The Approaching Storm

by Alan Dean Foster

  Sensitive, she was, Luminara marveled. Her Padawan was going to make an exceptional healer. “He’s certainly searching for something. Answers to questions he hasn’t even formed yet. Whether he can find enough of them to make him happy remains to be seen. I’ve spoken to Obi-Wan about it. He isn’t sure, either. He knows only that his Padawan has enormous potential.”

  Barriss rose. “Potential that goes unrealized is potential that might as well not exist in the first place.”

  From her recumbent position, Luminara looked up into the night. “Don’t be so quick to judge, Barriss. Some of us suffer from greater uncertainties than others. I would as soon have Anakin Skywalker by my side in a fight as any Padawan I have ever met.”

  “In a fight, yes, Master. At other times …” She left the thought unfinished as she pivoted and walked back to her own sleeping place.

  Luminara watched the young woman turn in. Had she herself ever been that restless, that uncertain? Leaning back, she scanned the stars anew. So many indeed, she mused, silently echoing her Padawan’s observation. Each system with its own problems, each individual living therein with its own hopes and fears, triumphs and heartaches. Even now there might be dozens, hundreds of individual sentients, lying outside contemplating the night, wondering if another was feeling what they were feeling, gazing out across the light-years in search of enlightenment. Hoping.

  Determinedly, she drained the last of the native tea and set the tumbler aside. The work of a Jedi was never done, whether it was bludgeoning recalcitrant planetary councils like the Ansionian Unity into seeing reason, fighting to hold the Republic together, or counseling distraught individual souls. Burdens enough for any one entity. She could deal with the exigencies. So, she knew, could Obi-Wan Kenobi. One day the same would be true for Barriss Offee. As for Anakin Skywalker, that remained to be seen.

  Potential, Barriss had said. Was ever a word so fraught with confliction? As for Anakin’s future happiness, where was it written that one had to be happy to perform well as a Jedi? Content, yes. Accepting, surely. But “happy”? Was she happy?

  Focus on the task at hand, she told herself firmly. And the task at hand was not satisfying the curiosity of her apprentice, not trying to understand the puzzling Padawan Anakin Skywalker, not even supporting the aims and ideals of the Republic. No, the task at hand was to get a good night’s rest in the absence of a comfortable bed. Turning onto her side, she pulled the thermosensitive blanket up to her neck, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to drift off into a deep and soothing sleep, where even a Jedi could, for a little while, openly and freely set aside all responsibilities.

  The majordomo was impressed, but not sanguine. Bossban Soergg’s plan was clever enough, but its success was far from guaranteed. Still, he admired several aspects of it, and said so, while keeping his criticisms to himself. It relied for success on a certain number of assumptions about the nomads. If there was one thing Ogomoor knew for certain about the nomads, it was that nothing was certain about them.

  Still, it did not involve him risking his own neck, one aspect of the plan he heartily, if silently, applauded. He moved to implement it immediately. There was a good chance it would all come to naught, since it relied entirely on the advice of outsiders. As Soergg appeared to trust their opinions, Ogomoor had no choice but to go along with them.

  If it worked, of course, the bossban would get everything he wanted, at no personal risk to himself. That was the beauty of it. Even better, when the truth came out, it would drive even deeper the wedge that already existed between the city folk of the Unity and the people of the plains. At that point, nothing and no one would be able to stop Ansion from pulling out of the Republic, with all the consequent actions the bossban seemed so eager to facilitate.

  Personally, Ogomoor didn’t see the significance of it one way or the other. In the Republic or out, what difference did it make to him? All he cared about was the size and integrity of his pay transfer.

  With luck, and if all went as planned, they would have the results they sought in a week or two.

  The water was wide, deep, and clear, but to Luminara’s eyes the current was not threatening. Sitting on his mount alongside her, Kyakhta let its head drop the considerable distance to the ground to snag a few mouthfuls of the spotted zeka grass that grew there, and a pair of rodentlike coleacs as well. The bones of the latter being efficiently crunched provided a noisy counterpart to the guide’s words.

  “Torosogt River,” he announced proudly. “We’ve made good time. Once across, we will truly be in the realm of the Alwari. No towns beyond this place. No fault-finding, arrogant ‘Unity.’ ”

  “How long till we reach the Borokii?” she asked him.

  Black pupils stared back at her out of dark-hued, protuberant orbs. “Impossible to tell. They have their traditional grazing grounds, but like any clan, the Borokii are always on the move.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t find them with a seeker droid and put an aerial tracker on them,” Anakin observed from behind them.

  Kyakhta flashed sharp teeth in the Padawan’s direction. “The Alwari choose to retain many of the old ways, but they are ever ready to make use of new developments that do not contradict tradition. Having always had weapons, they are happy to make use of better ones. They would use these to instantly shoot down any device sent to try to monitor them.”

  “Oh.” Anakin accepted this explanation without argument. When, he thought to himself, will I learn to see beyond the obvious? While the latter might be an admirable trait in a Podracer, it would not do much to qualify him as a Jedi.

  The party started forward again, Kyakhta’s mount spitting out small bones as it walked. “You see the problem Unity emissaries face. How can they make treaties and commerce with the Alwari if the clans will not stay in one place long enough to talk to them? Yet it is these same traditional rights of the nomads that Republic law protects. No wonder the cities are considering banding together to join this proposed secessionist movement. If they succeed in pulling Ansion out of the Republic, then they can deal with the Alwari as they choose.”

  “And yet the Alwari think we may be here to support the claims of the Unity,” Luminara responded.

  Kyakhta eyed her with an intelligence unsuspected prior to Barriss’s healing ministrations. “Isn’t your primary task here to see that Ansion stays in the Republic?”

  “Of course,” she replied without hesitation.

  “Then the Alwari are entitled to question the means by which you might choose to make that happen. They’ll know that they and their interests are not your priority.”

  “So do the delegates of the Unity.” She sighed tiredly. “You see, Kyakhta? Both sides are already united by their common suspicion of our motives. Not exactly a firm foundation for mutual understanding, but it’s a beginning.”

  The slope leading down from the last grasses to the river’s edge was not acute enough to slow a crawling infant, much less the towering suubatars. The group paused on the bank while Kyakhta and Bulgan studied the flow with an eye toward picking the best place to cross. Finally, Bulgan started forward while Kyakhta directed their charges to hold back.

  “The Torosogt runs deep, but Bulgan thinks he has found a sandbar shallow enough for the suubatars to walk most of the way. From there we will swim.”

  Luminara leaned forward in her saddle. “I suppose we could all do with a bath.”

  “No, no.” A smiling Kyakhta hurried to correct the misunderstanding. “We don’t swim. The suubatars will carry us.” Ignoring the considerable distance to the ground, he leaned way over to indicate his steed’s middle legs. “See—a suubatar’s fur is short, but runs all the way to its feet and down between the toes. With six legs and long toes, suubatars are very good swimmers.”

  Luminara had to admit that a vision of swimming suubatars was one that had not occurred to her. As Kyakhta had pointed out, six churning legs would provide plenty of propulsion.

  She had time to fill in t
he image while Bulgan made progress. Halfway across the river he stopped, turned in his saddle, and waved. By this time the water was up over his knees despite his high seat on the suubatar. Luminara wondered how deep the river ran on either side of the “shallow” sandbar. Giving her mount a perfectly enunciated “Elup!,” she found herself starting forward in tandem with Kyakhta.

  Water rose gradually until it was up to her stirruped feet. As her mount was slightly larger than Bulgan’s, she remained dry. Barriss and Anakin were not so fortunate. She could hear them both grumbling quietly behind her. As for Obi-Wan, when the water reached his feet, he simply pulled them out of the stirrups and crossed them atop the saddle. A spectator would have thought he’d been riding suubatars all his life.

  Bulgan waited for them to catch up before resuming his own forward movement. There was a brief sensation of dropping, a quick bob upward, and she realized the suubatars were no longer walking. If anything, their swimming motion was even smoother than their remarkable gallop. While paddling effortlessly forward, they held their long, narrow skulls just above the surface. That did not mean no exertion was involved. The snorting of their single, wide nostril was clearly audible.

  The water lapping against her feet and calves was cold and bracing. Looking down, she could see schools of streamlined, multilegged backswimmers riding the wake generated by her mount. The finger-length water breathers had their multiple limbs folded flat against their sides to conserve energy.

  She was already focusing on the opposite shore when Bulgan’s mount was suddenly thrown sharply to the right. The two Alwari let out a simultaneous, though different, curse and drew their weapons. Her hand went automatically to her lightsaber, but search as she might, she could see nothing like an enemy.

  Then her own steed was slammed violently sideways. If not for her feet being jammed firmly into the stirrups, she would have been thrown right off the saddle and into the water. Despite her concentration, she was aware of everything that was happening around her—especially Kyakhta’s sharp but inexplicable warning cry of “gairks!” What was a gairk? she wondered.

  Then a warty, misshapen olive-green face emerged from the water entirely too close to her left foot, and her curiosity was instantly sated.

  Full of bulges and protrusions, the maw of the gairk was unlike any oral cavity she had ever seen. There was no symmetry to it at all. The thick, blubbery lips seemed to wander all over the pebbly-skinned face. From behind these gaping lips rose a pair of large, protuberant, gray-green eyes. Lightsaber raised high, she swung at the bloated, bottom-dwelling monstrosity, but it had already dived back beneath the surface before the blow could make contact. Another of the ugly creatures surfaced a short distance away.

  She found herself drowning not in water, but in a rising din. The hum of Jedi lightsabers was interspersed with the bellowing of kicking, snapping suubatars, the shouts of her companions, and the intermittent crackle of their guides’ newly bought blasters. She ought to have been more afraid, she knew, or at least felt a greater degree of apprehension.

  Most peculiar of all, as near as she could tell, the gairk had no teeth.

  If they weren’t carnivores, then why were they attacking the crossing party? Did they rely on some other less apparent mechanism to catch and devour prey? Certainly, she saw as her mount reared sharply to kick out with both clawed forefeet at a gairk that crossed its path, their mouths were large enough to swallow a human whole. But she saw no biting apparatus, no sharp talons, not even potentially poisonous spines. Yet Kyakhta and Bulgan were treating them as if they were nothing but fang and claw.

  Then she heard a yelp. Whirling in her saddle without regard to her own safety, she looked back at Barriss’s suubatar. It was still behind her, holding the same position as when they had started to ford the river. There was only one difference.

  The animal’s embossed saddle was empty.

  Barriss surfaced not far away, easily visible in the swirling tide because she was waving with her activated lightsaber. Kyakhta cursed violently. It struck Luminara that the Padawan was being carried downstream faster than the turgid current warranted. She pointed this out to Bulgan.

  “It’s the gairks!” the despondent Alwari told her. “They’re dragging her away!”

  Luminara’s expression twisted. “Dragging her? With what? They have no hands.”

  By way of answer, the guide opened his mouth to form a wide, gaping O. Suddenly chilled by more than the river water, Luminara understood.

  The instant he’d seen Barriss knocked off her mount and swept downstream, Anakin had gone in after her. He hadn’t thought about it. The action was entirely reflexive. He knew that if the circumstances had been reversed, she would now be the one swimming hard to catch up with him. When he saw that she was unaccountably receding away from him, he redoubled his stroke. He was a strong swimmer, having grown fond of the skill when he had been confined indoors during winter months. Before long he was close enough to exchange words.

  “You okay?” he called out to her. “How are you, Barriss?”

  “Wet,” she shot back. “Very—wet.”

  “Can you swim with me to shore?” Raising a hand, he pointed to where the others were already beginning to emerge on the far bank.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” she told him. “This situation sucks.” At his look of incomprehension, she gestured downward with her free hand. “I mean literally.”

  Taking a deep breath, he ducked under the surface. The crystal-clear water offered little in the way of obstruction to his vision. He saw her legs, kicking hard but driving her nowhere. Behind her in the water was a single gairk, mouth agape, gills expanded to the maximum. It was taking in water in a steady stream and expelling it through its gills as it applied suction to drag her steadily downstream. Bursting back to the surface, he gestured reassuringly.

  “Hang on. I’ll take care of this.” Taking another deep breath, he dipped back down and swam straight toward the creature, ignoring her legs in passing.

  It did not try to dodge. It didn’t have to, since he found himself intercepted in midwater. Looking back, he saw that not one but three of the creatures had taken up positions behind him. No two of the twisted maws were exactly alike, but when the three put their heads together, the differently shaped jaws fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. They were now applying suction to him—in unison. A fourth joined in. He felt himself being drawn inexorably back toward that unified dark maw. It now struck him, as it had Luminara, that they had no teeth. They didn’t need them. By joining their jaws together to create greater and greater amounts of suction, they literally inhaled their prey.

  The technique was uncomplicated. Jolt travelers off larger, inconsumable crossers like the suubatars, get them in the water, drag them downstream away from help, and then ingest them at leisure. Only, he and Barriss were not helpless grass grazers. The need for air was becoming imperative. Kick as he might, he found himself unable to free himself from the force of that quadruple suction. What was it Obi-Wan had often told him? If you can’t defy the storm, go with it.

  Turning, he kicked not away from his assailants, but directly toward them. Dark maws yawned expectantly. Lack of oxygen was beginning to blur his vision when he drew close enough to strike out with the lightsaber. As their flesh was parted, the four conjoined gairks separated, and the drag on his body evaporated. With the last remaining oxygen in his lungs, he kicked for the surface, breaking it with a gasp and sucking gratefully at the fresh air. Nearby, he saw Barriss swimming not for the nearby shore, but toward him.

  “You all right?” she inquired. She seemed unjustly composed.

  “I was coming,” he wheezed, wiping water from his face, “to rescue you.”

  “I appreciate the gesture,” she responded courteously while continuing to tread water, “but I was really in no trouble.”

  Aware that their Masters and the two guides were watching from shore, he forced down the first retort that sprang to mind. “You
didn’t look like you were in no trouble. You were being pulled downstream.”

  “I know that. It was just a matter of getting turned around so that I could strike at the gairk.” Her eyes bored unflinchingly into his own as she deactivated and resecured her lightsaber. “You could have stayed on your suubatar. Did you hear me yelling for help? Did I ask you to come in after me?”

  His reply was curt. “I see. Well, now that I understand you a little better, I promise that you won’t have to worry about it happening again.” He started to kick toward shore.

  She kept pace with him easily. “Don’t misunderstand, Anakin. It was a gallant gesture, and I appreciate your willingness to risk yourself on my behalf.” She chuckled softly, her laugh far more restrained than that of her Master. “Not to mention your willingness to get yourself soaked for me.”

  Stroking smoothly on his side, he looked down at himself. “I certainly did that, didn’t I? You swim well.”

  She laughed again. “The Force is with me. Race you to shore.”

  “You’re—” Before he could say “on,” she had burst forward like an eel. He almost caught up to her, but her hands and feet touched the sandy beach an instant before his own.

  Two solemn-faced Jedi were waiting to greet them.

  “Well, you two are certainly a pretty sight.” Luminara stood with hands on hips. “What happened, Barriss?”

  Barriss looked away. “It was my fault. I leaned too far to one side to try to see what was going on up front, lost my balance, and fell. Then something started pulling at my back and clothing, and I found myself being dragged downcurrent. I could see that it was some kind of water creature, but in falling out of the saddle my robes became twisted around me. Wet, I had a difficult time unwrapping them before I could get to my lightsaber.”

  “Very good, Padawan,” conceded Obi-Wan. He turned his attention to the other apprentice. “What’s your excuse, Anakin?”

  Moving one foot slightly in a nervous gesture his mother would have recognized instantly, the taller Padawan muttered uneasily, “I went in to help her. Once I reached her, I realized she didn’t need my help. But I didn’t know that at the time.” Looking up, he met his Master’s gaze. “All I had to go on was the evidence of my senses. They told me she’d been dumped in the water and might need help. I’m sorry if I did something wrong, or violated yet one more unfathomable Jedi rule.”