Halcyon 🪐⋆｡°✩ Paul Arteides ✩⋆｡°🪐 / A Star Wars Story

7.

The Jedi had their first experience in an ornithopter. These ships were sturdy, quick and effective in travelling above the desert. 

Instead of blast jets, ornithopters had three wings on either side of its hull. They each flapped at their own speed until they would synchronise to lift the ship off the ground. This made the ship hum as it flew over the sand, and the extreme, early morning heat didn't seize their engines.

Much to everyone's relief, Mon vin Cuss did not accompany the group into the desert. 

In fact, Ahsoka and Sidra believed that the man had never ventured out of Arrakeen's complex. They almost giggled at the thought of him burning to embers at the first exposure of the Arrakis sun. They joked that he would cry out and disintegrate to join the sand that he so loathed.

Instead, the Jedi were accompanied by Glossu Rabban and his men. 

Anakin and Obi-wan stood in the cockpit, where they looked over Glossu and his co-pilot to the outside desert. Ahsoka and Sidra were forced into the back, where seats lined the walls.

Like children, the Padawans were strapped in by seatbelts while their Masters were able to stand at the front of the ornithopter. Ahsoka made sure to voice her opinions while Sidra sat with her hands clasped in her lap and her lips fighting a smile.

'Master, if we need to balance out the ship, shouldn't you be sitting back here? We can switch,' Ahsoka called over the hum of the engine, but she was ignored. Anakin barely gave a glance over his shoulder with a hand on his hip, before he looked back to the blinding windshield.

Sidra was able to see the desert and opaque blue sky through a window beside Ahsoka's montrals. She had been excited to see the Spice in person, and experience the constantly hot weather. But after flying over each sand dune that was a near copy of the last, Sidra found her eyes drifting elsewhere.

The Harkonnen soldier who stood at the back of the ornithopter added to Sidra's distraction. With one hand through a ceiling loop, the Harkonnen acted as a guard, as if one of the Jedi was prepared to leap to their death. 

Sidra wished that Luvis had travelled with them, but she knew that it would be pushing Mon even more than Anakin already had.

'There. They are mid-harvest as we speak,' was heard from the pilot's seat.

Sidra perked up and she noticed Ahsoka do the same in the opposite seat. They stretched their necks as if to peer over the shoulders of their Masters, but it was useless.

From Obi-wan and Anakin's view, the repeated desert was broken by a large man-made structure. Grey and rustic, like the city of Arrakeen, the harvester crawled through the sand. It's model, the MENG MMS-013, was bulky but efficient in the way its claws prodded at the sand. 

It was slow, so slow that a team of masked Harkonnen were able to walk alongside it. In the soldiers' hands, were slow-pellet stunners. Unlike blasters, these weapons were built to paralyse.

The invention of the Holtzman shields had caused a ripple in the Galactic Republic. The Great Houses began using them in their armies, but the Republic stopped their extension to The Core. The shields' outlaw of blasters and most weaponry made for a dangerous way of war. 

So, the Senate made it so that Holtzman shields could only be used in duelling and in very specific circumstances. But on Arrakis, their use had just made hand-to-hand combat the favourable technique, meaning every Great House army was trained to kill with their fists and swords.

'Is that your defence against the Fremen?' Sidra heard Obi-wan ask Glossu, and she wished that she was up front to see what he was talking about.

She didn't hear the man's reply. Instead, Sidra looked back to the window beside Ahsoka's head. She stared in hopes of getting a glimpse when the ornithopter tilted on its side.