Star Wars_ The Approaching Storm - Alan Dean Foster [104]
Blood streamed from his torn shoulder. The wound was painful and messy but not deep. Enraged and confused, the shanh landed on all sixes and immediately whirled to launch itself anew. As it did so, Anakin made a dive for his lightsaber. His fingers closing around the metal cylinder, lying on his stomach, he started to turn to face his furiously hissing adversary. The shanh was a big male; powerful, fast, and hungry. He knew he would only have time for one strike. But with the lightsaber, that should be enough.
As he started to turn, something landed hard on his right wrist, pinning it to the ground. Wincing at the pain, he looked up—to find himself staring straight into a second pair of brilliantly reflective red eyes. Not an arm-length away, they narrowed as they bored into his own. His heart dropped toward his diaphragm.
The shanh’s mate had arrived to join the party.
An enormous weight landed on his back. Everything was happening too fast. Using the Force against the shanh had been one thing, but now there were two of them. If he tried to throw off the male now crouching on his back, the female was likely to bite his face off. If he pushed at her and freed his hand and lightsaber, the male would have time to shred his back with its claws, or lock its jaws on his neck. Even as he formulated the thought, he knew he was spending too much time thinking.
The male shanh emitted a rising hiss, a tormented sound unlike anything it had given voice to so far. At the same time, the weight on the Padawan’s back was removed. The shanh had stepped off him, for what reason Anakin could not imagine. Thus reduced to a single adversary, he shoved hard with the Force. Grunting in surprise, the female was knocked sideways several body-lengths. Arm freed, he activated his lightsaber.
Before he could bring it into play, the stunned but still reactive female leapt. She was met in midbound by a downward sweeping arc of light that caught her just behind the head. There was a single, sharp hiss of surprise and pain, a sudden smell of burned flesh, and she landed on him belly-first. Using his muscles he rose on hands and knees and shook the heavy weight off his back.
The big male shanh was lying nearby, motionless, smoke rising from its seared skull. Standing next to it was a single familiar shape. Though not inherently tall, in Anakin’s sweat-stung eyes the looming figure assumed the proportions of a giant. The outsized image vanished in the smile the slowly turning figure bestowed on him.
“Small sounds often mask large sources.” Clad only in her sleeping attire, Luminara Unduli deactivated her lightsaber and let it fall to her side. “A good lookout needs to listen with more than his or her ears, Anakin Skywalker. Reality is rife with disguises.”
Breathing hard, he rose shakily to his feet and bowed his head once, hastily. “Thank you for my life, Master Luminara.”
She accepted his thanks with a nearly imperceptible dip of her own head. “Your life is your own, Anakin, and not mine to give or take.” He thought he detected a twinkle in her eye. “I merely helped preserve it.” Approaching, she startled him by casually slipping an arm around his back. The feel of it was astonishingly comforting. It reminded him of something nearly forgotten. “Come with me. I’ll stand the rest of your shift.”
“But you’re not due to come on for another hour yet,” he protested.
Once more, she flashed that warming, knowing smile at him. “For some strange reason, I’m suddenly wide awake. It’s all right, Padawan. Consider this just another learning experience. One you will learn from—won’t you?”
It was a rhetorical question, one he knew he did not have to acknowledge. But he did anyway.
“When one hears the sound of a lightsaber springing to life in the middle of the night in a strange place on a strange world, one knows it is not being triggered for purposes of amusement.