Due to work stress I’ve been falling back on comfort media, so please have this Jeeves & Wooster Star Trek AU that, I cannot emphasize enough, literally no one asked for.
We Woosters are almost exclusively terrestrial beings, despite the rallying round to the other galaxies in the last few centuries. Unlike Gussie Fink-Nottle, who had been raring for the greener (and more reptilian) pastures of space since childhood, I was content to stay on Earth. I rather fancied myself like that one chap who was bound in that one thing and considered himself the king of that other thing. Jeeves would know who I’m talking about.
However, there’s nothing like Aunt Agatha on a warpath to make one boldly go anywhere that she isn’t.
Salvation, in this case, came in the imposing form of Honoria Glossop, who had graduated from bossing around a young B. Wooster to bossing around some very important bit of the United Earth Government. She looked, as always, as if she had successfully won a hand-to-hand match against a Klingon before breakfast, so I guessed that the old U.E.G. was falling in line better than I ever had.
“Well, we can’t actually hire you,” she said, scrolling through a padd industriously, “but I can appoint you as a special Terran diplomat to somewhere unimportant in Federation space. As long as we make it clear that you’re not being paid, no one will look at your credentials too closely.”
Normally this kind of rampant nepotism (NB: is that the word I want? Ask Jeeves later) would go against the Code of the Woosters, which has undergone some much needed revision over the ages but still advocated for honest dealings. Still, Aunt Agatha was bearing down on me with the fury of a woman deprived of both matrimonial plans and a fairly expensive ceramic cow-creamer, so desperate times called for desperate space stations.
After some additional scrolling and frowning, Horatia finally found a suitably backwater station called Deep Space Nine that was welcoming a Starfleet contingent only next week.
“I say,” I said. “Nothing too bad happened to the first eight, I hope?”
Honoria sighed with set-upon indignity and said “really, Bertie,” but didn’t actually answer my question; instead, she explained that this particular novenary d. s. was ideal for my aunt-hiding needs. “It’s basically in the middle of nowhere. Even you couldn’t screw it up.”
This seemed a bit harsh, coming from a gal whose engagement to Madeline Glossop I once needed to salvage with the help of a Bolian theatre troupe and five dozen chickens, but I nobly held my tongue.
And the first few days on DS9 were exactly that; I ankled about the dusty circular bit and gave a occasional heave-ho to some of the more manageable debris in a show of camaraderie. There was a bar, to my delight, and I holed up there for a goodish period, buying rounds for the new residents and learning some new gambling games. I took notes to share with the Drones upon my return to Earth, and lost enough money to endear me to most of the bar’s regulars. The bar proprietor, a singular fellow named Quark, had never hard of gin rummy before, so I gave ample demonstration. All of the regulars were only too happy to go on about the current intergalactic politics; I didn’t totally understand all of it, but I gamely wrote things down and send comms to Honoria. It seemed like there really wasn’t much to this whole diplomacy thing; I imagined returning to Earth in a wave of intergalactic success to the astonishment of the Drones and Aunt Agatha and everyone else who considered me a bit mentally negligible.
“What,” I’d say rakishly, in the style of one of my favorite holovids, “like it’s hard?”
All of my plans for relaxing in an aunt-free corner of space and noodling around spreading good cheer towards Terrans was complicated a few days later when a wormhole appeared next to the station with all the suddenness of Claude and Eustace crashing into my flat at some unholy hour. All of the Starfleet types ran around looking intent for a while, but it seemed like the wormhole, like Claude and Eustace, would be staying put longer than expected.
This, I gathered in the days to come, rather changed our posish about being in the middle of nowhere.
There was a hubbub with the United Earth Government, but at that point reassigning someone else as ambassador would be a little like closing the barn door after the wormhole had bolted, so B. Wooster was stuck with the task. The good news was that Aunt Agatha still hadn’t figured out where I was; the bad news was that now Honoria and several other important-sounding U.E.G. officials were raining down comms messages. They all seemed inordinately fond of capital letters.
I first caught on that this whole diplomatic wheeze was now more important than Honoria had let on when Jeeves suddenly arrived.
