"Hopefully, long enough," he replied to Toland's survival question "I'm Corporal Beskad, the platoon armorer. All you new arrivals need to see me so we can do a weapons function check," he said casually, "so we can make sure nothing goes 'click' when we need it to go 'pow.'"

There was a second reason he wanted to check people's weapons out, and that was to casually assess their skills at marksmanship. As the Alliance had diverse sources of training, it was important to find out what the new guys knew and what they didn't, and Besk felt that a 'function check' was a nicer way of doing that than telling them outright that they were going to have to qualify for marksmanship under his eye. Also, it was real -- the Alliance had multiple sources of blasters, and that meant having to inspect the weapons.

"Also, I notice that both the droids are combat models, so I'd like to see if we can start putting them on sentry duty over the weapons locker. The crew of the Intruder," and he said this without batting an eyelash even though he was shagging the gunnery officer and every one of the veterans knew it, "are not what we'd call entirely trustworthy and we have a Hutt on board. Security for our weaponry and explosives is a must." It meant they could free up more duty time by putting a droid on it for other jobs, so Besk was jumping right on that opportunity.

But as he spoke of 'untrustworthy' his eyes tracked Thanner; he wasn't going to say it where the Lieutenant could hear it, but there was a reason he wanted a droid on weapons locker detail -- they had an Imperial agent on board and he didn't like that any more than his comrades. He actually felt a little naked without firepower strapped to his hip in the form of a pistol or something similar.