Meet The New Boss
Chepi brooded in the back of the cab with her head in her hands, lost in thought. The debriefing of their last mission had not gone well. Commander Noriko read her the riot act over her team’s performance, and well she should have. Chepi would have a few choice words for her team at their next meeting in the morning. For now, she just wanted to get home and soak in a warm tub.
How in the blue hell had things gone so badly? She’d meticulously planned out every detail and made sure her team had adequate intelligence. Still, they’d managed to screw it up good. Tala and Fehed had been ill equipped; Vittorio and Ezra had been out of position. At least in the end, Ezra was able to upload the data, and she got everyone out alive.
Relaxing in the bath that night, Chepi played back the day’s events in her head.
Yesterday morning, everything seemed to start out fine. All they had to do was break into Chysoar, upload some data files from their servers to the command center network, and get out. They had been given a dossier documenting the security in the building, and they even had access codes.
Tala and Fehed showed up in their undercover disguise, but they had the right badges and the wrong maintenance uniforms; the set they’d brought had been used in the previous job they’d just completed. Chepi decided since this was supposed to be a simple data grab, the cat and dog could stay in the van and act as backup, so she took Vittorio and Ezra and went on ahead without them.
When they got to the server room, they discovered that their swiped access codes had not been appropriately updated; they were two months out-of-date. Ezra had to do an on-the-spot hack to gain access, while Chepi and Vittorio ran interference. It was Ezra’s idea to pose as server room cleaners, but for some inexplicable reason, in the process, Vittorio just wandered off. He never did give a satisfactory explanation of where he went. Then, after collecting the data, Ezra took the wrong escape route, so Chepi had to take Tala and Fehed back in to retrieve him.
Distracted, Chepi pulled the chain from the tub drain stopper with her big toe, and watched the soapy water swirl away into oblivion. She realized the main problem was focus. Her team was not concentrating on what was happening at the time; they were not zeroed in on the task at hand. The whole lot of them was anywhere but in the present moment. Tala and Fehed couldn’t seem to grasp that what happened on the last mission might not happen on the current one. Vittorio never took anything seriously, and Ezra was just plain old standard issue scatterbrained. Rhiannon had never had any trouble supervising the team, but with her gone, and Chepi now in charge, somehow they’d lost some of that cohesiveness they’d had, and she couldn’t figure out how to get them back into ship shape, and peak performance.
Could it be she just wasn’t cut out to lead?
In the meeting room, Fehed and Tala were engaged in idle chatter, Ezra was engrossed by his terminal in what was obviously a video game, while Vittorio had apparently drifted off onto some other planet. Chepi simply shook her head. Everyone was in their own little world, seemingly not the slightest bit concerned about the monstrous cluster fuck that was yesterday’s activity, as if that royal shitstorm had hit their ragtag band of compatriots a decade earlier, not just 24 hours ago. She slumped into her seat and sighed heavily, but said nothing.
Ignored by her mates, Chepi took her staff from its station at her command post, charged it with an Earth spell, then stood and looked over the others for only a moment, before bringing the rod down sternly at her feet. A thunderous tremor quaked through the entire base, sending the rest crashing onto the floor. Seeing them all upended unto their butts was almost enough amusement to make the whole debacle worth it, but Chepi tried her best to contain her smirk. She hated being hard on them, but she wasn’t their friend anymore, she was their commander now. It was time she stepped up and started acting like it.
“We need to talk,” she stated firmly, as calmly as she could.
The rest of the group stared up at Chepi from the odd positions where they’d landed, blinking, and stunned. Things were about to change in their little gang, in a big way they would not soon forget.
LJI WEEK 11:
RECENCY BIAS
Additional stories from this world, in chronological order:
| In The Beginning | Escalation | Project X | The Woodshed |
| Meet the New Boss | Back To Reality | The Interview |
| The Turing Test | Ohm’s Law | Hero’s Anthem |