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The Lothal sector has been given a new lieutenant governor. From what Kallus read about the man, he's quite young to already be promoted to such a high rank. However, the man is from the upper levels of Coruscant and graduated from the royal academy barely a year ago, so it isn't difficult to put two and two together enough to know that this is some high-end's son. Great.
Shaking his head, Kallus switches over to a different tab. This new lieutenant governor had commed Kallus the same day he entered the sector, ordering that Kallus debrief him on all rebel activity reported. Going into it, Kallus figured he could just send the files over and be done with it. Have time to see what intel he could smuggle without arousing much suspicion.
But, apparently, Kallus thought wrong.
He sent all the files over and almost immediately got grilled by this uppercrust nepo ranker because Kallus, allegedly, is too lazy to 'give the debrief proper like'. Fuming, Kallus arrived at the lieutenant governor's star destroyer.
Kallus may have been almost willing to accept that maybe the new hire just has difficulty reading or using the holo technology and needs assistance. Which would be why higher ranks have access to accommodations. Even if there weren't almost every single offered accommodation available to this new high ranker, there's absolutely no excuse as to why he couldn't have a lower ranking officer on his ship read him the file. But no. Everything about this is about flaunting status.
He's been here for several days, recounting each and every incident in the entire Lothal sector dating as far back as the Bridger Transmissions. Another thing Kallus is peeved about, because initially this child just wanted the past four years. But because Kallus gave him the records in the most effective manner, rather than hold his hand through the paperwork, the brat demanded that he now has to do the entire history. Kallus doesn't have to know whoever's son he is to know that the power trip genes must have been passed down.
Kallus’s first observations of the 23 year old told him just as much. This kid has never seen a field mission. He's never fought in any battle. Kallus couldn't find any work history on him, and he looks down his nose at everyone he deems lower than himself. It's infuriating, but Kallus holds his tongue and deals with the constant insults. It isn't personal, the nepo hire is just a dick.
It's alright. Because Kallus has out done himself and is almost finished after three days. And he's saved the best for last. Kallus has used the debrief thus far to get a gauge on exactly just how much experience this kid has. Which is none. Kallus has taken note of every flinch he gains from a lightly detailed attack on the empire. Personal attacks, not just some slash and dash.
On the fourth and final day, Kallus complied as much as he could on one of the most feared enemies of the state ever to strike the sector. Kallus couldn't fit everything in, but he’s sure he has more than plenty.
Walking with a light spring in his step, Kallus smiles as he strolls through the large, desolate halls of the Star Destroyer. It's a ridiculously long walk from the personnel quarters to the lieutenant governor's office, but Kallus has made it in record time. Taking a deep breath, Kallus relaxes his features into a dignified one, formalness masking the anticipation that has been building in him the last few days. He gives a sophisticated knock to the door, one common to their shared homeworld.
"You're late." Kallus holds in the eye roll, even if the other can't see it. "Are you deaf? Get in here to give your debrief before you waste more of my time, Agent."
Ignoring everything irritating about both the statement and the situation- if you didn't want to waste time, why in the stars did you demand that I give you the debrief in person? Kallus clicks his comm cylinder into the door and enters. "My apologies for keeping you waiting." This'll go faster if he tries to appease the brat. "It was ill of me to waste your time by not arriving sooner." It's too early in the morning for this.
"Pfft," the young adult sneers up at Kallus from across the room. Gazing at him as though he is the dirt beneath his boot. "At least the ISB instilled manners into someone like you." It's an act of the senate to keep his eyebrow from twitching in ire. "It's a shame they still weren't able to make you punctual."
Kallus gives a calm, gentle grin, as though his work ethic hasn't just been jabbed at for the twelfth time since he's had the displeasure of meeting this young man. "I'll do my best to make this quick then, Lieutenant Governor." Sure, Kallus certainly isn't going to waste the same energy into imperial work, but he has to make it at least appear like he's worth being kept around. Because if the empire still finds worth in him, the longer he can supply the rebellion with vital intel.
The imperial just rolls his eyes in contempt at Kallus as he waves for him to start.
Talking himself down from just saying 'fuck it' and stealing anything and everything of value of the empire now and taking it to the rebellion, Kallus pulls out a holopad. In his mind, he has a track on repeat of 'short term loss for long term gain'.
"The final report on the Lothal Sector." Kallus sets the holopad down on the desk that separates them, the entire overview casting a blue glow over the dull room. "C1-10P, also referred to as 'Chopper'. Final member I'll be covering of the Spectres."
A truly magnificent droid.
"Of the C-1 series astromech droids, of course."
The lieutenant governor curls his lip as he jumps to his feet. "A droid? You're wasting my time with a droid?!"
Kallus just tilts his head innocently. "I would have covered him last night, but you insisted I was keeping you up too late."
"What rep could it possibly have?" The other crosses his arms over his chest.
The joy of this reaction lights a harsh fire in Kallus’s chest. He's been waiting oh-so patiently for this moment for the past three days.
"Oh," Kallus can't keep the smile off his face any longer, "C1-10P has the longest, most violent of all the spectres." This is going to be utterly splendid.
He is shocked into silence and Kallus absolutely revels in it. The kid playing war leader takes a closer look at the report displayed in front of him. He glares back up at Kallus, but there's a subtle amount of heat lost from it. "A five page report?! On an old droid?" Kallus thrives on the hint of fear creeping in slowly on the edge of the other’s voice. Something that he's desperately trying to bury in his eyes.
"This is just what I was able to compile on such short notice, paired with the rest of the report, of course." Flatly, Kallus didn't even have to dig for the worst of what Chopper had done. Just what he's been working on the past few months. "Honestly, if I had to write about every single thing this droid has ever done, we wouldn't leave this room for, at minimum, a standard week. And that's if I were to make a light point by point summary, not each individual instance in full detail."
Kallus can see that the kid's eyes are unfocused, he can't bring himself to start reading the report himself. That, or he still stubbornly refuses to do so. Or, likely, both. The lieutenant governor tries to make a show of regaining his composure, turning away from the desk and open report to look out the window behind him. Though, he has his fists clasped behind his back tightly.
"It's a droid. Probably just following some rebel programming. Read the report to me." The tremble in his voice isn't prominent. Yet. But it is ever so slightly present.
"Yessir." Kallus looks to the report before him needlessly, having committed every minute detail to memory. Pretending not to pay attention to the lieutenant governor's reaction he recites the report.
C1-10P
Known Aliases:
-Chopper (By Crew)
-Chop (By Crew)
-Spectre III (By Crew)
-Child (By Hera Syndulla)
-Explosive Bestie (By Sabine Wren)
-Murder Mech (by Garazeb Orrelios, Ezra Bridger, and Imperial Personnel)
-Danger Droid (By Imperial Personnel)
-Butcher (By Imperial Personnel)
-Electrocutor (By Imperial Personnel)
-Gri-
"Oh, skip the blasted aliases!" The lieutenant governor spins back around to glare up at Kallus. "Just tell me what crimes it has supposedly committed!"
Smiling gently, Kallus nods. "Of course."
"There are 57 counts of sabotaged weaponry storages, two dozen different lines of blasters throughout them," Kallus pauses for half a beat, "in just the past three months."
"Just three months?" The lieutenant governor's jaw drops. Kallus loves how he can see the gears turning in the kid's head as he tries to figure out how many different weaponries that would be a week. "57?!"
"Those are just the weaponries he destroyed. In the same span of time, he robbed another 46 weaponries of their explosives and blasters and proceeded to use said stolen weaponry on Imperial compounds and ships." Kallus tilts his head, disinterested.
"It shot at and bombed grounded ships?"
Kallus snorts, "Oh no, the ships were in space when he assaulted them. The only ground attacks he committed was to anything bolted to a planet."
The lieutenant governor tenses, appearing to be very suddenly aware of how delicate the star destroyer actually could be, suspended in the vast vacuum of space. "Was… was it on the ship or attacking from the outside?"
"Both, depended on what he was doing. Most of the time, however, yes, was indeed on the ships he attacked." Smothering down the grin on his face, he continues, "more often than not, he tends to toy with the inhabitants of the ships and compounds before trying, and usually succeeding, to destroy the facilities."
The lieutenant governor crumbles in on himself just the slightest bit, trying his damndest to keep his posture bold. "Elaborate… on that."
"A common thing for him to do is to chase stormtroopers and officers through the halls blasting at them." And if that isn't enough to horrify him, Kallus smirks as he watches the lieutenant governor's eyes shake, a gleam of sweat forming above his brow. "And then when they get tired and start to slow down, he'll ram into them full force to make them run fast so he can continue to shoot at them."
The other seems at a loss for words. As though he can't grasp the concept. "It's an astromech. Barely anything more than an appliance. How-"
Kallus can feel his eyebrow twitch at the sentence. An appliance. A blasted appliance. The way the lieutenant governor calls Chopper 'it' grates Kallus’s nerves. It's the entitled, patronizing tone. He curls his lip, "he has also been known to attach active detonators to unsuspecting personnel."
The young man shakes his head, bringing a baffled look up to Kallus. "How is it able to do that and no one notices? Isn't it an older orange mech?"
"He's well known for disguising as an imperial droid. The mandalorian is an artist, as we covered yesterday." Crossing his arms over his chest, Kallus quirks a brow.
"A-ha!" The lieutenant smiles widely, desperately, as though he found the missing piece. "It's the mando girl! She must have programmed him. Didn't you say she attended the imperial academy on Lothal?"
Kallus can't kriffing- "No," he supplies flatly. The lieutenant governor looks positively floored. As if this is the first time someone's ever dared to correct him. Which it probably is.
Kallus cannot believe that he's probably going to blow his cover as a defector, not because Thrawn caught on to him, not because he was in the midst of smuggling classified documents to the rebellion, but because he told some privileged nepo ranker no. Kallus sighs, either way, it is "treasonous" to withhold information from a questioning officer. And this kid did indeed question.
"As I covered in the brief summary of The Spectres in the meeting yesterday, the droid has been active in his crimes before Sabine Wren joined the crew. In fact, he was like this even when it was just him and the pilot." It takes everything in Kallus to not roll his eyes.
"There's no way this droid acts independently." The lieutenant governor glares at Kallus, though Kallus remains indifferent.
"Two weeks ago," Kallus brings up an incident he witnessed first hand. One of his superior officers had started berating Kallus while Chopper happened to be on a mission at the same facility. What Chopper did in response, "I witnessed 'this droid' chase around an admiral with a flamethrower and didn't stop until the smell of burning skin was heavy in the air. The admiral is still in recovery."
The lieutenant governor makes this choked sound. "Well, why- why didn’t you stop it?"
Even if I weren't on the same side as Chopper, I wouldn't step in his way when he's in an active war path. "The admiral had priorly ordered that I not move from my post. I would have been defying direct orders." Kallus looks back to the report. "He has a knack for appearing out of the blue, however. Whatever reason he had for setting thar admiral on fire, he would have sought through to his goal whether I was there or not. For the past three months, he's toyed with Governor Pryce."
"The Governor?!" A high pitched sound escapes from the back of his throat. "Impossible…"
"Sir," Kallus boredly looks to those terror filled eyes and has to smother his grin once more, "nothing is impossible when it comes to this particular cell."
"What… what did it do to Pryce?" The apple of his throat bobs as he gulps.
"Probably the most tame thing he's done to any of his targets. Stalked her around, zapped her, chased her occasionally. One time, she felt as though someone was staring at her in her sleep. When she opened her eyes, he was right there." Kallus hunches down over the table, whispering to the lieutenant governor, trying to keep his voice down as though Chopper were listening in right this very moment, "Staring at her in the middle of the night," Kallus smirks watching as the lieutenant is frozen in place, "and there was no telling how long he had been there, as if he were taunting her."
Kallus straightens his posture, returning to his normal tone to continue giving the verbal report as though he didn't just strike the fear of the stars into the young man's chest. "C1-10P has a streak of taking no prisoners."
"It let's imperials who surrender walk away?"
"Stars no." Kallus innocently tilts his head, "he attacks them. Recently, when a temporary truce had been called between our personnel and a cell of rebels, he rolled full force at our personnel and pushed them off a cliff."
There's a small ray of hope that manages to slither in those blue eyes of the lieutenant governor. "The rebels called a truce?"
"No, our men had." Kallus is more than delighted to set the imperial's small bit of hope on fire. "Two months ago," Kallus doesn't waste a moment on moving to the next bullet point, "as an imperial transport was preparing to return to a Star Destroyer, C1-10P tossed a detonator into the thruster. The transport made it out of orbit, but never to the Star Destroyer."
"There's no way any of this actually happened." The kid's disbelief begins to turn into anger. "It would be so like someone of your background to try and intimidate me for fun. Since you have no actual power or status above me." The young man brings himself back to his proper posture, even going as far as trying to make himself seem bigger than Kallus.
He's the same height as Ezra Bridger. Though he's older than the teenager. Kallus simply pulls out a secondary holochip. Setting it on the desk, it brings up footage of Chopper's acts against the Empire. "The ISB keeps holographs and recordings of rebel activity. This droid has an entire gallery that I took the liberty of borrowing for you."
Kallus takes a moment to watch as the temporary gust of confidence dissolves once more. "He does much more than simply attack, however."
The lieutenant governor looks like he's about to vomit. Good. "What could be worse?"
"When a ship is infiltrated, all plans and security measures go south, and life support begins to fail, what do we do? According to protocol?"
The kid gives him a baffled look. "Fall back to the designated escape pods." Kallus waits for the implication to process. He can see the gears working overtime in that brain. "It… sabotages the escape pods?"
"Commonly, he'll get on a Star Destroyer or Light Cruiser to do nothing more."
Kallus enjoys how he scrambles to activate his commlink, ordering officers to have the escape pods checked immediately. He waits patiently for him to finish barking orders. Kallus wants his full attention for the rest of this presentation. The commlink simply slips from the lieutenant governor's fingers once he kills the line.
"If you're ready to continue, sir?" Kallus’s tone is respectful and polite.
The lieutenant governor's face is a pale-ish green as he grimaces. "Blasted- what else could possibly be left?"
"As I stated earlier," Kallus reiterates, "these things are primarily just the past few months. Not a complete history." Kallus wipes off the non-existent dirt from his uniform. "Carrying on, C1-10P has often disrupted academy life. Giving many cadets extra tutoring through unscheduled drills."
The llieutenant governor curses under his breath.
Kallus pushes on, "he's attacked over a dozen imperial medical facilities. Let's just say, he made faster work of wiping away our weaker links." There's something that dies slightly in the other’s eyes. "A month ago, it was reported that he, allegedly, threw stolen ration bars at a group of stormtroopers."
"That is the least dangerous thi-"
"And when they bent down to recover the stolen supplies, he tossed out active detonators."
"-ng…" The lieutenant governor slides down into his chair, looking utterly sick and defeated.
"And the last thing in the report." Kallus is still recovering from this last one himself, as he had helped in it. "At the end of last week, he aided two dozen notably inebriated rebel pilots to take control of a Star Destroyer before setting it to crash into a nearby Star Destroyer. And making a successful escape."
Just at that moment, the door behind Kallus opens and a courier droid rolls in with a delivery of important documents for the lieutenant governor. The droid happily chirps at Kallus as she passes him and Kallus gives her an affectionate pat.
There's a deep seeded terror in the lieutenant governor's eyes as she rolls up next to him. He flinches away from her as she extends the datachip. He gently takes the chip and in the quietest whimper, Kallus can hear a "thank you" uttered from the young man. The droid beams, thrilled to bits, in return as she takes her leave.
He's never going to look at a droid the same way ever again. Kallus smirks to himself, feeling happy that the waste of his time at least amounted to something. "If there wasn't anything else, Sir?"
The lieutenant governor waves Kallus off as he makes a swift grab for a nearby waste bin to purge his breakfast.
Kallus leaves the room without another word.