The Disclaimer is in the first chapter. If you're too lazy to go there, its your problem. So please don't try to make it mine, okay?
Several years earlier: The Great Battle
I was looking through one of the side-doors of our Samson, internally cringing at the massacre our soldiers brought upon the natives. Why they had ordered the medics to be held in reserve was a mystery to me. The wounded were out there, not here in the Samson, but then... if one was hit by the 7-feet-long, poisoned arrows the other side used, one was dead anyway...
Well, I was once one of the employees of the RDA here on Pandora. My name is... was Darren Barton and I was a mechanic/medic who didn't have the luck to be overlooked when the higher-ups went looking for soldiers to attack the Tree of Souls. I was with the support troops, hanging back to help the wounded and repair the occasional malfunction from one of the AMP suits or their guns.
The natives didn't even have the slightest chance against our fire. Occasionally one or two got close enough to launch an arrow and kill one out of the masses of infantry the RDA had sent, but those were just pinpricks where a hole would have been needed. It looked like this battle was already over.
But then, just as the natives began to retreat, all hell broke loose. It started as a massive wave of heat signatures on the screens, but when the giant beasts came into view, I nearly soiled my pants. It looked like the fauna itself had turned against us. Giant hammerheads made short work of our AMP suits when they reached the line, infantry being slaughtered by the smaller viperwolves. The line wavered and started to break, support Samsons all around us beginning to lift with the intention to at least save the copters where the suits and soldiers had already been lost. Before the pilot could lift our Samson, a native on the back of a thanator bounded past the copter. She saw me and aimed her bow, but just as she released, her mount stumbled and the arrow vanished above me. Then she was away and our ride finally lifted from the ground and broke the canopy of the jungle.
Up here, it was only marginally better, Scorpions and Samsons ripped into by riderless mountain banshees, a steady rain of steel, fire and broken bodies falling down into the jungle.
I looked around and saw a small group of Scorpions flying away between the damned floating rocks that dominated the airspace this far into the Halleluja Mountains. "Hey, Jack! Retreat on 9 o'clock! We'll try to meet those others for our way back!" My headset hummed a bit before Jack, our pilot, sent the affirmative and turned the copter around. Coming around the edge, we just saw the tail of the last Scorpion vanishing behind the next cliff, the swarm of banshees staying behind us at the site of the aerial ambush. Circumventing the cliff, I heard Jack swear through the headset, just before the Samson fell into a steep dive. The group of retreating attack-copters was in the process of being scrapped by another large swarm of banshees and Jack was apparently trying to hide by flying in the narrow gap between the upper branches and the floating masses of rock.
It worked, but when we came out of the field of rocks and floating islands, we didn't have any clue as to where we were or in which direction Hell's Gate lay. That damned flux vortex was still strong, even out here and those wonky instruments were no help when one tried to orientate oneself. Also, fuel was running low, we wouldn't have the luxury to just fly out until we reached the boundaries of the vortex. As Jack steered the copter higher to have a better look at our surroundings, I spied a long, but quite narrow clearing down the side of a hill in the distance. Remembering a report from last week, concerning a landslide that had buried one of those field-labs the eggheads where placing all over the jungle, I told Jack to head there. The RDA wouldn't let simple earth take their investments, so they had surely sent a dig and recovery team to unearth the lab. If we were able to reach them, we would have a chance to refuel and we should be far enough from the vortex to find our way back home.
About half the distance was behind us when the whine of the turbines above me suddenly spun up to a high-pitched whistle, just before a sharp "Bang" rang out. The Samson immediately started spinning and tumbling. I grabbed the nearest handholds and chanced a look out of the side-door, Jacks swearing assaulting my ears. We were trailing a fair bit of smoke and a few feet away, burning brightly and rapidly growing more distant, was one of the two rotor-pods, which normally held the Samson in the air.
The next few seconds were filled with swearing from Jack, smoke from the hole in our copter and the bright flashes when the side-doors aligned with the sun during the tumbling. When the first crashes from breaking branches began, shredded leaves were added to the mix and gave the air a green hue. Then, a bone-jarring impact shook the wreck around me, my hands were ripped out of the handholds and I saw the floor of the cabin rushing at me. There was a sharp pain in my head and the darkness claimed me.