Not My Idea of Vacation (The Best Way Not To Handle A Crisis)
Title: Not My Idea of Vacation
Series: The Best Way Not To Handle A Crisis (0/?)
Rating: G for now but it'll probably go up to R later.
Characters: Basically everyone, in one way or another.
Pairing: Everyone/everyone None at the moment.
Disclaimer: All made up! Lies! Crazy lies! UNE is totally not the UN IN SPACE; UNEPOL is not in any way related to Interpol IN SPACE.
Warnings/notes: (1) Crack. IN SPACE.
(2) Obviously wildly AU.
(3) Possible OOC because no one is an athlete in this. And they're more than half a millennium forward in time.
(4) This is unbetaed (any volunteers?) and it's been ages since I've written fic.
(5) I CHEATED AND NOW NOT-SO-STEALTHILY CHANGED SOME DETAILS. Please forgive me? :(
Summary: SIUO gets tasked by the UNE Security Council* with solving some crime. A pissed off SIA Håvard Bøkko gets to lead a team assembled by the Security Council and containing a wanted man and uncover what the hell is going on. (Hopefully he'll get to go back to his vacation once the solving is done.)
* No relation. Honest.
Håvard was in as bad a mood as anyone who gets called back from vacation because of an unspecified “emergency” at work, even if that work was UNEPOL (“unspecified emergencies” expected every time you weren’t there, possibly just to spite you).
He stalked back onto UNEPOL-IUO premises less than four days after he’d left them (seventeen days before he should be back), scowled at the receptionist who directed him to his boss’ office and prodded the elevator button so viciously he hurt his thumb. (The fact that the pain took away some of the anger only added to his annoyance.)
The elevator chimed that it’d make an extra stop at the eleventh floor, where the building connected with its neighbour and which had allowed some insane administrators to wedge the UNESC/UNEPOL Liaison Office between the Special Investigative Units Offices and the Administration Department, as they had to have ‘regular contact with both’ (apparently, those administrators had been fans of face-to-face real-time conversation).
The elevator chimed again and the doors slid open, and admitted an annoyed-looking Shani, who as head of Liaisons had frequent reasons to be annoyed with most governing bodies of humankind (as he’d learned over the years of their friendship).
‘Hey, weren’t you on vacation?’
‘I was,’ he grumbled. ‘I should be having a nice drink in the afterevening sun.’
Shani chuckled. ‘Forgot to read the fine print that says you sign over all your free time to UNE’s whims?’
‘Yeah. Must’ve. It appears there’s an emergency going on,’ he said, trying not to smile and being mostly successful.
The elevator announced they’d reached their floor and the doors opened again. He and Shani walked the rest of the way to Mueller’s office in silence. The giant blackglass door hissed open to let them in, then smoothly shut itself again. This time, he did lose the fight against a grin as Shani voiced his usual complaint of most exoworld’s doors lack of slammeability.
His boss’s obscenely large desk (office legend was it had come with the original terraforming expedition but he doubted any practical crew would take such a stupidly large piece of furniture with it) was covered with the datapads that presumably constituted the mystery emergency. Mueller didn’t seem very surprised to see either of them, though something that could technically be sympathy briefly flashed across his face.
That didn’t bode well.
Håvard decided being plucked off the beach gave him the rights to complain first: ‘So any particular reason none of the other SIA’s can tackle this urgent emergency?’
The layer of datapads shifted slightly as Mueller rummaged through it and threw him one. ‘Yes.’
While he skimmed files about some museum thefts which in his opinion were very much undeserving of UNEPOL attention much less emergency status, Shani launched into his complaint. He didn’t pay any close attention-Liaison’s most frequent complaint was always that various governments or officials were slightly confused over what it was there for-until he caught that someone had been ordered taken off UNEPOL books by Security Council decree.
(Several more uninteresting thefts scrolled by. Apparently they were early terraforming artefacts.)
‘They want me to remove the one person that legitimises the existence of-’
‘-I don’t like this any more than you do, and you know th-’
Wait. Stupidly urgent emergency. That required his personal attention. (Some seemingly random thefts.) “The one person” who “legitimised the existence” of SIUO… He most likely wouldn’t like hearing the answer to this question. ‘-What the hell’s going on?’
‘The UNESC wants them,’ Mueller motioned in Shani’s direction, ‘to take Kramer off the register,’ - no, he didn’t even like hearing this part of the answer -, ‘and,’ Mueller continued, ‘they want us to work with him.’
‘“Us”?’
‘Work with him?’
Mueller sighed and threw Shani another pad. ‘Yes. “Us” including you and “work with him” meaning, you know,’ shrug, ‘throwing years of work away.’
He turned to Shani, who didn’t look very impressed by the reports either. ‘I don’t work for you. And I’m certainly not working with him.’
‘You work for the UNE.’
‘And what’s so special about these thefts?’ Shani demanded.
‘He’s probably behind them anyway!’ Håvard protested, at more or less the same time.
Mueller was silent for a few seconds, then explained in terms that screamed “They didn’t tell me everything either”, that there was “good reason” (read: “we know but won’t tell you”) to suspect there was more going on than just some thefts of important artefacts and that the Security Council was now of the opinion Kramer had “valuable skills” for this “unique situation”.
It left him none the wiser, although he now seriously doubted the judgement of the highest human government. Getting a criminal wanted for everything under the stars that didn’t involve physically harming other humans or sabotaging terraforming missions to help solve a series of thefts…?
‘You’ll be taking a special team-’ a special special forces team, that was sure to have made some bureaucrat’s day, ‘-assembled by the Security Council-’ of course (so this “special team” would be him, a friend who wasn’t even officially part of SIUO, the man he’d spent years trying to capture, and a randomly thrown together bunch of SIUO agents he most likely wouldn’t know and who might not know each other either; which was sure to be a smashing success), ‘-to locally investigate these cases.’
Multiple interplanetary trips; oh joy.
Two more datapads sailed their way, and Håvard caught his on top of the other one, like parents told young children not to because it could so easily damage the pad. He could at least cost UNEPOL two new datapads.
This new pad contained a list of the people (not all complete strangers, and even some people he knew reasonably well) the Security Council people had chosen for this insanity. The fact that they weren’t here demanding to know why they weren’t supposed to do the work they were being paid for gave him the unwelcome idea that he was going to have to tell them that.
Mueller added that they were expected to inform the other members of their team (how surprising) they had two hours to get ready; and that the two of them, personally, would be there to meet their “new colleague” at the starport in two hours. They were apparently leaving for Earth (ugh) in less than three hours, and with that they were waved out of the office.
‘Well,’ he said drily, ‘at least I’ve still got all my things packed.’
‘You know,’ Shani mused playfully, ‘I’ve always thought they wouldn’t panic this much until we’d discover sapient aliens…’
‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘imagine the chaos if we did?’
Laughing slightly despite everything, they made their way back to the elevators and contacted the rest of their team-to-be. (None of them were very happy with the news.)