"Biscuit Baron?" Jaina asked, stretching up to fetch the cereal packet from the top of the storage unit, and frowning at the stylised image of an Imperial aristocrat in high-collared cape and glareshades. "Is this Tagge's idea of a joke?"
"I think anyone in the Empire would find this funny," Tahiri answered, strolling in and fastening her uniform, grinning up at Jaina. "Besides, you used to like that stuff when we were kids."
"Not my point." Jaina had meant to give her a flat look, but instead, she found herself raising her eyebrows at the outfit the blonde had somehow managed to get hold of—a red version of an officer's undress uniform, with her choker just about hidden inside the collar of the tunic, and straight trousers and spike-heeled boots that made her look lean and dangerous. She had the rank badge of an Army Lieutenant on her lapel, a square metal badge set with a quartet of four smaller squares—the top pair the same colour as the red fabric of the uniform, the other two a contrasting shade of bright blue. Jaina wondered whether she'd stolen her Moff Council security codes again, and used them to give herself some sort of authority to wear the insignia.
Tahiri waited patiently while Jaina clambered down from the chair she'd been standing on. Though considering that Jaina was wearing nothing more than a spiked collar, a chastity belt and her own velvet boots with the fifteen-centimeter heels, that probably looked more like a striptease than something you'd do in your own kitchen while the caf was brewing, with a box of Biscuit Baron Bantha Breakfast Biscuits in your hands. She was a little relieved that she wasn't a full thirty centimeters shorter than her girlfriend, today, which she would have been if she'd been barefoot.
"There," she added, brandishing her cereal box. "I knew all that acrobatics training with Aunt Mara would come in useful one day."
"You should pole-dance," Tahiri said. "I'll get a vertical bar set up in the mini-gym for you to perform on. Sacker'll love that. D'Ashewl and Tagge too."
Jaina gave a roll of her eyes, fetched her caf, and brought Tahiri her blue milk and hubba flakes from the cooler, realising that she'd defaulted into the role of servant, before sitting down on the far side of the little breakfast table, and swapping smiles. Their boots played footsie for a moment, all sharp toes and spiky heels. Then she shook out her Bantha Biscuits, poured over the luminous cobalt-coloured jelly that Biscuit Baron called Blue Sauce™, and added her own milk. The sound of her eating counterpointed Tahiri's, accompanied by the curious combination of fibre, full-blooded meatiness and fruity sweetness she remembered from her childhood.
For a moment, she was disoriented by the incongruity of everything—the cluttered little breakfast room in which they were sitting suggested an ordinary apartment, and the view out the window was as close an approximation of civilian civilization as anything in the Empire, but they were perched at the top of the kilometer-tall Imperial Tower, with their private army of brand-new DT-4 combat droids on the floors immediately below, and a battalion of Moff Sacker's stormtroopers garrisoned on the mid-levels below that.
"You should put some clothes on," Tahiri suggested.
She looked out the window, across the gridded city blocks of Ravelin, capital of the Empire, smart and vast beneath a perfect sky. "We're a klick up from the ground, surrounded by ten square kilometers of restricted airspace and a perimeter of TIE Fighters," she summarised. "Who's going to see me?"
"Moff might visit," Tahiri answered, between mouthfuls.
Jaina gave her a skewed look. All the same, rather than letting herself get distracted by the way that Tahiri was making eyes at her naked breasts, she leaned back in her chair and looked around for something to wear. The clothes she'd been wearing night before should have still been lying around—a thigh-length undershirt, a vaguely military-looking jacket and a pair of ridiculously tall boots—Imperial civilian designerwear, her costume for a formal opening ceremony.
She'd been in a hurry to get undressed once they'd come back, with Tahiri making out with her whole body as she stripped off.
But someone—Tahiri or Spanker?—had tidied up. Instead, she had to take the uniform jacket off the back of her chair—the one with the Grand Moff's rank insignia and four code cylinders, discarded there after the most recent Moff Council meeting. Which of them had hesitated to put that piece of high-ranking Imperial formalwear away with her discarded civilian clothes? She stood and slipped the garment on, covering her bare arms and her breasts, shaking the rear flap down over her bare behind—but the spiked leather collar she still had on around her neck meant she couldn't close the neckline, so she didn't bother with the cross-fastening lapels and let the belt flap loose.
She realised as she sat back down that her cheeks were still naked on the chair either side of the cool metal links of the chastity-belt's rear chain, and the way the jacket fell open was probably doing nothing to hide the durasteel crotch-plate either. If anything, she felt more underdressed than before, self-conscious about the underwear, but the garment's weight and shape and the jewelry of rank insignia somehow made her feel properly dressed—properly Imperial.
She tugged back the sleeve so she could freely access the chrono/comlink cuff around her left wrist and tapped her nails on the shiny metal surface of the shackle, activating the holographic display interface and logging in to read the morning newsfeeds. That done, she picked up her spoon with her free hand. As Grand Moff, she felt a little guilty that she had access to Fleet Watch, The Life Monitor, and other Alliance packets that were delisted from normal distribution in Imperial Space.
"Suits you," Tahiri said, her gaze admiring the way the unfastened tunic fitted her. She gestured lazily with her spoon, and took another scoop of her breakfast. "Half way between an Imperial Advisor and a swoop-bike gangster. You should write music reviews for NewsStack."
Jaina shook her head, decided there was nothing interesting in the news, and went back to her Bantha Breakfast Biscuits.
"Look at us," she said, after a few moments. "Two happy Imperial lesbians having our Imperial breakfast while we wear our uniforms."
"Yes?" Tahiri asked, with a bright smile. "And?"
"Kriff," said Jaina, exhaling hard.
"Eat your Bantha Breakfast Biscuits," Tahiri grinned. "I'd join you, but you know I don't eat Bantha."
"You used to have a pet one, when we were kids, didn't you?"
"Still do," she smiled. "I keep him in a Bantha sanctuary on Arkanis. I'm having him freighted in, as soon as the Alliance customs service play nice about the paperwork. Thought we could put him on level 90."
Jaina snorted. "You're joking? Right?"
"About having an Emotional Support Bantha I don't get to see enough of?" she asked, with a smile. "I suppose we could put him in the Pellaeon Gardens instead."
"No." Jaina breathed out, trying hard not to disintegrate into laughter.
"The Moff Council chamber? I could train him to eat people's hats in meetings."
"No!"
"Well, then. Level Ninety. Should I fake your authorisation, like I did for my rank insignia, or do you want to sign off on this one personally?"
"I wondered where you'd got hold of those."
"From you, technically." Tahiri paused. "Anyway, since we're being all uniformed and Imperial, what's the Empire needing us to do today?"
"Confirming some personnel appointments. I could use your advice."
"These new Moffs?" she asked.
"Yeah," she agreed, switching the holo display to show her desk-work interface. When her ex-husband ran off with the Queen of Hapes, several of his close friends and allies on the Moff Council had tried to stage a coup to hold on to power. Instead, Sacker and Tagge and d'Ashewl had arrested them, and she had drunkenly agreed to be appointed as their head-of-state. And now, that left a vacancy to be filled in the Empire's government, a space which she tried to think of as shaped like a progressive pro-Alliance faction, rather than the men and women who she'd had sex with at Jag's bondage parties.
"So where's the problem?"
"Most of the candidates I want to take are pretty much the ones the Moffs told me to take," Jaina frowned.
"By the Moffs, you meant d'Ashewl, Tagge and Sacker?" Tahiri smiled.
Jaina nodded again. "Yeah." Among other things, she was relying on them to tell her how to keep the rest of the Empire happy, though if she was going to lead effectively, or even play a proper part in governing, she was going to have to get to grips with all the different attitudes, and do some of the thinking and negotiating for herself. She'd privately regarded the appointment of the new Moffs as a test of her ability to run her own analysis of something more complicated than a starfighter tactic, and make a little useful input on important decisions. She ought to be more than a government sex-toy.
"Why not just reorganize the sector borders?" Tahiri asked. "The Empire keeps rearranging things like a party game for people in silly uniform. I'm sure the other Moffs, the ones whose side we're on, would be happy with a handout of some extra planets...?"
"I'm trying to avoid that here. The sector borders seem well designed. In Oplovis and Dantus, they usually get a Governor from inside the local establishment, so that means General Vosteltig and Baron R'aya. In Myto, on the other hand, every second system seems to have a petty king, planetary oligarchy, or baron-administrator, and their sensitivity about who's on top mean that an outside candidate with a reputation for fairness is better. So Prefect Evens seems like the obvious pick. Atrivis is even worse. I think even d'Ashewl doesn't know what to do there. I'm tempted to just let Tagge annexe them to his sector and sort them out. But for Braxant, we have a candidate on the long-list who I like better than the ones that I was recommended. She's young, which I suspect is why she wasn't flagged as a top pick, but everyone who's worked with her seems to think very highly of her." And she played an important role in arresting her own Moff, Jaina didn't add. "She's an Intelligence officer, so d'Ashewl should approve."
She showed Tahiri the file. "Lena Devis?" Tahiri said. "Why do I recognize that name." She scanned down the report, noting information with rhythmic taps of one fingernail on the screen. "She's Admiral Pellaeon's granddaughter?"
"Apparently so," Jaina nodded. "Seems Pellaeon had a family—no official records he was the father, for whatever reason, and the kids used their mom's name, to keep a lower profile."
Tahiri nodded. "So this is going to be a bit awkward."
Jaina nodded, reading the unspoken communication in Tahiri's quiet sigh—I murdered her grandfather. "How she reacts to you is going to tell me a lot about the way that Imperials who think fondly of Pellaeon will respond." There was more she wasn't going to say—during the war against the Vong, she'd watched Lena Devis's father ram his TIE Defender into a scar-head interdictor ship, as they fought out of a trap which had bottled up an entire Alliance fleet group, plus the Millennium Falcon, and her parents. She'd found herself wondering what would have happened if they hadn't escaped.
Tahiri made eyebrows at her. "You're planning on brining her up here for a one-on-one?"
"This morning," Jaina nodded. "She's scheduled for eleven hundred. The main gate should alert me when she arrives."
Tahiri smiled at her. "Just as well I'm not the type of girl to distract you too much, Grand Moff..."