Head of Republic Intelligence Marcus ██████
[Marcus is a very tall, thin old man. He has a large white beard and large glasses. Although old, he seems to have a very keen sense of his surroundings, common within the intelligence gathering community. We speak in a interrogation room this time, Marcus has locked the door behind him and shut off the audio detectors. I did not know I was about to step on one of the biggest bombshells in history.]
You wanted to talk about CT: ████, Rats, and I know what you want to ask me about exactly.
The Blackened Harvest incident...
He takes a deep, wavering breathe. Looking around the room, then eying me. … How much is your life worth? I wonder. In this galaxy, there are so many living, breathing bodies... So many pumping hearts and thinking minds... So many souls and beliefs... It's hard to think of yourself when you are compared to the Galaxy, all the billions of lives... Trillions, even...
There was a long pause
… There are things in this world we keep as secrets not only for our safety, but for our humanity... For our future... That's why it's been so hard for you to get a single soul to tell you what happened that day... And I suppose it's for the best... But it doesn't matter, I only have a year left, the doctors say. And I might as well go out with a bang.
We all know Blackened Harvest was a mistake. I'm not going to say it wasn't, it was a loss of life that could have been easily avoided. But... What people tell you is not always the truth...
The operation was to go smoothly. Rats and his squad were deployed with civilian clothing, and their Deeces and armor hidden in bags they carried. The IDEA was that Rats and his squad would reach a back alley in the financial district, and take it to the residential district. From the alleyway, they would drop the bags and put on their gear. Next, they'd make their way to a "safe house" across the street. Of course, we both know it was empty. We also both know that halfway across the street, an agent was supposed to appear from behind a speeder and shoot a couple blanks at CT: ████. Rats would go down, he'd apply intense sleep meds to himself VIA pulling a small tag on his shin armorpiece, commandos would pull out and be EVACed with the "body", "body" is taken to morgue and claimed dead. From there, Rats got a new CT number and would be sent to Republic Intellegence for his next mission. And his commandos would think he was dead, and it would remain that way.
That's not what happened.
Everything went as smoothly as it was supposed to go... Rats and his team reached the alleyway, he put on his stuff, and they went across the street.
… But...
… Something happened when the agent exposed himself and started shooting blanks at Rats... More specifically, something happened to Rats... You see, his brain is hardwired to complete his objectives, no matter what. He was born that way. Even if the objective was a fake one... Something in Rats broke in two, he confused himself on what he was supposed to do and what he was told to do. One half of his brain told him to complete his FAKE objective and clear the safe house, the other half of his brain told him to complete his REAL objective, and to apply the sleep meds. I guess in the end, the fake objective won over...
Rats shot the agent as he popped up to shoot his blanks at Rats. Rats' Deece was loaded, so the agent died immediately when two lasers fried his brains. His squad mates, thinking that Rats had done what he was supposed to do, continued moving across the street. He followed behind them. All across the neighborhood, people called the authorities after hearing the gunshot. By now, the commandos were SUPPOSED to be gone. But since they had no reason to exfil, they pressed on.
It was when they were stacking up on the house entrance when Rats finally went crazy. He snapped, realizing that he was both failing one objective while succeeding in the other. His squad mates started to take notice of this when Rats started to apologize loudly for failing the mission. His squad slicer, confused, was about to tell him that the mission wasn't over yet. He was interrupted when Rats raised the flechette cannon on his Deece and opened fire.
The commandos in his squad didn't stand a chance... Since Rats was so close to them when he opened fire, they were shredded within seconds. Along with a large portion of the front entrance to the house. The slicer was the first to go, Rats shot him directly in the head with a flachette shell. The other commandos stared at Rats and the slicer in shock, their training failing them in this gruesome scene of betrayal. Rats took advantage of that, and finished off the other two. Shooting them both in the chest with quick succession.
It was at this point civilians began to gather outside the safe-house, wondering what was going on... At this point, Rats was full blown mentally unstable, compromised. He had a hard time understanding what was threat and what wasn't. He was told that there were to be no one to know he was alive... I guess he took it literally... He-... He came out of the building, rambling something. The civilians started to back up, but it was too late. Rats opened fire, with the commando training he was given it was well beyond one-sided. They ran but... They couldn't get far. Rats used his grenades, throwing it into the crowd. Blood, meat, organs, it all hit the pavement... So many lives... Brutally slaughtered.
The police units stood no chance, I'm not even going to tell you how that went... The police speeder didn't even survive Rats' rampage. Rats was making his way down the street at this point, moving from cover to cover. All the civilians either had fled by now or were bloody red marks on the street. Rats, ironically, was moving to his exfil point, thinking that he had completed his objectives when in actually he didn't even have a team to exfil with. That's when the ARCs came in... Elite Civilian Protection Enforcement (1), ARCs that weren't good enough to be military. But they were still ARCs, you see. What happened next was interesting...
Rats engaged them, shooting a good number of them. Alot of them... Right around his third kill, he ran out of ammo and proceeded to beat the fourth ARC to death... He pinned him to the ground behind a car, ripped off the ARCs helmet and just slammed the helmet into his head over and over and over again... The other ARCs tried to get around the car and WOULD have shot him, but something happened. RI commandos bust out of nowhere, behind speeders, buildings, dumpsters, everywhere, catching the remaining couple ARCs off guard. Taking them out in quick succession. Rats, who went for his pistol to shoot the RI units, was too late. One of the commando's stunned him, cuffed him, and dragged him into the nearest alleyway. The commandos disappeared, along with an unconscious Rats...
There was another pause, Marcus went into a coughing fit somewhere in the silence and apologized.
… We didn't know it at the time, none of us knew it. But what we were witnessing was one of the biggest coverups in Intelligence history. The agency was giving the military the biggest middle finger that there was to give. You know what happened? You'd think Rats would have been put out of duty, right?... Wrong. Intelligence knew that even if Rats was unstable, even if Rats was amoral and dirty and unprofessional, even if he was mentally insane, They. Still. Hired. Him. Can you believe it? This man murdered a total of thirty five people, twenty three of which civilians. Woman and children. And the Republic didn't discharge him...
I thought about it for a long while. A really long while. 'Why would the Republic do this?...' I thought, 'Why would they hire someone who killed innocent people, OUR innocent people?...' And then, one day it hit me. Rats wasn't executed, Rats was never sent to prison, Rats was never even punished because Rats did exactly what we wanted him to do. He did exactly what we made him to kill.
So what if he killed thirty five innocent people? You know how many live on Coruscant? One trillion. One. Trillion. In the eyes of the Republic, it didn't matter if thirty five people were killed. Even children. Because in the Republic's eyes, Rats was well worth it. Because Rats was the person... The thing... The MONSTER that the Republic needed. They didn't need, or want, more morally correct jedi. They didn't want more heroic clones, what the Republic wanted, what it needed, was a bad guy. A big mean dog to deliver some bite from it's pitiful bark.
The CIS weren't scared of us, we had nothing to scare them with. Heroes aren't scary, we were losing our propaganda battles by miles. Sure, Jedi's are really nice and really polite. And sure, they can do all sorts of neat tricks with they're light batons of justice. But people weren't afraid to fight them. The jedi deal with passive tactics, taking prisoners when they could, refraining from violence whenever possible, avoiding conflict to instead read they're holocrons and be wise. Sure, clone's like Captain Rex and Commander Cody and so many other Morally Correct Max test tube babies (2) were soldiers and shot things... But they lacked the same problem, a un-intimidating face. They too, were passive.
But Rats... Rats was like the little gremlin the heroes kept in case they needed to do something awful... He was our loaded gun, he was like a scapegoat. Kinda... When General Kenobi needed a criminal to talk, he would call Rats. When Commander Cody needed a clone disciplined, Rats... You have no idea about the subtle effect Rats had on the CIS Shadowfeed system... Underneath this whole war battles were being raged on intelligence and propaganda, and by the core, I think this war would have been a lot more bloody if it hadn't been for Rats. Even Sith sometimes get the willies from him (3).
… So they cave him some mental therapy, gave him some meds, and sent him back to RI... There were some accusations on clone madness (4), but diagnosis revealed that Rats wasn't mad, he was just too technical... It was insane. He wasn't even punished, I don't think. Around a week later he was calling himself Intelligence Operative. We needed to put him someplace among elite, some place among assassin's and miscreants. We couldn't place him with other clones, too much unit cohesion, too much friction(5). So... Place where only the elite's went... No clones... Perfect, 84th bound he went.
So... That's... That's it?...
Yep
He murdered thirty or so innocents, against orders, and was sent back into action?
Mhm
… In one of the most elite squads of the war?
As long as he wasn't given objectives that were literally impossible to complete or objectives that negated one another, he was deemed A-OK... The families that died were given condolences, but the Republic Intelligence community never gave them a reason how. They never even stated what happened or why... That must have been horrible to the families that lost loved ones in the incident... Seeing your loved ones, friends, family being shot and blown up... And not even told as to why... (6)
My god...
That's not even the most messed up part.
Hm?
Republic Intelligence classified the whole thing as a mission success... To this day, Rats is still considered to have a 100% success rate...
There was a long pause as we both mulled over these thoughts in our brain
Where is he now?
If only I knew.
NOTE: (Marcus died 17 days after this interview. His death was not of his disease, but of a supposed suicide as he jumped out his apartment window. Republic Intelligence denied all allegations of a assassination.)
(1) The ECPE SpecOps unit designated with Domestic crime in Coruscant, none of which survived the onslaught.
(2) Derogatory term used for clones, coined by CV-█████
(3) Referring to an incident where two sith inquisitors fled from Rats upon sight of him.
(4) A mental affliction with clones that were per-maturely conceived, rendering them mentally unstable.
(5) Term used by RI to signify conflict or argument within a squad or partnership.
(6) This was made to be false, as it turns out RI told the families of the dead that they're loved one's deaths were due to the infamous Coruscant Insurrection, which happened a while earlier.