Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“…I want everyone on the Phoenix team to have it hammered in their thick blue skulls - no interfacing with glowing trees! And generally, no sticking of the queue into sentient lifeforms, Colonel!”

“No problem, doc, I’m not a fan of-“

“How are we supposed to blend in, though?”

“Blending in” for a mission like that doesn’t mean you plug every waiting orifice with your braid! Especially Zdinarsk. Wainfleet, tell her I’m watching all the bodycam logs… Pah, marines!”

“It feels like you don’t trust us, doc. Does it feel like it, General, what do you say?”

“Oh, forgive me if I don’t trust you, a product of a program ran by a traitor! Plus, you - yes, don’t turn your face away, not a “memory”, you - were the one to fuck up the whole operation in the first place, wasn’t it? You. Should. Have. Reported. To. Selfridge. That. Your. Man. Was. Acting. OFF. You. Should. Have. Watched. Augustine. And. Detained. The. Whole. Team. It was your mistake, your negligence, and now that you have the kuru… the queue, I can’t honestly say…”

“You can’t seriously be blaming me for what that bastard did! I don’t know who’s behind you, but throwing blame like that…”

“Really, doctor Torres, that’s going a bit too far. Colonel here got all the reprimands he needed for a couple of lifetimes. What we need now - what I need - is for this operation to be different, OK? No more bickering between “lab-coats” and “jarheads”. It’s what set us back in the first place.”

“I get it it, General, alright? But please, both of you, try to widen your scope on the situation just a bit-…”

“It’s wide enough. RDA had accepted the previous administration’s mistakes.”

“You have a defected human in an avatar body, with extensive military experience, training Na’Vi to run a guerilla operation against us. Sure, everyone with a functioning brain understands that once you take him out, you can forget about the locals posing threat as they go back to arrows and direhorses. He’s the unique specimen, a human permanently fused with Na’Vi biology and all the advantages that provides, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, get to the point, doc.”

“My point, Wainfleet, is, that it’s no longer the case. He’s not unique. Hmmm. Listen closely - now YOU are the weak link, get it? All the Recoms are a weak link, so my orders on all matters bio take precede-…”

“You what, think me and my boys are gonna defect like Sully? General, the egghead’s gotta be fuckin’ out of his mind!”

“Quaritch!”

“That’s “senior science officer Egghead” to you, Colonel. My team recieved evidence reviews from corporate Int-Inv and from what I can tell, Sully wasn’t going to defect in the beginning. He was your perfect little tool, wasn’t he? Then Augustine had him ride the skinsuit for days on end. What? Don’t be a child! You’ve been decanted for what, a couple of months? Wait till you truly grow into the body, let the hormones take in…”

“I want to talk to the boy.”

“Get your head straight on first, Colonel. Doubt the boy wants to have bedside chats with a man he was brought up to view as a monster, let alone - ressurrected in a Na’vi body. Also that would happen only after I assess him when we’re done with the mem-spinner. General Ardmore, could you…”

“I agree with doctor Torres. After the spinner, then, well… we could discuss our options, your options, with the boy, Colonel. Agreed?”

“If he doesn’t suffer a stroke first.”

“I’ll see to it that he won’t. Top priority, Hippocrates oath, yadda-yadda.”

***

Miles Socorro - no, Spider - listens to the voices as he sits in the corner of his cell. Muffled by the blast-door, they come off strangely alien, altered and stretched by the buzzing between his ears.

He hears, but he doesn’t understand. The world is still spinning, colors and flashes of light combining into a nauseous haze in his head.

So, Spider clings to the only thing that matters now, finds it like a firm branch or sturdy rock to cling onto among this sensory overload, pulling himself up and out from the pain and confusion - the fact that he didn’t give them anything.

He fought, he fought even when it felt like his synapses had been pulled apart, setting his brain on fire.

Even with all their tech and cruelty thrown at him, he diverted, resisted and… and hid. Concealed things within his own mind so deeply, he wasn’t sure he will ever find them again. Memories that were once treasured precious gems were brought up as shields, only to be nearly torn down by that machine’s mental assault.

The thought almost makes him weep, but then there’s a loud metallic clang, and the lights in his cell become brighter and harsher.

The protesting creak and whine of servomotors announces a visitor, and as the door fully opens, Spider’s heart sinks. They came for him again? So soon? He blinks sweat from his eyes. No, no… this is bad. If they put him back in the machine now, when he’s so tired and hurting, then…

Folding almost in half, the lanky bulk of an exoskeleton squeezes into the cell and then immediately stretches back to full height. Spider jumps to his feet, fists clenched.

The new face is… no, not really new. He recognizes it, if only by the skel-suit. One of the labcoats that hung back behind General Ardmore, working over the blasted mind-reading machine.

As Spider pushes away in panic and defiance, he catches a glimpse of the man’s face beneath the shadow of his khaki cap - a narrow, clean-shaven face, already tanned by Pandoran sun. And a thin-lipped sneer, crossed over by a small pale scar.

Having grown up around Norm and Max, and the rest of the Hell’s Gate skeleton crew, Spider early on came to respect the idea of science and scientists. Hell’s Gate residents were selfless and dedicated, and… and in all aspects that were important, better than his biological parents. The “only decent people that came here. And Trudy”, as Jake had once said, and he wholly believed it.

But, of course, as he grew older, things had begun to develop nuance. That usually meant that things were worse than he had previously imagined them to be.

In this case, turns out, most of the scientists actually left Pandora post-battle with the rest of the RDA staff. The only ones who remained were the ones involved with the Avatar program and the xenobiologists. Eight people in total, and a couple of IT and communications specialists that kept what was left of the decommissioned base running.

Norm didn’t like mentioning it much, but the majority of the lab-techs, meteorologists, geologists and astrographers had chosen to side with the corporation.

“I kind of understand it,” Norm told Spider once when they’ve made a trip to the remote Hell’s Gate warehouse to get a new batch of generators, and the conversation naturally flowed towards the ever-hot topic of keeping the facility functional with so little people. “I mean, they were in it for the profit… at least to a degree. And nor we, nor Jake were gonna write them checks in place of RDA. Unless they wanted to trade Palulukan teeth, hah!”

But even then, being 12 years old, Spider felt the tang of bitterness behind Norm’s words.

“They were in it for the profit”. Not that different from the managers and the soldiers who’d come to Pandora to plunder her for rocks and Eywa knows what else. In addition, the people Na’vi allowed to stay were the people they knew - and nobody in the Omatikaya clan knew some dude who was busy studying the quality of extracted unobtanium ore. More so, if they were aware what that person’s job ultimately resulted in, Spider wasn’t sure they’d be even allowed to leave alive.

The image of a scientist as the pursuer of justice, truth and balance, a pure scholar, thirsty for the knowledge that the moon and Eywa provided, faded and tarnished rather quickly.
Even though he loved Norm, Max, Lee and others, Spider still couldn’t shake the disappointment off. Even those examples of humanity that he once clung to and hoped to follow, were tainted with the collective shame of being merely present on Pandora.

Ironically it was here, in Bridgehead, where he now fully understood what kind of people generally got recruited by the RDA and why Hell’s Gate was so empty. People that would do something like this to him, that would scramble his brain for intel, were capable of anything. Of any twisted, cruel thing that he could, or rather couldn’t, imagine. All in the name of research-slash-profit.

“Science is immoral, Miles. But that doesn’t mean we have to be. Or to be heartless”, Norm told him during that conversation in response to Spider’s question on why it had played out like that, the corporation’s departure and them living so scantly here. “The battle for Hell’s Gate showed who was what. Very… sobering, yeah. That was sobering.”

Heartless. That’s what the other teams were, in effect. And the people… no, monsters… who were now trying to pull out information out of him to find and, undoubtedly, kill the Sullys, were of the same stock. So heartless, in fact, that they didn’t even realize that no amount of meaningless offers and no amount of pain would make Spider betray the Omatikaya.

They simply lacked the ability to understand Spider’s devotion, to understand that there were things more important than rocks, money and technology. Lacked as clearly and physically as they lacked a tail.

And so, Spider hisses at the man, drops to a crouch, splays out his arms like an angry stingbat. Exhausted or not, in pain or not, he’s not going to give in an inch, not when Neteyam’s, Lo’ak’s, Tuk’s and Kiri’s lives are on the line.

As they were taking him here, back to the cell, despite the horrid state he was in, Spider managed to break the nose of one guard, and drive a hard heel into another one’s groin. “Tough kid”, that’s how Toruk Makto himself calls him, and that’s what he is. So whatever this piece of yerik shit plans to…

“Hissing sounds funny, has no one told you yet?” The man speaks in a light, if a bit disparaging tone, and it strikes Spider as a different kind of threat, making him perk up with new worry. Before, it was all stern demands and indignant shouting, and he was used to it long before getting captured. Live with Neytiri, with Jake, learn to take it all in a stride - an anger of a commanding officer and a disappointed mother.

This, however… was somehow worse. He knows a slinger beast, lanay’ka - it would hunt by cocking its head farther and farther back on a flexible, powerful neck, only to then snap it forward and fling its detached, venomous head to pierce the prey. Na’vi fear it almost as much as Palulukan, and this man’s demeanor reminds him of the slinger horror stories that were so popular in the clan. He half-waits for the man’s head to fall off and fly screaming at him.

The visitor’s eyes, a yellow so dark that in the cap’s shadow it turns almost black, slide over Spider from the height of the skel-suit in a way older Na’vi would glance at him, usually - to wordlessly chide him for his “sky-people” folly. There’s an almost perceptible scorn in the labcoat’s gawking. English, it seems, isn’t a native language for him either. There’s a weird inflection to his words, and the syllables are hard, accentuated like a snap of a metal cuff.

“Human mouths aren’t meant for that sound. Lots of spit. Not exactly threatening.”

The man makes a jest of wiping off saliva off his light-green uniform, de-synchronizing the skel-suits large arm.

In turn, Spider hisses some more. Just to spite this skxawng, to let the pain, the terror of where he was, why and with whom, forcefully push out of his chest with the air. The man cocks his head to the side and then half-turns to observe his reflection in the two-way mirror built into one of the cell’s walls.

No reaction. No beating, no threat. Reluctantly, Spider takes a peak too. Not directly, but at the reflection as well. And for the first time notices what he should’ve noticed long ago, if he wasn't so utterly worn out by fear and pain - the man is missing a leg.
Well, most of the leg, that is - the remaining stump is wrapped into the pants and strapped to the skel-suit’s harness just as a whole limb would be.
That would explain why the skxawng would drive the exoskeleton here, Spider decides, and hopes that some Pandoran animal had a good meal at the bastard’s expense.

The man kind of looks the same age as Norm, but the waxy face is all hard lines. There’s neither Norm’s kindness nor gentleness there, just unblinking glass and rough skin. He will call him “One-Leg” for now, like the Omatikaya would call an annoying beast with a distinct feature that had once evaded a hunter.

The skel-suit thunks around the cell in long strides, and Spider moves out of its way. His head begins to swim as he’s forced to keep up in this perverted game of tag, and he finds it hard to follow he jerking motions of the machine as it throws its weight around.

“Mister Socorro, if you continue to be difficult, we will continue to be difficult as well. It boils down to resources, mental, physical and material. Yours are extremely limited and non-replenishable, ours - limitless,” the skel-suit circles around the massive table in the center of the cell, and Spider mirrors the motion. “Cat” and “mouse” playing, like in those little movies that Deborah would show him when he was little. The “cat” always lost and the thought comforts him just a teeny bit. “Guess who will eventually win. I came to assess your state after the probe. Come closer, I require a scan.”

“Assess the state”. Yeah, that’s a lab-coat alright.

“Fuck off! You can just… fuck off, yeah,” fighting through a dry heave, he sputters and immediately hates how weak it comes out. How pathetic. After the initial surge of adrenaline wanes, all he feels is the thousand-year old weight in his bones and the acid swimming in his belly. And the uncomfortable exposure of his bare skin to it all. To what’s coming.

“M-hm,” the man murmurs, dangerously agreeable. “That I can.”

Without warning, he lunges at him and Spider darts away, swerving around the ungainly long limbs of the skel-suit to slide under the table.
But the exoskeleton is surprisingly agile even in such a cramped space. It moves with terrible, conserved efficiency not found in living beings, and the man dives right after Spider. The metal hand reaches, gets slapped away, and then quickly claws from the other side of the table, grabbing a handful of his dreadlocks just like the Recoms did back in the forest.

This again! He screams, he curses, he shouts… only to realize that the man puts no effort in dragging him out by the hair and leaving him to dangle on his knees before a slightly crouched One-Leg. The fucking skel-suit only looks spindly and thin, but he could as well have gone against an AMP. Something begins to burn behind Spider’s eyes, and he struggles with renewed vigor.

The tablet comes closer, lights up as Spider beats onto the metal hand holding him, kicking out and grunting with loathing and strain. The pad skims across his body.

“All green. You’re a sturdy little human boy, aren’t you?”

“I’m Na’vi, you dipshit!”

“Dipshit is an English word”, the man retorts dryly. “How very un-Na’vi of you, Socorro”.

With that, he unceremoniously lets him go and Spider slams back on knees.

“Name’s f’ckin Spider!” he snarls.

“Nickname. Pet name. Your RDA ID says “Miles Socorro”. Parents - Paz Socorro and Miles Quaritch”, the man waves his tablet, a crooked grin for a second flickering on his face. “Maybe you’ve an Omatikaya name? Humor me”.

Spider was mid-way into another string of mixed english and Na’vi insults, when the last words register in his consciousness. They stop him mid-sentence, and his mouth gapes open as he tries to frantically understand just how would One-Leg know? How? And why…

“Of course, silly of me to ask that. To have a Na’vi name one has to be Na’vi, no? Go through all the rites of adolescence. But I see your pale skin, just like mine. The stripes are almost gone,” the man points at the faded blue and softly chuckles, seeing the boy’s bewilderment. “What, you were going to say you’re one in spirit? But you’ve no queue. There’s no spirit to share, at least not in the Na’vi sense.”

The admission hits Spider like a second arrow, this time - to the gut. For it to be said so simply, so off-handedly, is unimaginable.

Worst of all, there’s no spite in the man’s voice. Just a neutral statement, like pointing out he was a boy or that Pandora revolves around Polythemus. He hates the man at the moment, passionately and to the point of shaking from contempt… But some sick part of him is grateful for this punch of reality that everyone around him had avoided out politeness or brushed it off.

Finally someone said it, confirmed and grounded that horrible truth.

He had no queue, and all the dreams of seeing Eywa, of connecting to someone, to Kiri or… well, they’re all moot now. Empty dreams, locked inn this lifeless steel box, in this human, no, demon body, with these heartless fucking bastards that are hellbent on frying his brain.
Maybe it’s because they’ve tortured him so, but Spider suddenly finds himself swallowed by a profound, deep sense of grief over his own existence. Like he was lying dead, yet unaware, and someone came to tell him that. Break the news of his passing.

Thunk. Thunk. The skel-suit paces and Spider, still in the grips of this strange grief, stares at the man’s leg.

The disability was put in the open. Like One-Leg was boasting it. Like he was proud of it and even mocking him, Spider. Showing just how in denial he was about his own disability in the form of a non-existent queue. How he grew his ‘locks out, to trail down the spine, to cover and mimic what he was missing from birth. Weak… so weak.

“The Omatikaya claimed me as my own,” he is forced to say to bridge that terrible silent gap, to protest at least something that the man was saying. “Jake Su-…”

“Yes, the infamous Jake Sully, traitor extraordinaire”, the man cuts him off, and then licks his lips, tip of the tongue running against the hair-thin scar as if tasting Spider’s lies and finding them delectable. “Ri-i-ght. Don’t see him barging down here with the whole tribe and a swarm of banshees to save his kid that oh-so-bravely resists an interrogation effort for his sake.”

The clumsy manipulation can be seen from a mile away, an attempt to set him against Jake and imply he is dispensible, unimportant to his found family.

The boy brushes it off. Kiri’s smile still shines bright in his memory, the gentle brushing of her tail against his calf as they walk through the quiet forest. No, no, the Sullys, of course were looking for him - but better they didn’t, because then all his efforts to protect them would be for nothing. He didn’t need that, he doesn’t need to be rescued, especially if the price is his named brothers or sisters safety… but a part of the man’s words actually comes through, stinging painfully. The reminder of his solitude.

The truth was that Jake would be a fool to risk it all and come for Spider. No matter how much a shameful, pathetic little part of him does want it to happen. Jake simply cannot, cannot betray his family for his sake, and even more so - when there's no guarantee that Spider wouldn’t crack.

And Spider knows he wouldn’t forgive himself if any of the Sullys die trying to free him.

He’s truly and completely alone with these people. And the absolute worst part? That it would be better that way. His body, tense before, relaxes and gives in to the acceptance of this reality. He’ll manage. He will…

“I’m too harsh, am I? Maybe Sully wanted to, but the Bridgehead has no deficiency of the Hell’s Gate facility. This planet can waste itself trying to pry us off now”.

Spider winces at the boasting.

“I don’t give a shit about you or the junk-hole.”

“I assume nobody gave you a tour of the city yet?”

“Didn’t realize I was brought in for f’ckin’ sight-seeing. I’m fine as I am right here”.

“That’s for me to decide as your briefly assigned therapist. Miller, Seong!”

The blast-door screams open once again, and two guards rush in. Not the ones from before, and Spider lets himself believe that the previous had been sent to the infirmary over their fight.

There’s another brief scuffle, one which One-Leg watches over with indifference, and with a round of shouting, shoving and a buzz of a taser, Spider is once again subdued. He kicks and spits nonetheless, refusing to accept defeat, adamant to waste himself with the struggle so much that the scanning machine wouldn’t be able to shake him back into consciousness.

“Cuff him.”

As his hands are violently wrung back to be bound with the mag-zip, one of the Sec-ops turns to One-Leg.

“Dr. Torres, the Colonel asked to talk with the boy.”

A huge metal arm waves dismissively.

“The Colonel can wait. I just want to show our guest around, let him recover a tad. He never saw a thriving human settlement before, his head is a mess. Hell, if I grew up around the likes of Patel, I’d hate mankind with the same passion”.

It might sound like a joke, but even like this, cuffed and restrained with a hard hand on his neck, Spider is perceptive. With Na’vi being so close-knit, so emotional, it becomes a second nature to him to read people’s moods and unspoken intentions - and he recognizes the camouflaged malice in… doctor Torres’ voice. Personal, heavy malice.

And at that point it all becomes painfully clear. The mind-rending machine isn’t the worst thing that has happened with his capture. He’s certain he can power through that, he has the strength and the resolve of his duty as Omatikaya. But the fact that this man, doctor Torres, One-leg or whoever he was, took an interest in him… He’d rather meet Quaritch, his fake father, than be given over to the scientist.

“His head is a mess”.

That sounded like a desire to fix it. Spider doesn’t want to know what a man like Torres thinks “fixing” is. And for the first time on Pandora since he could remember himself, he feels awfully cold.

Freezing, even as he is pushed out from the air-conditioned cell and into the stuffy corridor of Bridgehead’s SCI-DEV complex.

Chapter Text

The warmth of Pandora’s sun is so tender, so welcome, that Spider wants to cry from relief. He had lost track of time, and so the hours - days? - spent between interrogations and solitary confinement, felt like eternity. Like he would never wake up from this nightmare, forever forsaken within that bluish, oppressive haze of his cell.

Bridgehead sprawls around him with an anxious buzz of activity. Sparks rain from the construction works in the high-rises and titanic machinery hisses with compressed air and coolant as it creeps by on its tracks, shaking the earth itself.

The industrial zone reminds Spider of a dead animal’s carcass being stripped by the forest, only in reverse - its steel’n’concrete bones being reanimated in some morbid fashion.

Enormous pipes are stacked high and hoisted by cranes to lay down the blood vessels. Bones of concrete poured into cyclopean pylons to hold floors and floors of offices, factories, 3D-printing facilities.
Electric cables are unspooled to provide for Bridgehead’s nervous system… and, of course, there’s flesh - the dozens, hundreds of people scurrying around, on foot and masked, in cars and skel-suits, shouting, hauling, swarming the newly-glassed streets.

Spider breathes hard and fast into the familiar comfort of the mask around his face. It’s nothing like Hell’s Gate was, its quiet abandonment. Bridgehead lives and breathes, it shudders with the cacophany of heavy equipement at work, the chatter hanging in the hot air, the clang of metal. It smolders, vomiting fire and smoke and ash.

And the scope of it all immediately appalls and overwhelms. Nobody at High Camp or back in the old RDA complex bothered to tell him just how big and growing this place was.

Residential quarters climb high into the sky, looming over him like the Hallelujah Mountains themselves, right as their little groups switches a sidewalk to let through a self-driving cleaner bot.

In his irritation and fear, Spider grabs at the clothing he’s given, pulls on it with a subconcious effort to take it off. He’s been given this jumpsuit so that nobody outside the Admin Zone gawks at the “feral” boy.
Torres, from his height notices it and the suit’s metal arm swings down to forcefully yank on his arm. Then, his human hand stretches forward, and the skel-suit follows the grand, theatrical jest.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” He speaks loudly, to cut through the mask and the incessant noise around. “Shaping up to be the biggest and boldest landing operations in Earth history. And it’s just the beginning.”

“Just the beginning?” Spider’s throat constricts with anxiety as he mulls over One Leg’s admission. “What the hell does he mean by that?”

But, of course, he knows. Jake knows, too, and Spider wonders if his face now reflects the same struggle of concealing the terror that he saw that day on Jake’s - the realization of failure. Failure to having actually stopped anything.

Yet, Spider hopes he wins this struggle, and makes a show of suppressing a yawn.

“Yerik shit”, he finally says and looks Torres straight in the eye. “Just a big ol’ junkyard. If you tool me here to boast about a scrap heap, wasting you time, skxawng”.

That does it. Torres’ cheek sucks in, the jaw muscles twitches. With both a hitched excitement and horror bunching up his innards, Spider understands that he finally hit a nerve. It’s liberating to finally bite back - and terrifying, the anticipation of a backhanded slap spilling through his body.

One-Leg suddenly leans in, eyes dangerously cold. Instinctively, Spider flinches away from that abrupt movement, and hates himself for the basal reaction to a larger predator.

Something about the scientist is worse than a Palulukan. Worse than Jake when he’s disappointed. He doesn’t know what to expect, but if the “spinner” is anything to gauge from, the amount of horrifying surprises the one-legged bastard could pull out, was innumerable.

However, Torres quickly hides whatever true feeling seeped through to the surface, and his expression once again composes into one of condescending sarcasm.

“Oh, what cheek. The first session in the NeuroSect must’ve made you think we’ve reached your limits. Not at all - we didn’t even try the drugs, yet”, The man’s white teeth flash against the tan skin. “I’ve seen glimpses of the true you, Socorro. So many imprints of Na’Vi holding each other tight, their kuru entwined. The bliss of interfacing with the “Tree of Souls”. Iknimaya. And jealousy - so much jealousy in this little body. Still, strong emotion, I know. Perfect to resist the spinner. For how long, though, have you give it thought?”

If the fact that One-Leg had seen his most intimate desires shocks him, Spider tries not to show it.

“Longer than you think”, he says eventually and Torres nods, if approvingly. The fact that One-Leg tries to show that he “admires” Spider’s fighting is even more insulting. As if Spider would want respect from someone so abhorrent.

“I invited you for a walk not to boast. I invited here so you could see what you’ve been really deprived of in your little “tropical paradise”.”

A metal hand clamps on Spider’s shoulder and he feels he’s being yanked. Braces for a hit, for another manhandling, but Torres just routes him up a catwalk with the skel-suit’s manipulator. The metal fingers dig into his shoulder, find a collarbone pit and press into it hard enough for it to be considered torture. Spider grits his teeth and drags his feet along while the two guards exchange a knowing look and snicker.

They climb and climb, then push into a bare-bones elevator that shoots up the side of still-built skyscraper. The two Sec-Ops guards keep silent, but Spider watches them exchange mocking glances. One of them, a man with his helmet painted with a snarling maw of some earthen creature, subtly flips the bird at him.

Pressure from the fast ascension presses into Spider’s ears - they step outside, to a platform on top of the building, where a team a few dozen meters away is busy erecting a comms tower. At this altitude, wind rips at them - warm and joyous.

Back at High Camp such wind would’ve invited him to go and pester Lo’ak or Neteyam to call their ikrans and go on a long flight.

But here, the wind itself is dead. As he looks down, he sees only what he saw in the recon holos Jake would put up as the Omatikaya planned their daring raids - the huge, several kilometers-long killzone. The wide band of lifeless, barren ground, pockmarked here and there with craters from guided shells or missiles, feels like a grievous wound upon the face of the planet.

Torres though, seems to enjoy it. The rebreather, of course, doesn’t allow him to take a lungful of Pandoran air, but he squints and smiles, too, warmed up by the sun. Then looks down on Spider.

“You don’t think much of humans, do you, Socorro? By extension, of yourself. However, I advise you to look at Bridgehead and see, that all of this was achieved by thousands, hundreds of people working in incessant synchronisity and unified drive, to make it happen. A common goal - a shared vision. Language, love for one another, ability to imagine a different future. This is what you are a part of, Miles, by the grace of your ancestry. A network of souls, a collective mind far greater than any “eywa” can claim to be. Na’Vi don’t build their Hometrees, after all. And we did. We built much more than a Hometree”.

He nods towards the roiling city below and Spider looks, if anything, because there is nowhere else to look.

But he sees only steel, plasticrete, piping and glassed earth. Harsh lines, belching smoke. Hundreds of hexbots crawling around with the same deadened efficiency of movement that One-Leg’s suit exhibit. It’s all just a perverted mimicry of life, but not quite “it” exactly. The uncanny horror of it makes him nauseous, and the comparison to Na’Vi, to the HomeTree, rings as blasphemy.

Sider positively hates being here. In the epicenter of death. And One-Leg’s grandiose words touch nothing within him.

“What kind of “doctor” even are you?” he hisses.

The man barks a laugh, and moves closer to the platform’s edge, while the guards block Spider forward as well.

He bites his lip, frustrated by the fact that One-Leg evidently teases him by taking him here - dangling suicide before his nose as a tempting option while of course, denying it to him.

Not that Spider would, but… He gulps, throat dry from shitty canister air. If he did, then his knowledge of Jake’s whereabouts, plans and methods would die with him, wouldn’t they? He glances to the dark-skinned Sec-Ops good to his side, and the man notices. Wags a finger at him.

“What kind of… oh, I see. You think you know what scientists are because you grew up around a bunch of soft-bodied diletants with an ethnics superiority complex. You know,” One-Leg cocks his head in amusement at Spider’s perceived folly. “If all people pursuing the sciences were like mister Spellman, we’d still be wallowing in the mud, dying of tuberculosis and cancer, and definitely not travelling between the stars. I’m the head of the Neurocomm & Photonics Lab. We do wonderful things, Soccoro, me and my team.”

“Neurocomm”, Spider might have been running with the Omaticaya, but he was indeed, as Torres pointed out, perceptive. He’s as much quick in his mind as on his feet, and the realisation dawns on him fast. He can’t even find it in himself to rage from all the fatique, hurt and heartbreak. He shivers, even though the heat outside is thick like a blanket and as oppressive as the One-Leg’s stare. “You’re in charge of that… that thing, aren’t you? The Spinner?”

“Very good, Socorro. Guilty as charged. That - and other things, yes.”

“My name is Spider”, he insists, hanging to the proclamation as a drowning man to a reed. Torres ignores it. The skel-suit turns, desaturating to black as he stands against the sun.

“It is not. Listen here, boy. I’m much, much older than you think or what I look like. And my experience tells me that you will find a way to re-join the Omatikaya after we’re done with you. I also forsee a great deal of disappointment in your life. Sooner or later, reality of your condition would catch up to you, “Spider”.

“Condition?” Spider snarls.

“The human condition.”

The boys jaw juts out in defiance and he shakes his head violently.

“You think me snumina, asshole? Of course I know I’m human!”

“You don’t know what it is to be human - never had the chance to. I took you here to show you that we are “a people” as well. What we can achieve as a people. Every man and woman in Bridgehead, in Hell’s Gate, is on a mission here to secure life and prosperty for their parents, daughters, sons. Your adoptive father intends to take it from them — from thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. I implore you to think about it in your free time.”

Then, something alerts Torres - a small glass near his eye that he wears on a wire that loops around his head, lights up and his scarred lips stretch in a smile.

“Speaking of time… Enough of this impromptu little lecture. Socorro, Gneral Ardmore set up a date with you. Unless you had changed your mind and will give up intelligence without persuasion.”

He didn’t.

Chapter Text

The pain is constant and sharp. It climbs from the stump and up to the groin, the damaged nerves dead-set on feeding the wrong information to his brain.

Another man, more sentimental than Randall Torres, would’ve called it an “old companion”, but Chief Science Officer of Bridgehead’s SCI-DEV Torres treats pain as one truly should - a merciless teacher. Each pain is different, each etching a hard truth into the brain to never be forgotten again.

Pandora taught him a lesson, like many men, for decades now. Some, like Colonel Quaritch back in the day, earned three dashing scars on the side of his scalp - and he, unfortunately ended up with one limb less. No glamour in that… maybe for the better.

Back in the air-conditioned confines of the SCI-DEV “wet” laboratory for PRJ MRPHS, he abandons the skel-suit. As the exoskeleton lowers him near his locker, Torres reaches out and pulls his prosthetic out from the main drawer.

His movements are practiced, almost automatic - unwrap the pants’ leg, take off the protective cap from the interfacing socket. Squeeze conductive gel into the receptacle cushion of the prosthetic and then, cursing under breath, align the two, jack and socket. Press until there’s a confirming “click” and begin to tighten the straps to what remains of his thigh and to the belt. Check the connection, move toes - all three of them, because the fourth toe and pinky is an unnecessary luxury.

Parting with the skel-suit is always unbearable. Like he becomes less without the towering mech, devolves… all power gone.

For a few seconds he sits, breathing hard through his nose to calm down the budding panic and takes in the wet lab.

The chaotic order of it soothes his mind. What started out as spotless, state-of-the-art space boasting perhaps, the most cutting edge this side of the galaxy, is now a cramped labyrinth of jerry-rigged equipment, preserved specimens and additional servers brought in to power the SMART-AS, the SCI-DEVs AI core. Cables bunch on the floor and the holo-tables hum their monotone song in the otherwise chilled and silent space.

Ann Sokolova, his direct assitant, and Yun Chen, head of the paranatomy research, are both at their stations, while the rest of the team is either out in the field or at various meetings.

“What’s cooking, Ann?”

The woman’s head is encased in a large helmet with a darkened visor - the mixed-reality device makes her look like a Scorpion pilot, and the tech isn’t much different. The ends of her short red hair stick from under its rim while she moves her hands through the air, “manipulating” a complex-looking molecule that’s projected over her station’s terminal.

A puddle of coffee at its edge betrays both her enthusiatic clumsiness and the blindspots the helmet creates.

“It’s as you said, doctor Torres. Several neuromediator molecules are unobtainium-based, and the synaptic reactions they produce are absolutely fascinating! I’m trying to determine how this all works on the most basal level, but I need Hakim back here - there’s some chemistry-related nuances I’m not privy too. I know what I see, though - we got some robust reactions from the peptides…”

Torres sneers as he watches the dancing molecule model hover above the projector terminal. The depths of his distaste for the Hell’s Gate team reaches such new lows that it almost makes his head hurt.
To think about the resources that were flung into the wind just to fawn over alien plants and learn Na’Vi songs instead of real, honest work that they now need to pick up up from scratch, work that could make difference for them all! For humanity.

How many lives were lost because Augustine and Patel had effectively squeezed him out of the Pandora’s mission? His right fist clenches when he recalls the debates on Luna Nova’s RDA HQ, how Grace didn’t shy away from using PR, of all things - something that such a “morally pure” person should’ve abhorred - to put him on the backburner.

“How would it look that Dr. Lovecraft’s student is heading the Sci-Ops on Pandora? Can you imagine the publications, the noise? People asking questions - and it’s not like the answers are somehow bad, but the mere fact of them being voiced. No offense to Dr. Torres, of course…” her insincere apologies ring in his head like it was yesterday. “But considering the conservationist movement on Earth, we would need to put ESG first in these missions…”

Grace didn’t believe an ounce of this crap. Didn’t give a rat’s ass about RDA - gave them what they wanted to hear, just to get her ass on Pandora. And Patel, her sniveling fat shadow… Well, history had put everything back in its place, didn’t it?

Torres’ thoughts take a morbid quality, when he remembers that Patel, Spellman and the rest of the remaining researchers on Pandora are outlaws. Criminals, even. And in wartime, the talk with criminals is short. What if a PRJ PHNX Recom just gets a bit too zesty with the trigger of his gun, what if someone is resisting too much?

Life is rife with tragic coincidences. He of all people knows it well.

His assistant’s voice pulls him out of the dark daydream.

“Well, I fed some of the data to smart-ass, he spat out that that the projected speeds of data transfer in Pandoran neural tissue is at least 10 times higher, thanks to the Unob-based neurochemistry”, Sokolova points out at a graph. “But that’s not all. The density of data is higher. Like, if our neurons pass a hypothetical byte of data, a Na’Vi’s passes a megabyte.”

Leaning over Sokolova’s shoulder, Torres’s gaze sweeps over the data and it suddenly clicks.

“This could explain why Augustine failed to achieve the same transfer that Sully did”, he says with a smile.

Sokolova’s well-trimmed eyebrow raises just a fraction behind the semi-transparent AR-visor, a mix of both scepticism and curiosity settling into her stern features.

“Because she was wounded?”

“No. Well, maybe it’s not the whole story. Look”, Torres points out to the molecule visualization and then an additional dataset. “Her avatar was on ice most of the time, she wasn’t really using it much, and when she did, it was mostly at the facility. Sully, however, spent his sweet time in the jungle. What difference does it make?”

After mulling over the question for a second, Sokolova’s eyes light up in pleasure.

“Diet. Sully ate with the Na’Vi all the time, and… and of course! He had a higher level of unobtanium in his body, injested with their food! While Grace’s avatar didn’t, and her levels of U-peptides…”

“Exactly. It’s as if that body had B12 deficiency. The signal wasn’t strong enough - or something”, Torres concludes and pushes off Sokolova’s station, catching a glimpse of her admiring gaze. “It’s a hypothesis still.”

“But a good one. Anyway”, Sokolova sighs. “I’ll be waiting for Hakim to squeeze more out of this.”

“Keep me posted.”

Chen is in the other corner of the laboratory at the prep table, prancing around his grisly subject - a Na’Vi’s severed head. The robotic aux-surgeon hangs above like a dead spider, its many limbs curled tightly while Chen is engrossed in his mobile terminal, scrolling through it with his upper lip bit in concentration.

Abandoning the office chair, Torres clanks towards the specialist. The Na’Vi’s head without the body to accompany seems even larger - but there’s not just the head, there’s also a neck and a good, long chunk of the spine trailing after it. The cuts are confident and clean… must be Chen’s own work, rather than some grunt’s AMP-suit knifework.

Its skin’s bright blue colors are faded now - the Na’Vi’s version of rigor mortis setting in. The bioluminiscent dots upon the dead male’s face are just dark pore-like dots, and the eyes are glazed with a greying film of decomposition. There’s no trinkets or jewellery, only the queue stretched across the table, shaved and opened up like an eel along its whole length to the cameras set up all around as Chen was preparing the neural whip. The inner tendrils are carefully laid out to be further cut and turned into samples for the microscopes and tomographs.

Torres would pin the remains of the deceased as an Olangi, judging from the more purplish, darker skin, but without their characteristic garments it’s just a guess.

“New specimen?” he nods towards the remains and Chen, surfacing from his work, nods.

“Yeah… the foresters ran into a skirmish with one of the valley clans. Got a couple intact bodies - their manager knows my needs.”

“Sully’s op?” Torres asks, slightly curious.

There isn’t as much attacks now as the traitor went on the run - and those that happen, aren’t as painful. If there’s a point, where Ardmore is right, it’s the supposition that without Sully the Na’Vi are much less of a threat. Without him, they devolve to primitive tactics, stripped of the knowledge and experience that makes Sully’s raids so efficient at times.

“From what I know, no. No casualties, at least that’s what Razinski told me when he brought in the bodies. They just charged the Dredgers, got blasted by the companion gundrones, and scattered.”

Chen describes what must’ve been horrible carnage with the same intonations one would their morning workout routine. Not out of callousness, Torres understands - the patanatomy head just has his priorities straight.

Chen is a Lunar denizen, as is Sokolova. Tayapi, Sinclair and Hakim are from Mars. All of the Neurocomm and Photonics team, the PRJ MRPHS are “offworlders” - Torres specifically assembled it so.
People of the Lunar and Martian colonies are different from earthers, any way you look at it. More hardened, more focused. Disciplined. The environment itself instills… no, demands ingenuity and excellence from everyone. In the tight corridors of Tharsis’ underground prefab cities, there is no place for the kinds of soppy unprofessionalism that plagued the Hell’s Gate team.

The terraforming projects, especially on Mars, had created societies that are fiercely proud of their achievements. And no amounts of pretty alien ferns or funny monkeys would sway them from their duty. From taking everything Pandora offers to fulfill the dreams of their ancestors.

“By the way, am I getting anything from CET-OPS this week, doctor?”

Torres mouth’ a “no” and Chen rolls his eyes in dissatisfaction.

“Fuzhikawa’s been busy in the Eastern sea, Scorseby is, well - Scorseby… and in any case, the AMAQ Labs get the first dibs on tulkun bits.”

“Shit, I need those pineal glands. Sorry sir”, Chen curses, then immediately apologizes, running a hand through his short black hair. “But my research is kind of running in place without them.”

“I understand. We’re not high on the list, that’s the thing. However”, Torres curls his upper lip in what he hopes to be an optimistic smile, and not a cynical grimace. “Yet. We’re not high on the list yet. When we produce tangible results, everyone will trip over themselves to help us.”

For a second, Chen seems to focus back on the Na’Vi’s kuru, but then once again his head bobs up, black eyes narrowed in what Torres can describe as rapid-onset suspicion.

“Doctor Torres, do you think this whole amrita business is sound?”

Dangerous waters. Chen can be amazingly straightforward at times, and Torres eases into his chair, aiming to be as nonchalant as possible. He knows the Admin is listening, but he has nothing to hide.

“No, I do not. If we’re talking immortality, the Soul Drive is a much better technology - more mature, more sustainable. And I’m not saying that because I helped with the development, it’s just fact. And amrita… Amrita is about squeezing a few more cosmic femtoseconds out of an already flawed human body. But…”

“But?” Chen raises an impatient eyebrow.

“You know me, Yun. I try to abide by the Occam’s Razor. Hunting tulkun, wasting gigawatts on processing their bulk, not to mention that they are sentitent creatures… it’s excessive waste and excessive suffering. But, if it helps RDA’s funds to be well-stocked with investors’ money - and therefore, helps us do our work, I accept its necessity.”

“Admire your pragmatism, doctor.”

“Mh-m.”

Torres twirls on his chair and his metal toes scrape noisily against the grated flooring.

“Any progress with the brat, by the way?”, Chen asks. The disdain in his voice is palpable - most of the team, including the NeuroSect techs, don’t like Socorro, and not even for his aggression: it’s for the stripes. Traitor. Just like Sully, Cortez and the rest of the turncoats.

“No, the boy is… tough. He focuses on all the wrong things, and Ardmore doesn’t really get that the NeuroSect isn’t a silver bullet. But his mental defences will break, sooner or later.”

“Why do we even want Sully? He’s a transferred human, sure, but that’s below PRJ MRPHS’s scope.”

Before answering, Torres gets up and move to the preparation table. As he stares in the glazed over, amber eyes of the Na’Vi, he briefly wonders what if it was his head there, cut open by an alien with little respect or compassion or even an acknowledgement of him being once a thinking individual, that loved and suffered.

Nothing would change, he concludes with a grim resignation. He’d be dead, just like the Olangi tribesman. And the dead don’t ponder upon the manner of their demise.

Usually.

“Sully is the only successful human-to-avatar “eywan” mind transfer. Avatar brains are more akin in structure to human brains, and we need to see just how this “eywa” is rewriting neural pathways in its subjects, if my hypothesis is correct. With actual Na’Vi we don’t know what their “baseline” is before they ever interfaced with a Tree of Souls or equivalent species - but with Sully, the Gate’s team had detailed records on all his brain activity, from human to avatar, to post-interfaced avatar. That’s a valuable pool of data.”

Chen blows air from his nose in an impressed “huuuh”, but then scrunches his face in an unpleasant expression of someone who just sniffed major stink.

“That Recom bloke probably would bring him in no better shape than this fella”, he points to the head on the prep table. “Vendetta or some other merc crap. And we need him alive.”

“Not necessarily. Just fresh enough to juice the brain up a bit and roll into the scanner…”

For a second, Torres entertains the thought of Sully being brought in alive. The chances of this happening are low - both due to the man’s training, which would see him fight till the bitter end, and to the now parsec-wides rift between the goals of RDA and the natives’ way of life. And yet… what if it could be done?

He personally had teased the Socorro boy that Sully isn’t coming from him, but he isn’t sure that it would be the case if they had somehow got their hands on one of his biological children.

“Gotten hands on”, huh. The idea replays in Torres head as he shuffles to his own station to check messages. Some time in the past, the proposition of abducting children, regardless of species, would’ve made him physically sick, but those “some” times were markedly different. The times changed, and so did he, desperately trying to catch up. “Gotten hands on.” Back in the day, when hunting was still a pasttime on Earth, baiting a predator with a lure has always been a viable method for hunting. Sully’s kids would be something - a marvel of their own, morphologically speaking.

Regardless of how he despised the AVTR program, Torres couldn’t deny that it was a pinnacle of RDA’s biotech wing. To merge human and alien DNA so seamlessly that a hybrid could reproduce with a pure specimen - it defied reason. The word “miracle” came to mind. It was.

Bit by bit, as Torres semi-automatically works through his workload, his mind turns to the avatars fully - and the questions they represented. Thanks to INT-INV, recently they learned that Grace Augustine’s avatar, the one that failed to receive the consciousness transfer, in the 14 years of RDA’s absence from the moon had somehow got pregnant and birthed a child.

Closing a window with an email from lieutenant Thompson, Torres brings up a blurred, surveillance cam snapshot of a Na’Vi female teenager. Even with the pixelization, he can see the similarity to the deceased scientist.

“Grace reincarnated, hmm.”

Maybe the bait idea wasn’t bad after all.

Torres decides to clear his table a bit. Wires and charging units, empty painkiller hypos, bit and bobs are swept into a waste bin… and then his hand hovers, unsure, over a little holocube projector. It blinks on from the movement, for a second fanning out an image of woman suspended in micro-gravity.

He quickly covers the projector with his hand so that the static image fizzles out like candle’s flame. So that he doesn’t have to look at it. Heart beats heavy in the CSO’s chest, then, through focus, slows down.

Torres blinks. A thought emerges from the depths, a memory more fitting for the pressing matters of the Socorro boy.

Right. His mother. His mother had always been out of the equation.

***

“I want to see the kid.”

The Recom Colonel catches Torres in the winding corridors of the SCI-DEV complex several hours later. As usual, he’s accompanied by his incessant shadow - Recom Lyle Wainfleet, and both glisten under the harsh lighting, either with rain or sweat from training. Even here, in Bridgehead, they often wear the combat plate and webbing, reminders of their soldierly duty, as if someone would view them as anything but dumb blue muscle without it.

The Recom’s voice carries the same authority it did in his human life, the same gruff undertones and pressure, now amplified by inhumanly powerful lungs. A voice like this demands obedience and Recom Quaritch definitely expects what he was once used to. Especially with the SKEL-M69-AR hanging off his shoulder.

“You will see him. Later.” Torres responds and turns to walk away, but it takes just one little step for the hybrid vessel to block the passage. Wainfleet moves too, but to Torres’ back, boxing him in.

“How much later, doctor?”

“When he - how would you say it? Spills the beans.”

“I just want to be sure you ain’t gonna fry his brain in the process, s’all. Because then we’ll have a problem, you and I”, a threatening softness creeps into the Recom’s voice, accompanied by a fangful smile.

Quaritch, for all needs and purposes, is a Na’Vi, and his 3-meter tall form looms mencindly over Torres. Of course. The CSO is just a cripple, now even without a skel-suit to put him on the same eye level. Easy to look down on. To intimidate with size and physical presence.

Torres’ jaw squares. No, he wouldn’t be intimidated. Not by cloned flesh and memories scattered through alien neural pathways.

“You really think you’re him”, he says flatly and crosses his arms before his chest, the labcoat sleeves riding up to reveal a collection of faded tattoos, cut and burn scars.

“Who?”

“Miles Quaritch.”

“I am him. You said so yourself.”

“I did.” Torres confirms without elaboration and looks over Recom Quaritch, his dark-yellow eyes meeting the other’s golden slits without blinking or shifting.

There is a snarl being birthed somewhere in Recom Quaritch’s face, but then his remark, just as Torres expected, throws the Recom off. The jab of poisonous doubt sets in, making the hybrid flatten his ears unvoluntarily and his tail swish - and unaware how this far richer body language gives away unspoken emotions and thought.

It’s not without cause. The rules of the game dictates that Recom Colonel Quartich (and the rest of them) is to be treated as the real deal, but Torres knows the technology inside out. He knows that even though the software might be the same, the firmware and hardware are different. And so, the software works differently too.

However, psychologically destabilising a Recom isn’t a part of his job description, even with “insurance” in the form of a few grams of high-yield explosive covertly implanted at the base of their necks. RDA learned their lesson just as Torres did.

And so he decides to offer him an olive branch.

“Don’t worry, Colonel. Don’t hypothesize that I have some far-reaching nefarious plan with the boy. He’s Ardmore’s project, not mine - and your headache eventually. I’m completely transparent - I’ll arrange your meeting with him when I see that it’s not working out.”

“It could not work out?” Wainfleet butts in, his eyes shifting between the other two men. Torres shrugs.

“NeuroSect wasn’t meant to be an interrogation device in the way General Ardmore uses it, but I generally agreed that it could work. In principle.”

“You’re not principled though”, Recom Quaritch’s stiped face splits in a nasty, truly human smile. “Which, tee-bee-ache, is refreshing, after I, it turns out, put a bullet in that stuck-up bitch. She’d stink if some of her precious tech had been used for y’know, such “unethical” purposes. Would’ve been a shame if another head of all this sciency stuff expressed such hm, attitudes.”

“We got bullets to spare.” Fingers thrumming on the rifle’s dock, Waynefleet grins.

For his part, Torres doesn’t answer, just continues staring while his prosthetic big toe taps a monotone rhythm.

“I… I meant to say that I’d be uhm, grateful, if you let me see the boy. I mean - the Sully’s brainwashed him like the cartels did with the vezzies, but I…”, Recom Quaritch stammers and then, suddenly grim, shakes this train of thought off. “He needs to see me. Be with his actual family rather than those traitors and freaks.”

He doesn’t say that he’s the boy’s “father”, Torres notes and watches closely the Recom’s expression. The uncertainty that grips him - that always would grip him, the CSO decides. Who he is. Is he. The Recom Quartich’s chest patch says “Deja Blu” and one of the superimposed Na’Vi skulls in its design bears three large scars on the side.

But the Recom’s head is yet free from these injuries.

“Of course. Later - and when we get the general’s clearance”.

This didn’t go like they, Recoms Quaritch and Wainfleet, had planned. He didn’t expect Torres to be so lenient and at the same time, unperturbed by the threats. All the revved up, prepared aggression is now caught in limbo, trying to leave the Recom’s body and he seems both confused and restless. Almost disappointed with lack of a heated argument and the ease with which he will get his way.

The Recom’s eyes scan over Torres.

“Pandora?” he asks, tilting his chin towards Randall’s missing leg.

“Yes.”

“How, if I may ask?”

“Dart. Dipped in some poison”, Torres answers simply, but doesn’t elaborate. “I was lucky it was the leg. Thankfully had an AMP nearby to perform... emergency amputation. Two of my companions died.”

“F’ckin blues”, Wainfleet curses, the irony of it coming out of his mouth completely lost to him to Torres amusement, but Recom Quaritch’s predatory yellow eyes take on a warmer sheen and a flicker of respect passes through them. And, Torres would have to admit, it’s even mutual, to a degree. After all, Miles Quaritch’s final Pandoran lesson was even more profound than his own - it was death itself.

“Pandora plays hard”, the Recom says and steps aside to clear the way. “But we’ll play harder… CSO, won’t we?”

CSO. Not “doctor” or “egghead”. Progress, if achieved by a classic tribal test of hutzpa. He moves to leave, but not before nodding - before acknowledging their common goal.

“We will. And don’t forget that me and you all have an appointment after your first mission, Colonel.“

Chapter Text

The idea that humans - the tawtute, the skypeople -  were “a people” was a troublesome one. It made Spider toss and turn on the thin mattress they threw in the cell, gnawing on the thought like on an especially hard waterthorn nut, and its shell wouldn’t budge.

Hell’s Gate facility, for as long as he could remember, at three or four years old, was permeated by a somber atmosphere of shame and desolation. The skeleton crew that kept it running was torn between aiding the Omatikaya clan’s rebellion and continuing their research. Some of them later ran to High Camp in the Hallelujah mountains.

The McCoskers, his “adoptive family”, were technicians - one of the very few who were allowed to stay and aid the scientists, and as the so-needed working hands, had little time to spare for young Spider. Mary made sure he was fed and changed, taught him to eat, hold a spoon, walk and say his first words. Jim showed him around equipment and computers, patted him on the head and called him “sonny” with an acrid air of non-commitment.

Patel, Spellman, a handful of others looked after him in shifts, teaching him a trade here and there, but more allowing him to kind of just… hang out with them. They kept an eye on the boy, but there was no zealous drive to take him under the wing firmly.

Some were warmer, some were colder, but one constant, painful and evident even to a toddler, truth remained - he was a burden, essentially. Though no fault of his, but still a burden.

There was a film, a membrane, an invisible wall that separated him from the folks as Hell’s Gate. For a while he had believed it to be his age, that they simply didn’t know how to handle children. But then, the truth came out - it wasn’t just his age.

Ah, Pandora was often just a viewport glass away. Spider ventured out into the jungle as soon as he could. First with supervision, enthralled by the vibrant, lush, <i>real</i> world beyond the sterile, air-conditioned offices and labs of the research facility. Then, bit by bit, when he discovered that nobody was particularly on the lookout for him, by himself.

He wept from joy that there was life teeming beyond the walls where he was nothing more than a nuisance… and wept to learn that he was a child of a man that wanted to burn it all down.

That explained everything. That… slashed a wound in his heart so deep, so painful, that from the moment he was told, he couldn’t think of anything but to patch it up, to make up for the one that caused so much grief to this innocent, beautiful world.

To prove that he wasn’t like him. And that there needn’t be for this unseen barrier that separated him from everything and everyone, to exist.

Then, there were the Na’Vi. The Omatikaya. The avatars. Oh, they were breath-taking in their own right! Tall, graceful - eyes soulful and full of amber warmth. Maybe, there could be warmth for him. He met Jake Sully, and his children, the wonderful, wonderful Neteyam, Lo’Ak and Kiri… and then Tuk, of course! Those that would become his first real friends.

Friends? Yes. Brothers and sisters? Aaaaah… Better not to dwell on it. Bask in the light of them calling him “brother”, but whither away under the unblinking gaze of Neytiri.

Sneaking with the scientists to the forest, having the Sully kids come over - between the joys of companionship, he bit by bit learned of the world. Of Eywa’veng. Pandora. Of the Na’Vi. Of why he, Spider, was pink and small, why he had to wear a mask a breath, why he was called a “vrrtep” by the tribesmen.

Why the Na’Vi abhorred the tawtute, the “sky people”. Learned, soaked the information like a sponge.

Not always directly, no. Overheard things. Caught glimpses of video and holo. Taught himself the language and even asked those that would tolerate his questions.

The Omatikaya were, without doubt, The People. Not like the humans - in a profound, true way, that no “sky person” could come close to. And he, Spider, desperately wish he too had a people.

Painting the stripes on his skin, wearing the dreads like mister Sully, learning all the songs, the rituals, the right words, it all was right. He wouldn’t have it any other way, but he didn’t delude himself, no matter what the blasted One-Leg said. How could he, when it was Neytiri herself, who would never tire to remind him that…

He wasn’t one of The People. No song-cord. No Iknimaya. No embrace of Eywa. And even though the Sully children never said it, there was that implicit understanding that Spider, for all his adjustment to Pandora, for his prowess and wit and spirit, would never know something they all had  - a profound, deep connection to one another.

In his cot, back when he had to return from the forest to Hell’s Gate to eat and recharge his exo-pack’s batteries, he lay and stared in the window, at the leaves beating the window during a rainstorm, and prayed to someone - to Eywa - that one day he wakes up transformed. No longer trapped in this flesh, but free to run through the forest with Kiri without a mask, without them treating him like a fragile little pet.

Free to be with his family. Sullys? He didn’t really know.

To have one. Leave the limbo of not being truly wanted in one world - or the other.

He wished for all these things… and then, he grew up.

Spider was a tough kid, after all. Tough - and smart. Dreams were just never meant to come true.

“People”. His thoughts turn to Bridgehead, its streets filled up to the brim with massing, teeming humanity. The chatter. The music. Smiles… smiles on their rotten, vrrtep faces. His eyes fall on his hand as it clutches the fabric covering of the cot, so tan and small. Not blue and striped, not anymore.

And then, he snarls, in sharp, unbearable heartache. No, he wouldn’t let the skxawng One-Leg get under his skin.

***

Spider has little time to think about it further, because another session in the meme-spinner begins. Questions, again and again, while his mind is pulped in a blender and he tries to hang on to irrelevant memories, to not give the RDA what it seeks.

They shout. They are calm. They insult him, the persuade him. They promise and they threaten.

They question him from a myriad angles, and he forces a blankness into his head, agonizing from the knowledge that soon, he will break. His mental stamina is depleting, fast, and the bastards, Ardmore, One-Leg and all the other techs behind their masks, know it as well.

Hunger, sleep deprivation, thirst, pressure. They pile it on him in the hopes that he breaks.

Still, he doesn’t break, and by the end of yet another session, is thrown back into his Cell. Exhausted, bleary and nauseous, he still kicks and claws at the guard, but as he fails to reach one of the Sec-Ops’ groin with his foot, Spider realises that there’s less fire in him now.

Spider wants to sleep. The cold, previously unnoticeably in his adrenaline overload, seeps into his bones. Acid splashes inside his empty stomach. Lips are dry and for a moment he lapses into a stupor, thinking about water.

They are carving him, little by little. Like water etches stone, that was what they’re doing. A hunter jogging after their prey, waiting for it to fall from exhaustion and stress, that’s who he is.

And even though he is determined to outlast, he’d seen enough of such hunts to know that it’s a futile hope.

A guard is at the door, and One-Leg thumps in again, searching for Spider for a moment before he finds him once again curled under the table. A giant metal hand motions him to get out and this time, Spider obeys - doesn’t want to add more sore, painful scratches on his knees than there already are.

The man smiles and Spider scowls, well-understanding the satisfaction of the bastard from seeing him gradually bend to his whims. So he crawls out and spits demonstrably onto the floor, then throws himself onto the bolted-down metal chair, if with a small air of pride - they changed the previous folding ones after he smashed a guard’s face with it before.

One-Eye takes a knee, uses the pad clutched in the skel-suits hand to scan over Spider, and lets out a good-natured whistle. His eyes are hooded and dark beneath the cap’s peak, betraying tiredness - and if Spider can take even a bit of blame for it, he gladly does.

“Very good, Socorro. It seems that the supplements you’re getting are doing you good - you’re finally thriving with proper food, and not those scraps they must’ve fed you from Hell’s Gate stores.”

Spider snarls, but the news actually make him more anxious, if it’s even possible. When he gets out, when he escapes back to High Camp, what would Jake think if he’s “thriving”? That he’s better off with humans, away from the Omatikaya? That he’s never going to have a place with them?

“How would you know what I ate, you fucki-…”, he begins, but Torres cuts him off with a wave of his hand.

“We cleared Hell’s Gate a few days ago. It’s ours again…”, the crippled scientist closely watches Spider’s feeble attempts at concealing emotions, obviously delighted by the pain inflicted by these news. “Back into the embrace after the rats are chased out.”

Hell’s Gate has fallen! Fists clenched, Spider holds his breath, waiting for more information to pour out of One-Leg, even if it’s more of the mocking, gleeful boasting, …

As these concerns flash in Spider’s head, One-Leg motions for the guard to move to the outside of the cell, and cocks his head, studying the boy intently, as if mulling something over - his crooked pose reminding Spider of a perched ikran with the spindly skel-suit limbs thrown around him like wings.

Then, de-syncing the suit’s arms, One-Leg reaches into the breast pocket of his turquoise-green RDA jumpsuit, and pulls something out, to place on the table’s edge. A piece of paper or carton. Beckons the boy to check it out.

Reluctantly, Spider takes a look. His breath hitches, caught in the throat like a thorn from the pricklefruit’s peel.

The piece of paper is a photo, one he knows well - the photograph of his pregnant mother, handed to him by Mary McCosker back in the day. Someone in the compound decided to photograph the first woman on Pandora to give birth, and the photograph lingered long enough to end in his possession.

Once, it was pinned to the wall of his bunkbed. He’d stare at it, imagining what kind of person she was, torn between longing and hatred when his gaze would fall upon her soft smile.

It would be easier if she was sullen or indifferent in the picture. But she was smiling, and that smile would lead him on winding paths of fantasies he today found shameful.

“I had a helper of mine scour for your possessions, but there weren’t many”, One-Leg motions with his narrow chin towards the photo. “This, however, I’m sure, you’d want to keep.”

Of course, Spider knows it’s all manipulation. One-Leg wants to build rapport with him, to pull him away from the Sullys. And so, Spider’s face contorts into a grimace of pure loathing. All of the once-buried turmoil suddenly finding a crack in containment and blasting out like jet of water under pressure.

“She mated with that monster, that vrrtep, demon! She was a… a whore! Came here to exploit, to rob, and hurt, and kill, like - like all of you! That’s who she was!” he explodes, the words born from fear, despair and pain tearing from him like a herd of stampeding sturmbeests. Shaking with anger, he lunges forward, swiping the photo off the table.

“And she left me”, Spider wants to say, but before he could make this accusation, One-Leg moves.

The skel-suit accelerates the scientist’s movements to a frightening degree, and before Spider knows it, he’s thrown to the floor with his head ringing from the impact, his lip and lower jaw bleeding, numb.

From the height of the skel-suit, One-Leg looks upon him with such contempt, that its burning ferocity ties Spider’s stomach into a knot. Taking out a napkin, Torres carefully wipes first the specks of blood that landed on his face, then the blocky fingers of the skel-suit’s hand, and with the same measured motions, folds it back into his pocket. For some reason, the boy only now notices the dense pattern of tattoos covering the scientists forearms below the rolled-up sleeves, and it feels like the lines twist and shift, almost living like, through his skin. Is he concussed? Drat, shit!

“Now that your head is clear, get up. Sit back or I’ll make you, and you wouldn’t like it.”

Spider obeys and does as told, seething.

“Hitting me on the head, real smart… Not afraid your precious data gets lost from trauma, huh?”

“No”, One-Leg replies calmly, but the contempt is still there. “I know where to hit. Now, let’s get something out of the way. The “rob and kill” part that is at the core of your little outburst, Socorro. Nigh time we did something about. What did the Hell’s Gate skeleton crew tell you?”

“About what?”

“About the goals of human presence on Pandora.”

“Do you think I’m dumb and don’t know?”

“No. But I also don’t believe you to be fully aware of the real state of world affairs. I want you to tell me. Here”, One-Leg reaches out with a bottle of water that was tucked into a pocket of his pants. “Quid pro quo… ah, of course you wouldn’t know Latin. Mhm.. let’s barter, like the Na’Vi do.”

His dark lips pull into a frigid grin.

“I give you, you give me”, the scientists says in a voice meant to mock the Na’Vi’s broken English.

Blood cakes Spider’s split lip, and despite himself, almost feels the cool water run down his throat. When did he drink last? He gets the IVs, but they always keep him thirsty - no doubt, another tactic to break him down. One-Leg shakes the bottle slightly, and Spider’s eyes involuntarily lock on it with longing.

“I’m not going to hit you again. That blow is deserved - I will not tolerate insolence, even if I do understand why you said such things. To a degree.”

Spider nods. One-Leg tosses him the bottle, and, unscrewing the cap with shaky hands, the boy drinks - noisily, angrily, water running down his face and throat to mix with blood and drench the collar of the t-shirt he was given.

After waiting for him to quench the sharpest pang of thirst, the scientist inquires again.

“So?”, and Spider wipes his mouth.

“What is there to tell? RDA arrived here after humans killed Earth, destroyed it with pollution and digging up of stuff. Now they want to do the same to Eywa’veng, uh… to Pandora - to bleed her dry for um… money, until it’s the same dead rock as Earth” he says confidently. He’d heard it so many times, that the words almost come out on their own, like pebbles falling in place under one’s heel when you step down into a stream.

One-Leg listens, head still cocked to the side as if he has trouble hearing, then smirks.

“What’s so funny?”

“Earth isn’t destroyed”, he says simply. “Far from it.”

“Well yeah, I mean that it’s just a shithole because of skxwangs like you! Instead of living in harmo-…”

“Let me show you something, Socorro.”

One-Leg props his tablet down onto the table, and fiddling with it for a few moments, launches a video. For a second, Spider’s deference and curiosity fight. Curiosity wins, and he stares into the tablet.

Burning ground. Trees, nothing more than charred remains sticking out of a soil consumed by a slow crawl of lava. Aerial footage - cities, abandoned, standing cold and dark under a clouded sky. Caravans of cars and people treading through desolate landscapes. Dead animals littering the sides of long roads lost beyond the horizon. Scenes from what appears to be hospitals, filled to the brim with injured, crying men and women. Blood, misery. 

He watches and doesn’t understand, and when the video ends, he looks back at One-Leg, confusion written all over his face. He expected to see crowded megacities and factories throwing black smog into bright blue skies, but… this is different. The destruction, the ruin on display doesn’t look man-made even if he desperately wants it to be.

“The Yellowstone supervolcano exploded several decades ago. I assume you know what a volcano is? Right. It took half of the North American continent - one our biggest continents - with it. We knew that it would happen one day, but not so soon. And we couldn’t have stopped it even if we knew.”

Spider wants to say that the volcano exploded because of RDA, and other megacorporations like it, but unfortunately, he knows that’s likely not the case. Even here, on Pandora, volcanoes are a threat, to the Na’Vi and wildlife.

“Norm never…”

“Of course, why would he? He was born, hm… I assume, thirty-something, almost fourty years after. When most of the damage was fixed”.

“What does that have to do with anything?!” Spider spits out, but One-Leg continues.

“There was a winter that lasted several years. From all of the ash, you see. Lots of plant species died. We lost millions of acres of arable land - that means, no more crops. People starved and died, millions of them. People died from the ash fallout. Forced to relocate. Once ordinary cities swelled to accommodate the refugee surge”, One-Leg explains along with the video playback. “ Wars broke out. That’s how RDA came into its true power - we were the ones that managed to deal with this catastrophe. Reached deep into Earth’s core and then, space. Oceanic farming. Hydroponics on Ganymede, Mars. We built a maglev system that spanned the whole globe, helping to quickly get resources to those that needed them. We were instrumental to rebuilding what was lost, saving countless lives.”

Raising one of the skel suit’s arms, Torres points to a sticker on its “shoulder”. It reads a company motto all-too-familiar to Spider. “Building tomorrow.” The boy rolls his eyes, but One-Leg continues as if he doesn’t notice it.

“But, we were still… crippled. We still are, despite our colonies in Sol. Earth isn’t dying, Socorro. It will chug on along for aeons. Just without us. It became… unfit for the future of humanity. Its capacity to sustain mankind has greatly diminished”.

Spider rolls his eyes, not ready to give up.

“Maybe the problem isn’t Earth! Maybe it’s the problem that you took too much of it! Turned it an unliveable, junk-filled dump! You bled your planet out, just because of… of greed! Your ah, superprofits for the dumb rocks or whatever you shitstains call it!”

“Unobtanium? That’s just on piece of the puzzle, Socorro.” Torres lets the swearing slide, but Spider notices that the skel-suits left hand balls into a fist, and the boy gulps down a saliva wad of worry. Sure, poking at the man is fun, but he’d need his strength to resist and escape, not get injured. “Profits are good, but when you live in a bubble in orbit or the surface of an airless planet, you kind of get used to breathing and grow to appreciate it.”

“Max says theres too many people to begin with… that it’s in… unsustainable! You’ve multiplied and multiplied, like parasites!” It’s true. Max had told Spider about overpopulation, about the Resource Wars and the sprawling megacities where life was cheap and miserable. The picture he painted was something so vivid, so horrendous, that as a child he’d even have dreams about it. But his tormentor just shakes his head in denial.

“Do you know what’s behind those words? “Too many” - what they imply? That there needs to be less? And how do you propose that to be fixed? You’re sixteen, Socorro, you should know death already”, One-Leg’s umber eyes grow dangerously cold. “Imagine… imagine whole landfills, being stacked with the dead. People that died of hunger, of respiratory failure, millions dumped there and burned. Not even getting a burial - too costly, too little space.”

In turn, Spider squares his jaw. He doesn’t believe that a person like One-Leg cares for any of that. Cleary tries to get a rise out of him, to… what? To have Spider hug him and weep over poor misunderstood earthlings? He doesn’t want to know all this, to think about - about whatever the skxwang is talking in his dirty attempt to justify what RDA is doing to Pandora.

So he puffs, jerks his head to throw the dreads over his face - let the fool poke and pry, he’s not buying any of it.

“And who be the judge of who lives or dies? How many should have children - or not? Who would suffocate - Mars or Luna, to pay for the comfort of Na’Vi here, because the unobtanium that powers the oxygen recyclers cannot be mined due to the natives being disturbed by the ops? You, Miles Socorro, son of Paz Socorro? You will decide that, hm?”

One-Leg reaches out to the photograph on the floor and almost reverently places it back on the table.

Despite his efforts to ignore all this, Spider’s head is spinning. In the face of new information, he searches for arguments, but finds none - all of the talking points that he had heard from Norm and the rest had never faced scrutiny or resistance, and now he has no ammunition to fire back.

A giant metal finger taps on the photo, smoothing the crumpled paper out.

“Your mother came here for a better tomorrow, one not just for herself. For people back on Earth, Mars, Ganymede, the orbital habs. For you, in the end. An ordinary job, really - protect miners from dangerous wildlife. Her contribution, I’m sure she knew, was small - what’s a Scorpion security pilot in the grand scheme of things? But her intention was just that, a good life. A future for us, her, and you.”

With that, Torres wordlessly activates the tablet again, to start another playback.

It was from within a cockpit, Spider recognizes that instantly. One of those cameras RDA installed everywhere to “track performance”, that once littered Hell’s Gare. The camera dutifully recorded the cramped interiors of a Scorpion gunship, and from the side, its pilot.

Her face was partially obscured by the helmet, but, of course, Spider recognized it, the flash of tawny-red hair - almost the same as in that photo he just tossed from the table, only now its expression not calm and loving, but terse.

There was a battle raging outside. In the viewports of the gunship, he catches glimpses of the Hallelujah Mountains’ green, the turquoise splash of darting ikrans.

Paz Socorro was barking something into the helmet’s integrated mic, eyes dark under the polarized visor. Time from time her head would jerk back, perhaps to shout at the gunner, and Spider would catch, in medium resolution, the faded blue of her eyes.

It was noisy outside, bursts of gunfire breaking the droning roar of the Scorpion’s rotors. The camera shook with hard, banking manoeuvres as Socorro danced through the air with the ikran riders. One arrow, then a second one, glanced off the windshield.

Involuntarily, Spider holds his breath every time. But the glass held. A third one chipped the surface, spreading cracks.

And then, with the fourth arrow, it failed.

Just like that.

It happened in a blink of an eye - one minute, she was holding the stick, plunging the aircraft in a daring dive… and then, with a crash and a shower of crushed glass, a thick shaft of a Na’Vi arrow burst into the view.

Into her, through her, nailing the fragile human form to her seat. It happened so fast, so… mundanely? He didn’t even see the blood until the flight jumpsuit soaked red through and through. The gunner cries from somewhere back, and the pilot slumps, boneless, around the arrow.

The camera recorded everything without mercy. How her hands try to hold to the flight stick, but slip. The blood bubbling from her mouth. And, amongst the cacophony, enhanced, no doubt, the microphone picks up a rattling, haunting sound.

A cry - a whisper? A plea.

“M… m-miles. Miles.”

Her hand reaches out a last time, with no strength left, to somewhere almost out of the frame, and then drops, like a puppet with the strings cut. The gunship tumbles and shudders as control is lost, so Spider sees her attempt to reach a photo pinned to one of the windshield’s separator. A photo of a newborn.

If there ever was, now there is no doubt to which Miles Paz Socorro called out with her dying breath.

The playback stops on a freeze-frame of a human figure pierced by that oversized arrow. A sorry sight, whichever way one looked at it.

“Whore, you said”, One-Leg’s venomous voice in the surrounding silence makes Spider twitch. “Who does that make you, then?”

The man stands up to the whirr of the skel-suits servos.

“I… it’s not… it’s what they said”, Spider breathes out, all fight gone out of him. He cannot begin to process neither what he saw, nor his feelings.

“Who “they”?”

Chewing his lips, Spider stays silent. One-Leg’s eyes narrow in triumph.

“I understand it’s easier for you to believe that she died for “dumb rocks”, than for you. Otherwise you’d have to deal with the consequences of being a son that spits on his mother’s memory”, the scientist snaps out every word. “And there we were, deeming you a strong, loyal character. Even praising your ability to survive this environment.”

“Like hell you did!”

Torres doesn’t answer. The cell’s door slides, and One-Leg ducks to leave - but not before taking the half-empty bottle of water with him. The barter is finished, and Spider is left with nothing but rage, pain and… doubt.

“Till next time, Socorro”, comes the chilling promise.

***

General Ardmore’s office is as spartan and non-descript as the woman herself. Sunlight floods into the room, and Torres watches dust play in the rays. Dust collects on the RDA and UEA flag’s behind her desk, on a dozen plaques covering the wall -  all, undoubtedly, given for distinguished service - and on the glass surfaces of the sleek curved holodesk.

Dust. For a moment, Torres thinks of the bright day beyond the walls of Bridgehead’s CIC, about the wind… such a weird feeling, wind! There was no wind on Mars. Dust, however… that was plenty of that.

He often overhears people lament the confines of Bridgehead, the masks they’re forced to wear outside when breathing fresh air is so tempting, the air-conditioning: too cold, too hot, smells funny. On his side, he doesn’t share the sentiment in the slightest. Recycled air to him meant one thing - safety. Meant that pressure holds, that all is right, that systems are green and nobody is dying due to an air-locks failure or a dome being shattered. That when they go to sleep, they will wake up.

His breath becomes harsh, jagged, as his thoughts turn to such things. Air becomes dense in his throat and then windpipe, almost clogging it… Hand claws into the pleather armrest, and…

Frances Ardmore takes her cap off and places it on the desk’s right wing with a light “thud”, mercifully ripping Torres out of his rampant memory. She runs a hand through her auburn hair, slicking it down - then looks at Torres with perhaps, the same levelled intensity as at target through the reticle of her CARB.

Hers is a hard face, etched with lines of age and experience, a face that was so used to forming of a blank mask that it, eventually, straight up fused with it. Dead eyes… no, not dead, he’s unfair to her. Just glassy. Life squeezed out of them from the crushing gravity of responsibility. General Ardmore is a functioner, a corporate soldier, not a passionate leader. Torres respects that.

In some regards, it suits him well, to work with someone like Frances Ardmore. She radiates a blunt confidence of a person that wouldn’t go on wild goose chases and personal vendettas. An aura of a professional. Torres basks in it after spending an hour trying to put some valuable knowledge in Recom Quaritch’s tiny Na’Vi brain.

Charismatic leaders, ones like Sully or the dearly departed Colonel-now-Recom, of course, can act as disruptors, as “black swans” capable of pivoting the course of history a whole 180. They have the willpower to do great, unexpected things. But they can never plough the line according to specifications.. and only that guarantees a predictable and desired result. 

Workhorses, not swans, bring about real change and progress.

The holo display before Ardmore powers down - she finished reading Torres’ latest report.

Her silence is meant to be uncomfortable, to pressure him into thinking that something is going wrong and that he is scrutinised, but Torres knows the game, and just further relaxes in the visitors chair. Notices a dust speck land on the polished metal of his prosthetic knee, and flicks it off.

Their work is impeccable. Precisely what the Director’s Board wants, and the General’s role here is to just make sure that they - the SCI-DEV teams - don’t go rogue like the ones before them.

Not to pass judgement on their research. That is out of her scope, and right on cue, General Ardmore sighs.

“So, doctor, when do you think you’ll have a working prototype for MRPHS?”

Torres doesn’t bat an eye.

“Two months, three tops. We’re burning the midnight oil. As you just saw, we made significant gains, and my team began manufacturing and assembling the first prototypes, but we still require some samples. Run tests…”, he pauses, letting the scope of their work sink in her understanding. “We have to be careful, because, as you know, there are complex surgeries involved at the later stages. We have to polish everything.”

“Sully still a critical sample?”

Makes sense that it would worry her. The traitor an OPEX drain to her operations - but not to his. Torres shrugs.

“No, I believe not. I need him to check a couple of important theories, but critical? No. If he’s killed, it’s no fatal blow to the project.”

Ardmore nods in agreement, then stands up. Walks over to the UEA flag and begins straightening out the folds.

“And who will test the um… the prototypes, your whole… hypothesis?”

“I’m partial to Socorro as a candidate, actually.”

“The boy? Why?” Amazingly, he manages to eek out a raised eyebrow out of the woman.

“From what I can understand, he has an incentive - he desperately wishes to be Na’Vi, to have a connection. And on the other hand”, a smile cracks Torres’ gaunt, tan face open. He knows it’s a cruel one, but he cannot help himself. “If we made a mistake somewhere, if something goes wrong, nobody would cry for him. The boy is… expendable.”

The General purses her lips in a faint grimace of surprise. Didn’t expect him to be so uncaring for Socorro’s fate? She more than anyone else should know that everyone, in the end, is expendable. Only the cause, of course differs… And the price tag to this expense. Socorro’s is especially low.

In truth, Torres wants to see Spider break out of his programming, to embrace his humanity - if anything, to stick a fat one to Grace’s little sycophants that “raised” the boy in the same self-loathing philosophy that had brought upon all this mess. But if that fails, well - then the teen is a lost cause. So if he fails during the alpha-test of PRJ MRPHS, it’s going to double the cosmic irony, not a great loss to humanity.

“Nobody? I beg to differ. Quaritch will be furious”, she points out. “Though, you are right. It’d be unethical to ask anyone else.”

“With all due respect, general, one - that is not Quaritch, and two - I don’t care what he thinks”, Torres rasps out, unable to hide his annoyance. “If that doesn’t work out, I’ll test the prototype myself. That was the initial plan anyway, before that little runt fell into your lap.”

To that, Ardmore lets out a small grunt, turning back to face Torres with her arms crossed sternly against her chest. Only now he sees how fit she is, how the uniform bunches around her conditioned physique - a true Earther, not like his lanky, wiry self. Probably works out to not loose muscle mass in Pandora’s gravity… he should pick up the slack too. Leg or no leg, this place demands excellence out of a man.

“You’re the CSO, not Vice-President Lei-Chen. I could order you to stand down with such plans. We cannot afford to have it set us back again”, in reply, Torres barks a bitter chuckle.

“That Recom, Quaritch - he’s compromised anyway. About the boy. About the Sullys. It’s personal for him and you’re handling a primed grenade in a form of a blue alien gorilla now.”

“And it isn’t personal for you, doctor?” If Torres didn’t know her better, he would’ve thought he heard a hint of sarcasm in her bleak voice.

His first impulse, is to argue that it isn’t. But, he’d be lying then. To her and to himself. And he never did so.

For a split second, he’s back in the jungle, that vortex of purple, green and blue, of pulsing lights and deadly air, accompanied by the shrill scream of Tokugawa as he’s dying from the poison, chocking on his own vomit. He’s back to stare helplessly as Valbont’s rebreather, at the foot-long dart needle with bright plummage sticking out of the cracked glass right opposite to her eye and the bloody mess beneath it. Back… to hear the crunchy, meaty sound that the AMP suitknife makes as it bites into his torniquetted leg, the vibrations shooting through his body when the bone yields to the steel, whining, screeching… him screeching in tune until his throat is raw.

They had been so, so foolish. Two Martians and a Loonie not even two months fresh from “Per Aspera”, deciding to waltz through an alien jungle with an tiny armed convoy, and still… their foolishness didn’t warrant what was done to them.

So, it’s personal. Augustine is dead, the rest of the traitors on the run, he has all the reigns, and the Na’Vi just didn’t know better, but… something inside Torres yearns for putting everything under his heel. His only remaining heel.

“It’s personal. But it bears no effect on my work”, Ardmore “mrrph”’s a half-hearted acknowledgement, and Torres continued. “Speaking of “personal” things. I have a request considering the Recoms. Or, rather, a proposal.”

A flicker of life, like a light being switched on in an empty, dark room, for a moment warms up General Ardmore’s face. Torres takes it as interest, and leans forward, powering through the pain that shoots up from the stump of his leg.

“I’m listening.”

Their relationship, his and General’s Ardmore’s, cannot be classed as “friendly” (he doubts Ardmore has friends - not out of some serious flaw of her character, but because she most likely finds them unnecessary), but they are not rivals either. There’s a flatline of respect and necessity connecting them. Both work for a simple goal and are meant to help each other. Nobody has toes to step on or conflicting stakes.

Pure business. Assumed understanding.

“As you’re aware, the later stages of PRJ MRPHS includes access to a… Tree of Souls. Or similar organism.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, the one located at the Flux Vortex is most likely inaccessible for us, but, as the AVTR program uncovered, more than one of these exists. Most likely, every Na’Vi clan has their own. We will need to determine where they are located, so that when time comes, we will have options.”

“That’s reasonable, but how is that related to Recoms, doctor?”

“Team “Deja Blue”… ex-Colonel’s team, as far as I understand is assigned to tracking Sully? Aha… But here’s the idea”, his eyes light up. “Recoms can be used to infiltrate Na’Vi tribes…”

“I thought you were against such missions?” she interrupts him. “Weren’t you insisting that they can just push Recoms further into defection? And I actually agreed with you on that.”

“I still am. But now things are different, aren’t they? With a bit of failsafe, right here”, he points a finger to his temple. “Make them pose as traitors, play the part of Sully’s allies who were hmm, say, pried from the grasp of RDA and now wish to frolic through the jungle with their spirit brethren? Basically, get on the Na’Vi good side just enough to figure the coordinates of their Trees. Then we’ll be able map out these organisms’ presence - not just for PRJ MRPHS, but for Sec-Ops operations as well. For GUILLOTINE.”

With the mentioned of the latter, he watched for a reaction, but Ardmore is back to her stone-dead self. Doesn’t even flinch, and instead, moves to her coffee-maker to prepare a cup of her, as he by now knows, favorite americano.

“GUILLOTINE is still in pre-planning phase, doctor. The chairmen are expecting results from your solutions first,” She glances sharply at him over the chromed-out, expensive machine. “And I should say… correct me, because maybe this opinion comes from my lack of my scientific knowledge, but MRPHS seems to depend on a lot of factors. On a bunch of unknown variables, all aligning perfectly. How do you know it will work?”

“You would, if you understood the project. And if you did, you would be in my place, not the other way around”, Torres thinks, not without a smidgen of superiority.

“I’ve laid that out in great detail in the initial roadmap of MRPHS”

“Hm. Well then. The proposition with the Recoms is… tactically sound. If risky.”

“The Recoms were already paid for, as far as I understand. Considering the fact that my team has a lot of worktime before us, this recon stunt can run in parallel - no harm done.”

She nods and takes a sip.

“Alright. But doctor Torres, do keep in mind”, she motions with the cup to the window, the Bridgehead’s boisterous sprawl. “The Board expects results. Wave three is coming in six years, and by that time, Pandora has to be tamed. Tamed, not played with to your colleagues’ amusement. We had quite enough of that.”

“Our logic is flawless, I assure you. The entity that Na’Vi call Eywa is, at a first glance at least, a communications network. A biological one. And what’s the characteristic of a network? That it can be hacked, General. Brute force or clever worming in, doesn’t matter. That is guaranteed. And in the best case scenario…”, he half-lids his eyes, lapsing into a dream for a second as the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafts through the room. Oh, he will wreck everything Augustine did here, on this moon. “Maybe we will find out what… or who, sits at the heart of it.”

He stands up, faltering for a second as the prosthetic finds balance, and offers her a short bow.

“I have your blessing, then, General?”

Ardmore offers him a faint smile of her own.

“Team “DaBaDee” is thawing in orbit as we speak. I will assign them to this task. Hash out the details later this week.”

“They’re good…”, he pauses, forcing himself for optics’ sake to get on Ardmore’s side more firmly. “Men?”

“The best, doctor”, she squints at them. “I know you don’t see them as such, and perhaps, given your pedigree, you are right, but they are… were… good men and women.”

“Employees from back then?”

“Yes. Sec-Ops elite.”

Torres, uncharacteristically, fidgets with his fingers as a surprising thought crosses his mind.

“The boy’s mother was in the program?”

A sound more suited to a direhorse, a chuff or snort, comes out of Ardmore’s nose.

“She was a pilot. So no, of course not. Why… oh. No. Good idea, but no. No avatars for people with those skillsets.”

With another nod, Torres sees himself out. Dragging his feet down the corridor, he feels the air choking him again and thinks back to a little black box the size of a man’s palm. About how it once felt to die.

It was… personal.