He watched some of the replacements come in with impassive eyes; the Intruder wasn't a standard Alliance Navy ship, though the fleet largely was sitting back and building itself up for larger actions while the starfighters and smaller ships, like the Intruder, took the war to the enemy in raiding actions. Hit and fade, hit and fade. And while the Liberators were a line regiment, in theory, the reality is that they'd been converted from urban guerrillas to an army regiment to marine platoons in their time in the Alliance.

That was the dice -- a new strategist came in and changed the old strategy, which forced everyone to adapt. It was the cycle of life and death, lessons learned and surviving in a tough environment.

He was like Vannin; stashing non regulation equipment away when the Captain showed up. He'd acquired a vibroblade on one of their boarding actions, that was carefully placed in a footlocker and stowed along with the operational equipment; he had a Compforce-issue armored suit vest that he was radically modifying and fitting out with attachment points that also was put away. The Captain looked the other way on things so long as discipline appeared in order. The pirate crew hid itself in their section of the corvette, and Slooga graciously stayed in his quarters when such inspections happened. It wasn't the Imperial Army, but obvious disrepair tended to bring down the disapproval and no one needed that.

The battle droid drew more attention from the assembled troopers than the replacement accompanying the battle droid. "A clanker?" whispered Besk, "I've never seen one of these before." Though there was at least one droid in the cargo hold that none of them could actually activate -- the security protocols were more advanced than their knowledge, which was saying something for a pretty tech-savvy crew. The droid looked like it had weaponry installed, and that made it a security model or something that could, theoretically, be put to use guarding the unit's armory when Besk wasn't around or the platoon was deployed. As the platoon's armorer, the locker's security was his job. Usually, the duty of securing it was done in shifts, or, if dropping, by a wounded trooper or someone not going on the drop. Never the Intruder's crew. Worse came to worst, they'd lock it tight, but a droid could fill the gap.

"Yeah, well you were knee-high to a strill when the Clone War ended, weren't you?" muttered another trooper. 

"Look at it this way," Besk shot back in a low tone of voice, "At least one of the replacements is really ready to go. Wonder how Palps' vat-grown plastic boys are going to feel about that one...think those clones get nostalgic for the good old days?"