They were traitors, every last one of them.

How could they just give up on their humanity?

Private Galina Stefanova Uluta was consumed by a potent mixture of dismay, anger and betrayal. She had been woken from cryo after five years hibernation, to find that the force of Avatars sent to retake Hell's Gate had rebelled against the RDA and captured two starships.

Even worse, they had used those same starships as relativistic planet-killing missiles to destroy all life on Earth.

Homo sapiens was now effectively extinct. The only humans left were here, on Pandora, where they did not belong.

Those traitorous bastard Avatar smurfs were doing everything to force the extinction along. As soon as the shuttle landed, they had been shepherded into the main building and told Earth was dead, told by an Avatar wearing an exopack. There was no long-term survival option – at least, not for humans.

The forecast was that the consumables at Hell's Gate would not support the remaining people on Pandora for more than eighteen months. There would be no relief – Evening Star was the last starship dispatched from Earth, before the smurfs killed everything. The bastard briefing them – a smurf called Renshaw – said the only option was to grow Avatars, and permanently transfer everyone's personality.

Well, he and all the rest of the blue traitors could get fucked.

There was no fucking way Galina was going to abandon her species, no matter how shitty her life had been. Not after what she had been through to drag her sorry ass out of the shithole that had been her childhood.

Galina had made her decision. She wasn't going to linger listlessly around Hell's Gate, holding out for some scraps of smurf charity. That was why she was in the Q-store, loading up her pack with supplies and ammo.

"Hoy! What do you think you're doing?"

She turned slowly around, her eyes slowly scanning up the length of a long blue torso. It was a smurf.

"None of your fucking business, turncoat," she growled in reply, as she shrugged her shoulders into the straps of her pack. "Now get out of my fucking way."

"You can't take this stuff..." he started, only to stop when a Wasp revolver appeared like magic in her hand. The muzzle looked to be the same diameter as that of a cannon, at least from his perspective, and he didn't see it tremble in the slightest degree. Apparently he realised that discretion was really the better part of valour, as he held up his hands and took two steps back. "You won't get away with this," he added mildly.

"Just watch me," was Galina's snarling response. She holstered the gun and pushed past the Avatar as though he wasn't there – a somewhat startling feat given that she was only five foot four.

Just before she disappeared out the door, the Avatar called out, "It's dangerous out there."


It was night.

Of course Galina knew Pandora was dangerous. She was an envirotech, trained to survive on the planet's surface for months, even years, trained to guide others through the perils of Pandora's hostile ecosystem without the need to use Avatars or other advanced technology. There were plants and animals that could be eaten, water that could be drunk. She even knew how to renew the filters on her exopack without using any human technology, so she could breathe the poison that went by the name of 'air' indefinitely.

All the biological research that had been carried out over the last two decades had culminated in the knowledge and training she had struggled to assimilate, so she could leave her shitty life on Earth behind.

But here she was, in what Galina had hoped would be a new beginning.

Instead, her life was at the end of all ends.

Fuck them all.

Galina adjusted her exopack to make sure the fit was secure, loaded her crossbow, took a deep breath of filtered air and slipped into the forest surrounding Hell's Gate.

Really, it was no more dangerous than where she had spent her childhood.


"Colonel Renshaw, sir," said the Avatar respectfully to the olo'eyktan of the Unìltiranyu.

"What is it, Fingers?" The heavily muscled leader of the rebels against the RDA looked up from his data tablet.

The former soldier said gravely, "One of the humans that came in on the last shuttle just walked out into the forest."

Renshaw sighed. It looked like another suicide by Pandora. More than one arriving on each starship since the destruction of the Earth had been put into motion by his actions had made that choice. "Who is it?"

"Uluta."

A few flips of his right hand brought up Uluta's personnel record. Renshaw started to say, "Put a party together to recover..."

His eyes scanned the personnel record. Perhaps he was wrong about the nature of the mission. If any human was qualified to survive in the Pandoran forest, Uluta might be the one. Orphaned by the Kiev nuke as an infant, she had been through a bunch of different foster families until the age of eight, when she was adopted by a veteran of the Caucasus insurrections, and taken to live in the Siberian backwoods – one of the few remaining untouched wilderness areas on Earth. The envirotech training was a major plus.

Hmmm...home schooled, enlisted when she was seventeen...what did her psych tests say?

Her profile was interesting. Renshaw allowed a half-smile to appear on his face. He had seen many similar scores in the personnel jackets of Special Forces soldiers. High ratings in aggression and independence, self-sufficiency...here was the kicker. A strong peak in compassion, not so different to another woman who had been allegedly under his command – Sharon had surprised everyone.

"Belay that order, Fingers," said Renshaw. "Uluta will come back when she's good and ready."

"But Boss," griped the former Delta trooper, a worry crease between his eyebrows. "She'll die out there. It's suicide."

"Not for this one," said the olo'eyktan. "She's ornery enough to make a thanator choke on her." Renshaw hesitated for a moment. If he was a betting man...and chuckled. Six months, he thought. Six months would do it. Perhaps he would suggest a pool.

It wouldn't do morale any harm.


As far as Galina could make it, she had been out in the forest for well over a month – possibly two. She hadn't switched her datapad on in all that time – there was too much to do to stay alive than worrying about time.

She hadn't realised how tiring just eating would be. Hold her breath, slip off her exopack, take a bite, repressurise, chew, swallow, and repeat ad infinitum. Then there was pumping up the pressurisation cylinder – by hand. No wonder she had lost weight, until she was nothing more than skin stretched tightly over muscle and bone.

At least drinking didn't present the same problem, although the gases dissolved in the water gave it a sulphurous taste.

One advantage losing weight had presented her – the disappearance of her period. Without access to drugs, Galina had expected to be almost crippled three days out of every twenty-eight. That's what it had been like from the age of eleven through to seventeen, until she enlisted – and she was glad for small mercies.

If only she wasn't always hungry.

Saliva pooled in her mouth at the thought of food. Galina swallowed, and cursed under her breath. She could do without distractions when she was stalking game.

There.

Quietly, she eased her crossbow to her shoulder, and took aim on her target. Without thought, her finger caressed the trigger, and the steel bolt flashed across the clearing, pinning the kali'weya to the aerial root it was traversing. The arthropod screamed, waving its many legs in distress and stabbing its stinger randomly, while Galina ran across the clearing and drove her knife through its brainstem.

The kali'weya gave a single spasm, and stilled.

Galina efficiently butchered the arthropod, and commenced the tiresome task of eating, when she stopped.

She spun around, to see a viperwolf carcass lying in a hollow. It was clear what had killed the beast. The broken stub of a Na'vi arrow projected from its flank. Galina relaxed, and then tensed when the carcass moved.

Ever so cautiously, knife in hand, she dragged the carcass aside. Three viperwolf pups were there – one was clearly dead, while the other two moved weakly. There was only one thing to be done.

Galina took her knife, and started on her grisly self-appointed task.


"I couldn't do it," she explained to the cubs as she fed them, cutting fine strips of flesh from the corpses of their mother and sibling. "I'm an orphan too, you know."

They mewed quietly as they took the meat from her hands.

Soon, their small bellies were swollen with the meal, and then they promptly fell asleep. Galina returned to the butchered carcass of the kali'weya, and laboriously finished her meal.

Galina sighed. She had just made her life even more difficult.


A few days later, she woke up before dawn, curled protectively around the two pups. They stirred and grumbled at the disturbance, before collapsing back into deep sleep. While she cut strips of flesh off something that looked like a six legged rabbit hanging from a nearby branch, Galina murmured, "I suppose you should have names."

She thought for a few moments before deciding, 'I think I'll call you Quisling, and your little brother can be Arnold."

Now she had done it. Her foster father had told her never to name an animal, because the act of naming gave it a soul. Then you could no longer kill the damn thing for food. The vicious bastard had never named any of his dogs, or his horse.

Then again, he had never called Galina by her name either.

Why had she done it, she wondered?


Leaving the pups behind when she hunted wasn't an option. Galina went through the items in her pack, trying to determine what was absolutely necessary to carry, and what would be proof against a pair of teething viperwolf pups.

She wrapped the discards in the rags of her fatigues, and stuffed them in her hidey-hole – inside the hollow of a rotting tree trunk. She shrugged to herself. Due to the rotting of her boots, Galina had been going barefoot for the last fortnight, so now she would be bare-ass too. It was just as well her belt and pack were proof against all that the forest could throw at her, otherwise she would be in dire straits.

One of the things she discarded was the revolver. Most of her gun oil had been consumed in the battle to keep it functional, and there was no guarantee her limited ammunition was proof against the weather conditions. Galina had come to the conclusion that it was dead weight.

A wisp of hair stuck to the glass of her exopack, and she cursed with annoyance. Her ugly dull brown hair was growing so damn fast – something had to be done. Ruthlessly, she pulled her hair back and quickly plaited it, using a scrap of cloth to tie the end off. If there had been a mirror, and her hair had been clean, Galina might have seen reddish tints in her hair, changing colour just like it had in the sunlight of her short adolescent summers in the Siberian forest.

With a single swift action, she scooped up both pups and deposited them in her pack. It was time to go hunting.


One day blurred into another, as she was consumed by the struggle to keep both herself and the pups alive.

It didn't take long for them to insist being let out of the pack, so they could trail at her feet. It was amazing how well behaved they were on the hunt, instantly quieting on a single gesture of her hand. There focus was total, watching how she stalked her prey intently, until the moment of the kill.

It was only after feeding from the carcass that the pups would gambol and play.

The pups grew rapidly, and she discovered they liked to run. Somehow, Galina managed to keep them in sight when they ran. Despite her ever-present hunger, and the difficulties eating with an exopack, it seemed her Pandoran diet suited her to a tee.

Galina had not noticed that she had grown an improbable six inches taller.

Unlike her change in height, she had noticed that the carbon fibre stock of her crossbow was developing a hairline crack. One of the things her bastard foster father had taught Galina was the art of the bowyer, and that of the fletcher. What little downtime that she had was taken up by the construction of a bow from local materials with matching arrows. Some of her crossbow bolts were sacrificed to form arrowheads – it was faster than finding suitable stone, or grinding an edge from the bones of her prey.

All in all, Galina was very happy how her bow eventually turned out. She felt no regret at discarding her crossbow.


"Quisling," she hissed quietly. "Arnold."

The heads of the two young viperwolves swung towards her. At her slight gesture, they returned silently to her side, crouching beside her flank in thick cover.

Involuntarily, Galina stiffened at the sound of soft voices, and felt the hackles of her companions rise in sympathy.

Ten Na'vi moved though the forest, made of equal numbers of men and women. Their voices were two low for Galina to understand their words. She began to tremble in fear and hatred. Galina had almost forgotten that this world was inhabited – except for the arrow that had slain the pups' dam, she had seen no sign of intelligent life since leaving Hell's Gate.

The last of the Na'vi – a tall male – stopped and stared directly at her position, frowning. He took half a step towards her, when a woman called out to him to hurry up. Galina's Na'vi was good enough for her to understand the gist of her words. He turned, and said something too quickly for her to understand, and strode after the beckoning woman.

It was time for her to move somewhere further away, away from any being that might be regarded as people, whether Na'vi or not.

All she knew from her short life was that people always betrayed her, hurt her body and her spirit. Why would the Na'vi be any different?

It was that night the dream returned, the nightmare that her foster father was still alive, and still hunting her.