The Blue Lion

[jammi]

Over the crowds and congratulations, Andrew's PDA beeped. Then it beeped again. And again, and again. The last manager of ExSec had been notoriously fickle with his paperwork, and the whole caseload had just been dropped on his shoulders. His jaw dropped again as he scanned through his now full inbox to find five crimson HIGH ALERT IMMEDIATE RESPONSE messages lodged there. He was already coming to rue his promotion to middle-management.

Over the clamorous noise, he shouted his thanks to various well-wishers, then battled his way through to Scott, who was now concealed by a wall of sycophantic Services personnel, probably hoping for another free round. Aaron was somewhere inside the crowd too, but Andrew had lost sight of him. He didn't think that was a particularly bad thing.

Grasping Scott's shoulder, he cleared a little space, shooing a few of the more boisterous and irksome toadies out of the way. "You're not going to believe this - I had my annual leave booked for tomorrow! I was going to be spending two weeks on the violet foothills of New London!" He held up his PDA. "Look what those ruddy bastards have dropped on me! I'm going to be on Lancaster all night sorting this lot out." He thumbed his PDA and muted it, to silence the beeps that were still flooding in.

"Typical. Absolutely ruddy typical. I'll see you in the Manager's Lounge later on, Scott. Terribly sorry I've got to cut this short." At that he forced his way out (using his helmet alternately as a battering ram and a mace) and ran for the Leeson. If he pulled an all-nighter on Lancaster, he could probably square away the urgent requests before his shuttle on New London departed. He hoped.

There went two weeks of relaxation out the window.

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