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The aerial platforms answered solely to their droid pilots, but he thought of a way to make use of them. Summoning one, Maul launched himself into the air with a Force jump as the STAP soared overhead. Dangling from the platform’s starboard footrest with one hand, he called his lightsaber to the other, and ignited its blades.

    Some of the Gungan riders saw him coming and took aim. Maul twisted his body, either evading flights of energy lances and spheres or fending them off with the lightsaber. Letting go of the STAP when he was still twenty meters from Ganne and the general, he called on the Force to send himself tearing through a score of mounted Gungans. It was clear that they had never seen anything like him. But then, who had? What Sith in the past thousand years had been allowed to wield a lightsaber in open battle? Was that in itself not enough to qualify him as a true Sith?
    The rubbery Gungans all but disintegrated at the touch of the twin blades Maul had hoped to reserve for the Jedi. Their billed heads flew in all directions. His slashes halved them down the middle or through the midsection, and they squawked as they died. Their nostrils flared and their eyes bulged from their heads, and the white sand beach grew puddled with their blood. Maul maneuvered closer to Ganne, cutting the legs out from under the Gungans’ mounts or impaling them on his lightsaber.
    He launched himself into the air when he was still five meters from the Boss and the general.
    The latter lost his head to one of the blades, and Ganne was knocked from his mount by Maul’s extended left hand. Agile despite his girth, the Gungan Boss clambered to his feet and scrambled for his electropole, but Maul was on him before he could use the weapon, disarming him and hauling him by his long ears through the chaos of the melee, into the tree line that defined the edge of the battlefield.
    The Gungan’s hooded eyes rolled around in his head, and spittle drooled from his thick lips.
    Maul brought the lightsaber close to Ganne’s face, but then deactivated it. This weak-willed primitive didn’t need to be threatened, he told himself. He simply needed to be manipulated into revealing the truth.
    “The route to Otoh Gunga,” Maul said, motioning meaningfully with his gloved hand.
    Responding to the Force suggestion, Ganne’s eyes grew even blanker. “Yousa needen to be knowen desa ways to Otoh Gunga,” he said in the Gungan’s pidgin tongue.
    “Tell me,” Maul said.
    “Mesa tell yousa. Yousa take yous mackineeks through da Rellias Straits.” Maul yanked Ganne’s ears behind his head. “You’ll open the gates when we arrive.”
    “Mesa open dissa gates when wesa riven.”
    Satisfaction and loathing mixed in Maul’s malicious grin. Hauling Ganne to his three-toed feet, he began dragging him toward Trade Federation lines.

    Information provided by the obedient but confused Gungan Boss allowed the Trade Federation S-DST to maneuver safely through the treacherous Rellias Straits and into the much larger Lake Paonga. No sooner did it arrive than parties of Gungan warriors began to appear on the shores to bombard the hovercraft with plasma boomers. Maul put a quick end to the attacks by securing Boss Ganne to the craft’s curved bow. The sight of Ganne made to serve as a figurehead gave the warriors pause, and for the remainder of the journey to Otoh Gunga, the Gungans did little more than brandish their electropoles and give voice to war cries.
    With the STAPs annihilated, OOM-9 commanded the battle droids to sow the lake with depth charges, some of which touched off underwater explosions that transformed the formerly placid lake into an expanse of frothing turmoil. But no Gungan bodies were observed among the objects the explosions brought to the surface. Even before OOM-9’s drone submersibles returned from their scouting missions, Maul realized that word of the invasion and fall of Rellias had spread quickly to Otoh Gunga, and the city