Owen nodded and dutifully followed as Cliegg stalked into the house. Right before the pair reached the door, the bantha lowed again. It didn't seem so far away.
'What's the matter?' Shmi asked the moment Cliegg entered the house.
Her husband stopped, and managed to paste on a bit of a comforting smile.
'Just the sand,' he said. 'Covered some sensors, and I'm getting tired of digging them out.' He smiled even wider and walked to the side of the room, heading for the refresher.
'Cliegg…' Shmi called suspiciously, stopping him.
Owen came through the door then, and Beru looked at him. 'What is it?' she asked, unconsciously echoing Shmi.
'Nothing, nothing at all,' Owen replied, but as he crossed the room, Beru stepped before him and took him by the arms, forcing him to look at her directly, into an expression too serious to be dismissed.
'Just signs of a sandstorm,' Cliegg lied. 'Far off, and probably nothing.'
'But already enough to bury some sensors on the perimeter?' Shmi asked.
Owen looked at her curiously, then heard Cliegg clear his throat. He looked to his father, who nodded slightly, then turned back to Shmi and agreed.
'The first winds, but I don't think it will be as strong as Dad believes.'
'Are you both going to stand there lying to us?' Beru snapped suddenly, stealing the words from Shmi's mouth.
'What did you see, Cliegg?' Shmi demanded.
'Nothing,' he answered with conviction.
'Then what did you hear?' Shmi pressed, recognizing her husband's semantic dodge clearly enough.
'I heard a bantha, nothing more,' Cliegg admitted.
'And you think it was a Tusken mount,' Shmi stated. 'How far?'
'Who can tell, in the night, and with the wind shifting? Could've been kilometers.'
'Or?'
Cliegg walked back across the room to stand right before his wife. 'What do you want from me, love?' he asked, taking her in a firm hug. 'I heard a bantha. I don't know if there was a Tusken attached.'
'But there have been more signs of the Raiders about,' Owen admitted. 'The Dorrs found a pile of bantha poodoo half covering one of their perimeter sensors.'
'It may be just that there's a few banthas running loose in the area, probably half starved and looking for some food,' Cliegg offered.
'Or it might be that the Tuskens are growing bolder, are coming right down to the edges of the farms, and are even beginning to test the security,' Shmi said. Almost prophetically, just as she finished, the alarms went off, indicating a breach about the perimeter sensor line.
Owen and Cliegg grabbed their blaster rifles and rushed out of the house, Shmi and Beru close behind.
'You stay here!' Cliegg instructed the two women. 'Or go get a weapon, at least!' He glanced about, indicated a vantage point to Owen, and motioned for his son to take up a defensive position and cover him.
Then he rushed across the compound, blaster rifle in hand, Zigzagging his way, staying low and scanning for any movement, knowing that if he saw a form that resembled either Tusken or bantha, he'd shoot first and investigate after.
But it didn't come to that. Cliegg and Owen searched the whole of the perimeter, scanned the area and rechecked the alarms, and found no sign of intruders.
All four stayed on edge the remainder of that night, though, each of them keeping a weapon close at hand, and sleeping only in shifts.
The next day, out by the eastern rim, Owen found the source of the alarm: a footprint along a patch of sturdier ground near the edge of the farm. It wasn't the large round depression a bantha would make, but the indentation one might expect from a foot wrapped in soft material, much like a Tusken would wear.
'We should speak with the Dorrs and all the others,' Cliegg said when Owen showed the print to him. 'Get a group together and chase the animals back into the open desert.'
'The banthas?'
'Them, too,' Cliegg snarled. He spat upon the ground, as steely-eyed and angry as Owen had ever seen him.
Senator Padme Amidala felt strangely uneasy in her office, in the same complex as, but unattached to, the royal palace of Queen Jamillia. Her desk was covered in holodisks and all the other usual clutter of her station. At the front of it, a holo played through the numbers, a soldier on one scale, a flag of truce on the other, tallying the predicted votes for the meeting on Coruscant. The hologram depiction of those scales seemed almost perfectly balanced.
Padme knew that the vote would be close, with the Senate almost evenly divided over whether the Republic should create a formal army. It galled her to think that so many of her colleagues would be voting based on personal gain-everything from potential contracts to supply the army for their home systems to direct payoffs from some of the commerce guilds- rather than on what was best for the Republic.
In her heart, Padme remained steadfast that she had to work defeat the creation of this army. The Republic was built on tolerance. It was a vast network of tens of thousands of systems, and even more species, each with a distinct perspective. The only element they shared was tolerance-tolerance of one another. The creation of an army might prove unsettling, even threatening, to so many of those systems and species, beings far removed from
