Chapter 8: The Apparatus of State

Stevo 21.

There was a slight grunt that burst from his lips as Silvia pushed him back onto the sofa, but with her lips securely sealed on his, the sound that actually came out of him was rather muffled, to say the least.

They had made out like hormonal teenagers for the entire elevator ride. Fifteen decks worth of heavy breathing and enthusiastic tongue-play. It was passionate, it was heated, and it was something he could somehow tell she had been holding in for just as long as he had. The dinging of the elevator arriving at their level had forced them to part, their breathing still panted, and her cheeks - if not his as well - were more than a little flushed. Somehow, they had made the short walk from the elevator bank to the door to her office without drawing any undue attention from the dozen or so people in the corridor, and he had waited patiently for her to open the door and let him inside. But as soon as that door clicked shut in its frame, all bets were off. Silvia practically threw herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck and crushing her lips to his hard enough to make him think he would chip a tooth.

His hands had held onto the small of her back, but the feeling of her grinding herself against the fully masted bulge in his dress slacks made him catch on pretty quickly, and he allowed his hands to slide lower to her ass. The mewling moan she purred into his lips told him clearly that it was a gesture she wholeheartedly approved of. She started walking him backward toward the brown leather sofa that was behind him, waiting until the backs of his legs bumped into them before shoving him back onto it. Once again, she was on him in moments, climbing onto him and straddling a leg on either side of his, pressing her core against his bulge again and grinding her hips against his as she sealed her lips back to his.

Stevo was not a stranger to women. He had been a Marine in the Imperium, not a prisoner, and despite public pre-conceptions, he had neither been kept on some far-flung outpost nor had he been forbidden from taking leave to mix with the locals. With no family to go home to visit, his leave had often been spent bar-hopping in one of the leisure districts that invariably sprung up close to military bases the Empire over, and he had done pretty well for himself. Even going as far as scoring a few semi-long-term relationships.

But this was different. There was a fire and a passion in Silvia’s touch and her kiss that he had never expected. It was like she had a fatal disease, and his lips held not only the cure but her only chance at getting it. Like a starved woman getting her first meal or a drowning woman being offered a liferaft. Stevo had been enamored by the woman from the moment he saw her, but he had never in his wildest dreams thought that the sentiment was mutual, let alone to this degree. This wasn’t the cheap, meaningless fumble of a one-night stand, nor was it the passionate exploration of a quickly-building-quickly-dying fling; this was desire at its most fever-pitched. This was the very definition of passion, and every breath he exhaled was consumed by Silvia, just as every heated, panted breath from her lips was swallowed by his.

They kissed. They made out. They explored each other’s painfully clothed bodies with their wandering, almost frantic hands. They consumed each other. They fed and fed on one another. Lips moving, tongues dancing, breaths shared, and - for a brief moment - two halves became one. It was more than Stevo ever imagined a kiss could be, so very much more.

Finally, the kiss broke, and Silvia rested her forehead against his. Her breath, like his, was hard and heavy; her chest was rising and falling with every inhalation, and that, in turn, seemed to drag the swell of her breasts over his. They were as close as it was possible for two people to get while still having their clothes on, and contrary to the frantic, throwing caution to the wind exuberance of his more youthful dalliances, Steve realized that there was nowhere in the entire stretches of the galaxy he would rather be. It took a moment for him to notice that they were staring into each other’s eyes; he was literally getting lost in them. He had no idea if he had been gazing into those bottomless cerulean orbs for a few seconds or half an hour, but the only sound in the room was the rasping breaths both of them were sucking in and out.

“Jesus, I feel like a teenager,” Silvia whispered. “Kisses aren’t supposed to be this good.”

“Nope, sorry,” Stevo smiled up at her. “I don’t remember them being this good, even when I was a teenager.”

She chuckled, nodding her head in agreement. “God, it would be so easy to go further. But...”

“But...?”

“You know, first date rules and all that shit.”

“Oh, so this is a date?” He gave her a lopsided grin.

“Don’t make me pull rank, Captain.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He smirked back at her, his eyes being pulled—as if by gravity—to those soft, pillowy lips.

“Yeah, so I’m gonna have to keep kissing you. Hope you don’t mind,” she purred with a radiant, beaming grin.

“Not at all, Ma’am,” Stevo smirked back, his hand coming up to stroke her cheek. He pulled her a little closer, tipped his head back a little, and sealed her lips back onto his.

As soon as they joined, a mutual moan echoed around the room; it was like a sigh, an expression of sublime desire, a passion given to such a simple touch yet one that transcended time itself. Everything else evaporated. Existence, in all its glorious splendor, boiled away around them until only the two of them were left. Nothing else mattered; nothing else existed, just them, just the feel of each other under their fingertips and the taste of each other on their lips. Just their kiss.

His hands hooked onto the small of her back, not sexually, but tenderly and affectionately holding her against him. Her arms clung to his shoulder, one of her hands rubbing through his closely cropped hair. For a handful of minutes, ones that seemed like they stretched out for hours, There was only their kiss.

“I want you,” She breathed as they broke apart.

“I want you,” he said back. It wasn’t the most original response, but why mess with perfection? The fire behind his eyes and the tone in his voice added more weight to that statement than any flowery string of words could.

“But...”

He silenced her with a soft, much shorter kiss before she could finish her sentence. “I want to take you out,” he said, resting his forehead back against hers. “Here on the Hyperion, in some bar when we get planetside, out to a fancy restaurant, I will think of something, but ... I ... I like you, and I want to do this properly.”

The smile on her face said it all. “I’d like that.”

“Does that mean we have to stop now?”

“Fuck no,” she laughed. “I like how your stubble feels on my skin, and I am going to stay here for as long as we can get away with.”

“Excellent. I grew it myself,” he chuckled as he brushed a few unruly locks of her hair behind her ear. She laughed loudly, like a release of building tension, before relaxing into his touch, leaning forward, and pressing her lips back to his.

Janus. 2

Now, Ellie had a nice set of tits. Not too big, not too small, the perfect amount of gravity defiance, and attached to a rather fetching rest of her body to boot. But tits were tits, and Janus loved them all. If she were ever asked - not that she ever was - Janus would say that she was bi-sexual but with a heavy, less-than-healthy leaning toward women. It wasn’t the fact that she leaned toward women that was unhealthy; modern society had its flaws, of course, but discrimination based on sexual orientation was a thing of ancient history. No, the concern came from how heavily that lean was. Janus often wondered if there was something wrong with her. She had heard somewhere that a pedophile’s sexual interest in minors was a result of an abnormality in the brain, that the sexual attraction first developed in childhood never matured as the rest of them did.

Biological imperative tailored sexual appetites to those most likely to produce offspring; it was the same mechanism that made some younger women attracted to older, successful men - ones who could provide for their children - and for older men to be attracted to younger, more fertile women, those more likely to continue their genetic line. In pedophiles, that neurochemical process was simply broken. Of course, that was a reason, not an excuse, and child molesters were, thankfully, chemically castrated as part of their punishment, usually only for the time of their incarceration before their justifiable execution.

It wasn’t the same for her, obviously. She found any sexual desire aimed at children as repugnant as the next person, but the theory did make a certain kind of sense when it came to her little problem. Janus loved tits; she really fucking loved them; she loved them on a scale that could only be matched by teenaged, virgin males who wouldn’t know what to do with a set of tits if they were slapping them around the face. It had long been known that the teenage boy’s brain was so obsessed with breasts because of puberty. Huge amounts of growth hormones were flooding their system, the most their bodies had ever felt since infancy. But during infancy, that biological imperative for nourishment centered around breast milk. Ipso facto, the teenaged male brain - when suddenly finding itself flooded with a need to grow - reverted back to tits. It’s just that mixed with the newly surging torrents of testosterone in the body, that obsession became sexual.

She couldn’t help but wonder if something comparable had happened to her brain too, something locked in there, something that went wrong in her female brain that somehow gave her the same obsession with tits but without the testosterone to go with it. Because it was marrow-deep! There were moments in her little security booth, whiling away the hours of tedium, when all she could think of were those perfect mammaries in their endless variety. Nobody ever caught on to the fact that she held some of the finer specimens in her scanner for a few moments longer than necessary; they never seemed to check. She was a woman; women didn’t do that sort of thing, whereas a man would be picked up on that shit after only a few instances. Sexual freedom and gender equality were cornerstones of modern society, but some double standards were probably never going to die off. Women got away with shit that men couldn’t all the time. But, like any self-respecting feminist, she didn’t care if it was fair or not as long as it benefited her.

For the moment, though, and in a massive break with tradition, her mind was focused on something other than Ellie’s pert little chest. Eleanor Clark was, in a manner of speaking, Janus’s commanding officer. Technically, the Border Control Agency was a law enforcement department rather than a military one, but like other law enforcement departments around the Imperium, it used a vaguely military ranking system. Janus herself was a sergeant; there were no privates in the BCA, nor were there corporals or the likes. There were officers, then sergeants, then lieutenants, then captains, and, finally, Commanders. Ellie was her Captain; she was responsible for the entire border control operation from the Orpheus VI space station. Her superior, the Commander, was like God: Eternally busy elsewhere and so never seen, but he was nominally in charge of all customs and border control for the entire system. It was extraordinarily rare for Captain Clark to close down all of the scanning booths - essentially shutting down the border - and it was never without reason. The last time had been to announce the investigation into her colleague who had allowed those spores through customs and caused the famine on the planet below.

“Alright, alright, settle down,” The captain silenced the room of about one hundred and fifty border guards. “We have a lot to get through and not a lot of time to get through it, so if you all want to stop fucking around and take a seat, we can get on with it.”

Janus smirked to herself at the grumblings of her fellow officers. None of them were complaining about a break away from the boredom of their day-to-day jobs, but none of them were looking forward to the queues of disgruntled, vocal civilians who - for some reason, thought that their wait was their fault - either.

Ellie waited for the general hubbub to die down to quiet before she took a deep breath and started to speak. “Okay, there is no easy way to say this, so I’m not going to try. In a few hours, a broadcast from the Planetary Governor will be shown on every channel in the system about the plan for Orpheus. I’ve already seen it, and I can guaran-fucking-tee that it is going to make our lives very difficult for the next few days at least. The decision has been made, given that you will be on the front lines of this, to show you the recording ahead of time. So, with that in mind, all overtime restrictions have been lifted, and - for at least the next week - base pay will be increased by half.”

There was a soft, happy murmur around the room at the prospect of more money and the opportunity to get even more again. Janus, however, was just enough of a cynic to know that there was a ‘but’ coming.

“Play the recording,” she said heavily as she looked at one of her assistants at the back of the room. The assistant pressed something on a remote in her hand, and the room went dark before a large holo-screen—filling the entirety of the wall behind Captain Clark—flickered into life. The elderly, regal, totally fuck-muppetty face of Andrew Johnson, the Planetary Governor of Orpheus VI, appeared on the screen.

“My fellow colonists,” he said in his deep, artificially imperious voice. Janus didn’t need to have met the man to feel a deep and visceral loathing of everything he had done and everything he stood for. “The history of a people, the legacy of a world, are defined by only one thing: the challenges it has overcome to thrive. In that regard, the tale of Orpheus VI and her people has been one of the more exigent endeavors in the storied annals of the Imperium.”

Yup, use big words to make yourself sound smart, asshole. That’s not transparent at all

“Colonists such as us are a rare breed; we thrive in the face of adversity and charge head-long toward any challenge in our path rather than away from it as a lesser people might, and I know the fervor with which you all want to reclaim our planet from the blight inflicted upon us by those few incompetent or treasonous fools. I know my people, and I know that abandoning this planet is the last thing any of us want.” A ripple of snickers echoed around the room. That was bullshit, and everyone knew it. Nobody ... absolutely nobody ... wanted to risk their lives to fight an already-lost battle against a fucking weed. Everyone who had been able to leave the planet under their own steam had already gone; those who were left were too destitute to follow them. An entire population was starving to deatth, and it seemed that only the stubbornness of people like this asshole were holding them there.

“However, realities must be faced, no matter how hard. The carefully crafted ecosystem needed to maintain our beloved colony ... has collapsed. The planet’s capacity to grow its own food - and thereby sustain the colony - is essentially gone. My expert advisors are all in agreement that Orpheus VI is no longer able to sustain human habitation. The cost in lives would be too high to continue the efforts to salvage our world in our lifetimes, not without countless people succumbing to starvation and disease.”

Yeah, no shit, Einstein. They’ve been telling you that for months!

“So it is with a heavy heart and no small amount of reticence that I am forced to order the complete evacuation of the planet. The next relief convoy will arrive from our benefactors in the Core Worlds in the next few days and will contain enough supplies to tide us over while we are evacuating, but that will be the last one. Part of that convoy will contain enough colony ships to evacuate every last man, woman, and child out of danger.”

A cheer went up around the room. Every man and woman listening to the broadcast had either already lost someone to the famine or was very close to losing someone soon. Almost all of them had family on the surface, and nobody was under any illusions as to how dire the situation was down there. Janus wasn’t among them; she was still waiting for the ‘but.’

“So, starting immediately, a shuttle service - provided free of charge to all Orpheus residents - will be running from every town and city, worldwide, up to the planetary space station...”

A groan replaced the cheer—that was the ‘but.’ Janus and her agency would need to process all four or five million people before they could embark on to the station. That would take weeks!

“ ... and from there, once the relief fleet has arrived, the first wave of our people will leave the system en route to the sector hub, from where transport to other parts of the Imperium can be obtained. Please leave personal belongings behind and take with you only what you can carry. Space on the transports will be limited, and it will take a few trips to complete the evacuation.”

That “obtained” sounded an awful lot like “bought,” and people who couldn’t afford to get off-world in the first place wouldn’t suddenly be able to cough up for private onward transport, would they, you clueless fucking dick!

“I want all of you, each citizen of our proud colony, to hold their heads high as we bid farewell to the world we have called home for most of our lives. You, me, all of us have given more in blood, sweat, and tears than could ever fairly be asked of us...”

No, just us, you fucking douche.

“ ... but fear not. It may not happen during our lifetimes, but the Office of Colonial Affairs will start the process of whole-scale eradication of the Mare’s Tongue blight as soon as the last of our people have left. Please contact your local government representatives if you have any questions regarding these instructions. I will be leaving with the first wave to ensure the smooth relocation of our people from the sector hub.”

Of course, you are, you odious little turd. Perhaps the evacuation might go smoother without you there to fuck it up like you have everything else.

“I want to thank you all and express my admiration for the spirit of the colonists of Orpheus, each and every one of you, and I will see you all on the other side of this. This is Governor Andrew Johnson, wishing you all a good evening, and a safe journey. Thank you, and good night.”

There was silence in the room as the scheduled transmission faded away to nothing. There was a sense of stunned silence that permeated the atmosphere, not just at what Governor Johnson had said but how unbearably frantic their own lives would be for the foreseeable future.

“What ... a prick!” A voice sounded from the other side of the room. A few people laughed, some nodded, and most stayed silent, but all of them agreed. This whole debacle had been botched from start to finish, and Johson was right up there at the top of the list of people who would be put up against a wall and shot if Janus ever had her own way.

“Alright, everyone,” Ellie spoke again as the lights came back up. “As you can see, the shit show is about to start. That broadcast is due to air in about two hours, so we have until then to get everything set up, plus however long before the first shuttles arrive. Station security is being briefed at the same time we are, and additional manpower is being brought in from the system defense fleet and a few of the fleet cruisers. We are going to need to rope off some queuing lanes for every scanning booth. You are gonna want to get a good meal in before we re-open, too, and I would strongly recommend keeping a few nutribars handy. This is going to be a long few weeks, people. Any Questions?”

Most of the room was still a little shell shocked, though, and no questions were forthcoming. There wasn’t really much to question; they would be doing their jobs as they always had done; there would just be a lot more people to process for the next few days. Janus thought the whole thing, as mismanaged and fucking predictable as it was, was pretty straightforward. And yet, despite the simplicity of their situation, one hand had risen into the air.

“Mike, go ahead,” Ellie called out.

“What happens after?” A deep, baritone voice echoed around the room. “You know, after the evacuation. No colony means no border control, right? Are we getting canned?”

Okay, Janus was wrong, that was a damned good question, and every pair of eyes in the room flashed instantly and nervously to their commanding officer. “At the moment, I don’t know,” she answered with a sigh. “The planet is being closed down, but the station is staying here. It’s still an important trading and refueling stop between the core and the outer ring, and there is going to be a pretty sizable terraforming operation here for a long time ... but you’re right. I imagine foot traffic will decrease dramatically. The BCA has posts all over the Imperium, and I’m sure we can get you transferred to other stations before we start thinking about redundancies. I can’t promise your jobs are safe, but I think that it’s much more likely that you can be transferred before getting canned.”

Mike sighed and nodded, slumping back in his chair. He didn’t look relieved, not even mollified; it looked like there would be a choice between staying and risking his job or keeping it and transferring somewhere new.

“Alright, people. You know what’s coming. Let’s make this happen. Dismissed.” With the meeting ended, the sullen and solemn-looking group started filing out of the room.

On the face of it, it was a pretty straightforward choice: If you want to keep your job, get transferred, but many of the men and women in the room had, like Janus, been born and brought up on Orpheus VI, it was all they’d ever known. Moving away from that would be to move away from the friends and family who had always been a part of their lives. But then again, it sounded like those people would be moving away anyway; the question was, instead, could people keep their family and friends close when the inevitable happened? Straightforward decisions were rarely cut and dry once you dug down into them. The situation was a little less complicated for Janus, though. She didn’t have family on the planet’s surface. Her mother had died years ago, complications from liver cancer that had been caught way too late. Medical science could almost always beat any form of cancer these days, but a person still had to see a doctor to get a lump looked at, and she hadn’t the money or the time to do it. By the time a doctor had been seen, it was too late. She was dead within three weeks. Her Dad, crushed by the grief of losing the love of his life, the guilt of not pushing her to see a doctor sooner, and surrounded by the ghost of his wife everywhere he looked, had left the planet. He was now living a quiet life away on Splanos II. Janus’s younger sister, Steph, had gone with him.

Janus had stayed behind.

She had stayed behind for only one reason, and that reason was standing at the front of the room in a deliciously form-fitting uniform that concealed her lovely pert tits, answering questions about being canned.

Janus was the only one who was allowed to call the Captain “Ellie,” a few people were close enough to her to be able to call her Eleanor when they were off duty, but not many, and her family and close friends just called her Elle. Ellie was something special and unique to Janus. In return, she called her babe, a term of endearment that sounded about as affectionate as a cheese grater on her ears when it came from anyone else, but from her lips, it was the sweetest sound imaginable. Their relationship was no secret; fraternization between the ranks may have been a big no-no in the military, but nobody really gave a shit in the BCA as long as that relationship didn’t affect the work and there was no explicit favoritism shown. Still, during work hours, Janus was as deferential to her commanding officer as was expected, and Ellie treated her no differently than any of the other officers.

“McNamara,” Eillie called as the rest of her team filtered out of the room, holding murmured conversations between them. Janues looked up at her Captain. “Can you hold on for a bit?”

“Sure thing, Cap.” Janus smiled.

The two of them waited until the last of the BCA officers left the room and closed the door behind them. “So,” Ellie started, nodding to the now blank holo-screen behind her. “Whadya think?”

“I think that asshole has two brain cells, and they’re both fighting for third place.” Janus shrugged, knowing that wasn’t what Ellie was asking at all.

Her girlfriend snorted out a laugh and then rolled her eyes. God, Janus loved that laugh. “No, babe, what do you think about ... after?”

“Ah, the whole ‘to be or not to be ... transferred’ question,” Janus nodded. “Not really an issue for me, is it?”

“What do you mean? It’s your home.”

“It was my mom’s home. When she died ... look, there’s a reason Dad couldn’t stay here, why he left, and I completely understand it. He needed to get away, and nobody could blame him for that.”

Ellie did that adorable thing where she turned her eyes away, smiled brightly, and blushed a little. Even after all this time, she was under the impression that she was dating ‘up.’ Janus was a good-looking woman; nobody could argue with that, not even her, and she had spent years helping Ellie get over that mentality that Janus could do better than her. It was a notion that was so absurd as to be almost funny. Ellie was, without a doubt, the love of Janus’s life, and it brought her no shame or self-consciousness to openly and freely admit that.

Of course, the fact that she had said those three words first was a source of endless teasing between the two women.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

Ellie shook her head. “Obviously, my family doesn’t know yet, but when they do...”

“They’re not gonna want to live on the station, long term.” Ellie shook her head again, but this time, looked up uneasily into Janus’s eyes. She was a complicated woman. When in her role as Captain, she was confident in her own skin, steadfast in her opinions, and completely unflappable in the face of adversity. But stripped of the veneer of her rank and the disguise of her uniform, she was still the same quietly nervous, unsure-of-herself girl that Janus had met all those years ago. “Any ideas where they’d want to go?”

Ellie seemed to think for a moment. “Dad was one of the first colonists born on Orpheus, did I ever tell you that?” she asked, waiting for Janus to nod before continuing. “Mom moved here with my grandparents when she was young, back in the colony rush era, but originally they were from Theolara. Mom still has family out there. If I had to guess, I’d say they’d choose to move there.”

Janus nodded again. Of course, she’d heard of Theolara, but only in passing. She knew nothing specific about it as a place to live. With worlds in the imperium ranging from backwater hellholes to thriving paradises, any planet could easily fall anywhere on the spectrum between those two extremes. But, where there was a colonized planet, there were star ports and space stations, and those places always needed experienced border guards, so she wasn’t worried about making a living when they got there. But seeing Ellie look so fucking cute, looking at her with those nervous, pleading eyes, was just too good an opportunity not to milk. “And you want to go with them?”

“I ... yeah, I think I do, but...” Ellie let the sentence die on her lips.

“But what?” Janus was trying very hard to keep the teasing grin off her face.

“I ... don’t want ... I don’t want to go alone.”

“You won’t be alone. You just said your family will be there.”

For a moment, Ellie looked like she had been slapped across the face. “Oh,” she said, looking down at her feet.

“Unless I’m missing something,” Janus added.

There must have been something in her voice, something that only Ellie would hear because her eyes shot back up in a flash. “Oh, you bitch!” She laughed, the tension evaporating from her face as soon as Janus let her teasing smile burst onto her lips. “You know I don’t like it when you tease me,” she pouted.

“Psssh, I know you well enough to know that you love me teasing you,” Janus grinned. “I also know you are well aware that you don’t even need to ask. I’m coming with you. Where I go, you go.”

“I don’t deserve you,”

“Yeah, well, you’re stuck with me, so get used to it.”

“I was planning on wearing that see-through negligee for you tonight, but if you’re gonna tease me...” Ellie pretended to pout while also pulling her shoulders back to thrust her chest out a little more prominently, a move that she knew drove Janus crazy.

Janus groaned as the image of her girlfriend, standing before her in the flimsiest piece of sheer material known to ever cover the almighty breast, floated through her mind. “I could still make you go on your own.”