforated a slaver's skull and got her own vatgrown green fuckbuddy for her trouble, or what your Bob has to do with anything else. You hackers stuff your noses in where they don't belong, sniffing for creds or your lost tentacle-sex thing. You're lucky nobody's cut them off already."

The Beorning stood up and stretched wide. I heard vertebrae and joints crack. Saw the nasty bruises from her fight, already deep blue and purple.

"So, what are you going to do?" I asked.

"They'll find Arnorson within a day or two. I'll need to act surprised when they alert me of his ****. The Lodgemaster will need to be informed. He doesn't need to know the circumstances. In fact, you might be my alibi..." Daleman mused.

I raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yeah. You stayed here with me all night. Cameras in the building don't record shit, so no one saw him come here or leave. As far as anyone will know, I was busy destroying this hot little piece of Dwarf pussy. Of course, we'll have to fool around a little, just to make it stick if they insist on a polygraph."

My neck hurt, craning up to look at her. She took the cold pack off her face and smiled, the old horny Daleman smile.

"You're beaten half to ****, exhausted, half drunk. I watched you tear a Man's head open, and you expect me to eat your pussy?" I said. Just saying that, I felt a weird warmth down below. I should have been drier than the great Eastern desert, but the perversity of it all struck a weird chord in me. Or maybe I was stressed and needed something, anything, to keep my mind off the image of what happened tonight.

"Well, I'd offer to let you ride my face, but my neck hurts like hell."

We settled on a little mutual satisfaction. Vanessë had left her little toy. The harness was adaptable enough that we could slip it around Daleman's hips. We turned out the lights and I lowered myself onto it, in the dark. The weight and pressure of my hips translated to Daleman's clit. Soft and gentle. There were long hours until morning, and her ribs were still busted. I felt her hands explore my breasts, my thighs, my ass. Not for the first time, I thought about Bob, whose soft, flexible body had pressed itself up against and into mine so many times. I felt a hole open up inside my chest at the thought of what Drake Industries might have down to Bob. Why they had delved that deep and that greedily, as it was written in the Red Book.

We went on like that for I don't know how long. No special neural interfaces. Just two bodies moving in the dark. I remembered sucking her thumb. Carefully groping the one breast that wasn't a mass of bruises. My pussy sliding up and down the shaft in the dark, buttoning out and grinding against the base to crush her clit. Until Daleman's soft growls turned, by slow degrees, into grunts. Until I felt the shift beneath me, the groan of the bed, the tips of claws against my ass. Then quiet. Stillness. Daleman's heavy breathing transition into snores into snores, and her hands fell away, and I eased myself off the slick toy, my pussy wet and pleasantly sore as I snuggled against her unwounded side.

"'nessë..." I heard her whisper in her sleep. The one thing Daleman hadn't asked me about. That was how I knew that whatever else Daleman might be, she felt something more for the Elfkin than she was willing to admit.

I don't know if that made her an ally or a friend. Yet Daleman was far too dangerous to have as an enemy.