Chapter 77
Geonosis, Geonosis System
Arkanis Sector
As the warship plunged into the arid atmosphere of Geonosis, Asajj Ventress struggled to shut out the staggering cacophony of sensory input and focus on finding her centre amid the chaos. Not from the turbulence, no, for the faux-freighter was solid of form and build and there was hardly a shudder as they whipped through a thundering sandstorm, but from the commotion on the deck. The flagship of the Storm Fleet, Storm-001 and the ships it led were all designed with the cover of a PCL 27 A-class freighter in mind, to disguise their true nature as warships.
Which meant they all possessed utterly massive bow cargo doors that spanned flank-to-flank, ostensibly to facilitate the off and onloading of the vast volumes of freight these ships fueled the galaxy with. Cargo bay doors meant cargo bays–smaller ones, not on the scale of a real A-class freighter–but large enough to be repurposed into a modest hangar bay. If hangar bays didn’t need airlocks or atmospheric containment shielding, that was, since the doors opened directly to the outside.
Except, the cargo bays weren’t being used as hangars–not in any traditional sense, at least.
From the railings of an observation platform above, Ventress silently watched the Onderonians scamper about on the bay deck–like ants scurrying in the shadows of giants. In the dim lighting, enormous wyverns writhed and grated against their steel prison, snapping and clawing in their restraints. Dxunian warbeasts, Ventress rubbed a phantom itch on her newly acquired mechno-arm, and lunar dragons. The dark side of the Force was thick and heavy in the bay, as if the gargantuan warbeasts lived and breathed it, as they should, spawned from the Demon Moon of Onderon.
In fact, there was more turbulence from inside the ship than outside.
Asajj Ventress absorbed their emotions, their frustrations, their pent up rage, accumulated over weeks and months cooped up in these metal cages. Ventress never thought of sympathising with monsters, but she did now. Plucked from their homeworlds, herded aboard warships and taken to where none of their kind have ever gone before. The stars in the sky.
The assassin felt a tinge of nostalgia. She was like them too, once.