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 the great city-planet of Coruscant.