The Esplin Chronicles: Planet Ondar Page 6 (Chapter 3)

 The Bladeship surged Into the void, its engines resonating through every wall, whisking them away from Sector 5. Its prow aimed toward the stars, toward their next conquest. Towards planet Ondar. And even now, the Visser’s mind was strategizing, weaving, insatiable. The Lerdethak. The Vanarx. These were merely the beginning.

The Bladeship sliced through the void like a predator gliding through dark waters. Its angular hull shimmered softly in the starlight, wings brimming with weapon arrays that pulsed with a silent menace. Inside, a profound silence enveloped the upper decks an eerie stillness disrupted only by the hum of conduits and the sporadic echo of various appendages against the ship’s metallic floor.

Visser Thirty-Two stood upon the ship’s command bridge, his four hooves firmly planted on the platform. To one side, a viewport displayed the black expanse of stars, where the streaks of distant suns created the illusion of frozen flames. Below him, subordinates toiled in tense quiet, their movements brisk and mechanical, similar to insects driven by instinct.

“Approaching the Ondar system,” a Hork-Bajir controller announced in a raspy voice. <Show me,> the Visser instructed. The shimmer of the viewport cleared, revealing the world below. Ondar rotated slowly beneath them, a sphere enveloped in violet clouds and shimmering ocean-glass seas. Its surface twinkled with bioluminescent forests that glowed even from orbit, radiant rivers of light meandering across its continents. To the average controller, it may have appeared stunning, but to the Visser, it was something altogether different. A resource. A crucible. A hunting ground. <Prepare for descent,> he commanded. The landing jolted the Bladeship with the vibrations of engines powering through the dense atmosphere.

The sky of Ondar was thick, painted in soft lavender tones. Storms twisted faintly in the distance, but the landing zone was clear: a plateau encircled by jagged cliffs, high above a forest whose trees emitted a faint blue glow, as though illuminated from within. Troops disembarked in formation.

Hork-Bajir controllers stomped heavily onto the planet’s soil, their blades glinting. Taxxons hissed, their segmented bodies undulating as they slithered into the grass, mandibles snapping with hunger. Gedd controllers moved rigidly, their  eyes scanning the forest with a faint, robotic detachment. And all fell silent as the Visser descended the ramp.