PREFACE
Interior, ISV Venture Star.
"What the hell did you do to piss them off, Parker?" snapped an impatient middle-aged, yet attractive woman with shoulder-length silver hair. She was a tall, fit, imposing woman; probably more so from Parker's suddenly inadequate perspective. Flashbacks involuntarily flooded his thoughts. The taunting epithets that his 'friends' had called him during his middle school years back on Earth. He mentally cringed as he recalled gym class in eighth grade when he couldn't get out of having to playing basketball. He was picked last, of course – basketball was a game for the tall, not the 'staturally-challenged' as one of his class mates had called him. Because Parker hadn't grown an inch since the sixth grade, no one wanted the 5 foot 4 inch tall accounting student on their team. He sighed aloud, half because of his memory, and half because of his current situation.
"Parker, I asked you a question," the woman demanded. She was wearing a gray flight suit with strategically placed yellow bars, indicating her status as upper-echelon flight command – she was also wearing an intimidating scowl.
"Can I at least get out of the goddamn airlock before the interrogations start?" he retorted, doing his best to deflect the accusing tone in her voice with one of defiance in his own. He pulled himself through the airlock, and moved four or five handrails into the module before moving off to the side to allow others to pass by. The embarkation/debarkation modules were fairly sizeable structures designed to load and unload personnel and smaller cargo to the Valkyrie shuttles. The EMDEB modules were roughly square in cross-section, with more than half of the space occupied by a large, semi-enclosed cargo elevator. These were used to load and unload the box-like ore carriers and large or bulky items not already stowed in the Valkyrie cargo bays at the start of their journey. The elevator platform was noisily creeping past them, manned by four dock workers wearing orange jumpsuits emblazoned with reflective tape at their extremities, and Parker had paused to let it go past. The wall nearest Parker had a series of padded hand holds, allowing people to move through the module in zero gravity. Against the walls, a series of different sized pipes and wires ran from the spine of the ISV up to the airlock wall, and out through the bulkhead. Parker guessed that these carried jet fuel, rocket fuel, water, and other necessary liquids and gasses to and from the ISV. He couldn't help but feel a tinge of pride, even given his present situation, as he glanced around at the nearly spotless, white module. These people were good at their jobs he thought. His thoughts suddenly came back to his job as the captain spoke again.
"Parker! There are quite a few people up here wondering why we haven't heard a peep from Hell's Gate for the last three days up until about seven hours ago. Including myself." She looked at the small man, trying to size up his reaction. Parker gave her a nervous half-laugh as he pushed his way past her and began to move down the module toward the axis of the ship. "What the hell happened down there, Parker?" she repeated her question from slightly behind him now. "Your transmission three days ago was less than unambiguous to say the least." She glared at the back of his head intensely with her aquamarine eyes.
"Captain Daily," Parker began, as he slowly spun around to address the woman, "the last couple of days have been no fun for anyone on Pandora – at least not for anyone who's human. We got our asses handed to us by the Na'vi! They got all pissed off when we bulldozed some frigging sacred ferns or something, and then all hell –"
"The data I received," she interrupted, raising her voice a few decibels to make it clear to Parker that she wasn't going to tolerate any half-truths, "was that some insensitive fuck went and attacked a village, blew up their goddamn home, and inflicted a huge number of casualties on them!" Parker pushed slightly back from the woman with his hands raised in front of him. A few other RDA employees who were disembarking the single remaining shuttle were watching the growing spectacle now, while others continued to pull themselves down through the airlock tube and down the EMBED. The module was starting to get uncomfortably claustrophobic for Parker; all he wanted right now was to put some space between himself and the potential mob members that were glaring down at him from multiple angles.
"Alright, alright – look, let's just get everyone who's still alive off the god damned shuttle for right now," Parker retorted, raising his own voice to emphasize that he was still the most senior RDA employee, and in charge. "I will debrief senior flight crew just as soon as I can stow some sensitive files and gear that needs to be secured. Do you have a space that I can use temporarily as a base of operations? I'll need a few consoles, some com equipment, and space for a few personnel." Parker intoned this last not as if it were a request.
Captain Daily looked at Parker with contempt clearly written on her face. She waited a long moment, pondering the thought of putting Parker into a cryosleep unit but not giving him the drug cocktail to stop his metabolism or prevent cellular decay. She smiled at the thought, finally saying with a smirk, "It looks like we'll have plenty of spare room if the crew roster you sent back is any indication." Then, a moment later, she pushed past him calling back, "Follow me, I'll get you your space personally, so I can drag you to your debrief afterward." He began to follow her down the handrails of the EMDEB module. She called back, "You know, some of the flight crew had friends and family among the ground party." Parker knew where this was going, and he didn't like it. She turned her head and looked back at him with a face completely devoid of emotion, "Including myself."
The room they were in was small by RDA standards for a debriefing of this importance, but Parker thought it was probably the most expensive conference room he would ever be in, considering it was 4.37 light years from Earth, and in space, and had artificial gravity. From the placard that he had see on the bulkhead door as they entered the room, he knew that this was the officer's mess. It was a Spartan room by Earth standards, fairly small, maybe 10 by 14 feet or so. Two surprisingly solid plastic-top tables were arranged length wise with a number of chairs along one side and a single chair against the corridor-facing wall. A shuttered external window was closed. The room was brightly lit with some kind of light-emitting diode panels, which cast nearly no shadows. As the command staff filed in, captain Daily pointed the chair out for Parker's benefit. When everyone was seated and the door closed and locked, Parker began.
"I just wanna start off by saying how sorry I am to anyone who has lost friends or family on Pandora over the last couple of days…" Parker was standing before thirteen of the senior flight crew of the ISV Venture Star. He had refused to take the seat that the captain had indicated, instead opting for a standing oration. A few of his audience looked at him expectantly, simply wanting to know what had gone on apparently. Most of the others, including the captain, were glaring; others showed expressions of indifference, disgust, or outright hostility for the RDA administrator. Looking out at their faces and sensing their hostility, Parker was suddenly aware of the very real possibility that something could 'happen' to him while he was in cryosleep. He fought off the sudden shiver that this brought him and regained his focus. Get this over with, he thought.
"…It's been an uncomfortable and dangerous time for all of us, including admin," he emphasized. He heard someone in the back of the room mutter something that sounded like 'yet you live,' but he couldn't see who it was. He continued, "Interrupt me if there's any questions on particulars as I'm going - I'm just going to jump right in here. He paused for a moment, looking down. He took a deep breath and began.
"As some of you might know, our latest satellite geological scans have revealed a massive unobtanium deposit roughly eighty clicks from Hell's Gate. That amount of distance here on Pandora takes some time to cover. We sent out four remote operated dozers about four months ago to rough in a road to the new site, along with a small security detachment of nine SECOPS personnel and two AMP suits.
"Unfortunately, the site was occupied by a Na'vi village." A few members of his audience murmured 'humphs' and shook their heads sensing how it must have gone down."
"But I'm assuming you knew this from the beginning," the ISV captain interrupted. There were low mutters from the assembled crew.
Parker continued, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the low din of the crowd, "We figured that this would give us enough time to figure out what to do about the native population living there. A few weeks later, a new avatar driver named Jake Sully managed to get himself captured by the Na'vi while accompanying one of Grace Augustine's science field trips studying tree bark or something."
One of the men toward the back of the small room interrupted, "Where is Dr. Augustine? She has not uploaded any data packets this week, and her requisition forms are overdue."
"Grace Augustine is dead." This time Parker gave the assembled members of the flight crew a few moments to stop murmuring before pressing on. "She was shot by Quaritch while her, Sully, another avatar driver named Norm Spellman, and a pilot sympathetic to the Na'vi were trying to escape in a stolen Sampson. I'll get to how that happened in a little bit." He paused to allow the assembled personnel to quiet down again, then he continued uncomfortably. "So, so – this avatar driver gets caught by the Na'vi, and it turns out that he's a marine, or ex-marine. But Quaritch and I had hatched a plan to get him in with the Na'vi, so he could feed us information. The plan was to get the Na'vi to accept him, and then, hopefully, to use his position to get them to move to another tree.
"The plan was working pretty good up until last week or so. When we were just about to the site, the dozers encountered our former informant, Sully," Parker emphasized the word, revulsion apparent on his face. He continued, "By this time, it appears that he had switched sides and allied himself with the Na'vi." Parker paused to take a sip of water that he had brought in with him before going on.
"He and his Na'vi girlfriend attacked the camera array on one of the dozers, putting it out of service." Gasps of surprise and shocked looks appeared on the faces of many of the people in the room. "I know, I know – how screwed up is that?" Parker asked with a slight smile on his face. The crowd was beginning to soften slightly, he thought. Parker surveyed the assembly quickly. Someone in the back looked like they started to say something, but stopped.
Selfredge continued, "Maybe an hour later, we got a very brief panicked radio transmission from the SECOPS team that we couldn't understand. And then the dozer operators began losing control of their vehicles one by one. We sent out a recon team shortly after. They discovered nine bodies full of arrows, and burning AMPS and dozers. All the equipment was a loss." Again, murmurs of disgust and discontent rose up through the small room. Parker waited patiently for them to calm down before going on.
Parker continued at length, backtracking a bit, outlining all that had transpired after Jake had begun training to become one of the Omaticaya. His audience remained eerily silent for the remainder of his narrative, only interrupting a few times for additional detail. At the end of Parker's presentation, there was a stunned silence. The expressions of most of his audience members had changed during his two plus hour narrative; most were now confused and angry. The administrator wondered if perhaps now they were slightly less angry with him and more angry with the damn monkeys.
Captain Daily looked up from the notes she had been jotting down during the briefing. She tapped her pen quietly on the plastic table top while looking at Parker, unsure of where to begin picking apart his story. "So…" she began slowly, "you have a planet full of unobtanium ore – so much of it in fact, that there are literally mountains of the stuff floating all over the sky." She began to pick up steam now, with each consecutive statement-question growing slightly in volume and acidity. "So much so, that you could have continued the pit operations at Hell's gate for at least another ten years. Yet you went and sent out bulldozers to plow through a Na'vi sacred site, expecting no reaction from the native population, correct?" Parker sat still, with an indifferent smirk on his face, and nodded.
"Your dozers are then attacked and destroyed, along with your expeditionary force, which, of course, you weren't expecting. You then gassed a Na'vi village of over 1000 people, blew it up, killed maybe half of their population, and expected them to roll over for you?" Snickers came up from around the room, but she continued on nearing a crescendo. "You, as the head of RDA on Pandora, allowed your SECOPS colonel to continue unchecked, to wage all-out war on a sovereign people, on THEIR planet!" she yelled. "People who shoot bows and fucking arrows for god sake! All of which resulted in the RDA being evicted from Pandora". All of her senior staff were staring in disbelief at the outburst from their captain, some had their mouths slightly ajar. At some point during her retort to Parker, she had stood up, though she could not clearly remember when that had been. She glared at Parker, but began to regain her composure somewhat. She straightened her uniform slightly, and slowly, deliberately, sat down in her seat.
"Did I miss anything?" she finally asked levelly, staring at a mute and visibly shaken Parker Selfredge. He said nothing.
The captain continued, this time in a carefully checked, slow, deliberate manner. "Of all the douche bags in all of the history books that will ever be written, Parker, your name will hold a very special place. That is, if many more history books are published. You and your moron crony have managed to get the very first sentient alien species that humanity has ever met to despise us to such a degree that they simply don't care if we go extinct. You've made them hate us so much that they don't want us taking a mineral from their world that they have absolutely no use for, but one that probably means life and death for our species. Oh, and then there is the potential that you might just have started the first interstellar war, one which could very well result in genoci – scratch that, xenocide. Oh, and then there's the maybe causing the extinction of humans thing."
The room once again fell silent. All eyes were on Parker. He had looked like he wanted to say something a few times while Captain Daily was giving her diatribe, but he waited until she had finished, less by choice than by her unwillingness to let him defend himself. Now that she had finished thoroughly berating the RDA administrator, Parker glanced around at the assembled faces shiftily. Finally, he took a breath, hesitated for a moment as if thinking to himself, and then stated simply, "I have a plan."