LAS SANTUARIO: PROVINCE OF NUEVO AZTLAN.
[I conduct my interview with Francisco Contreras in his office in the main administration building of Sanctuary. What strikes me the most about the place is that it doesn't feel at all like the office of a military commander. Two of the walls are lined with leather bound and paperback books, ranging from heavy tomes on civil and criminal law, to agricultural technologies and human history. The other wall is taken up by fictional tales, from The Odyssey, to The Last of the Mohicans. "Reading's in my blood." Contreras says. "My father wanted me to be a lawyer, but after I left the academy, I felt myself to be too good at waging war to have time for that sort of thing." Indeed, there are a few trophies placed on the shelves, including photographs, bits of scrap metal, and two na'vi pole arm weapons mounted on the walls. One of them is purely ceremonial in design. The other appears to have been plucked from a burning battlefield. Contreras; the former General of Guardia Paramilitaries as well as the former Chief of Staff of the RDA's Expeditionary Force, has a certain softness in his tone of voice. Throughout our interview he has difficulty retaining eye contact, often staring out into the ether.]
People often ask me why things happened. Why we decided to wage war against a peaceful indigenous population. They're asking the wrong man. I waged war for people, not against them if you know what I mean. The build-up, the escalation, the decision to invade… those decisions were made by executives who wanted lots and lots of boots on the ground. I just led the charge.
The company may now have been willing to invade the planet in force this time around, but there were still three massive obstacles that had to be surmounted: lack of manpower, long travel time, and the hostile environment. All of these were problems that couldn't necessarily be solved just by throwing money at them until they go away. Lack of manpower: they needed lots of soldiers to pull this occupation off, and to hold every region, otherwise the natives will continue mounting raids, long travel time: it previously took over two years to get to Pandora, and hostile environment: we needed to find a way to acclimatise our personnel to the hazardous environment of Pandora.
The first issue that the RDA tackled was the question of long travel times. Even with some of the most advanced space engineering and technology money could buy, the spaceships that we had could only go up to seventy percent of the speed of light. This meant that the average voyage to Pandora still took over two years to make, not counting return trips. This could have proven to be a massive problem for us as the situation on the ground changes in months, not years. Say for instance, we run into a large scale dig site somewhere. It's in the middle of the forest, so we're going to need specialist loggers in order to exploit the vein properly. So we send a request back home to Earth, and ask them to send those specialists over on the next starship to Pandora. Two years later, they finally arrive, freshly woken from cryo-sleep and eager to get to work. Problem: the dig site has just been swarmed over by na'vi raiders, making the whole place completely impassable. There's no more ore coming form that site anymore. So now we've got a whole bunch of loggers having to sit on their asses because it took them two years to get over here and we lost the site within two months.
To solve this problem, the RDA poured its resources into faster-than-light travel. It took them the finest physicists in the world and a trillion or so dollars but eventually, after six fucking years they finally came up with something. They figured it out. They finally broke the light barrier or something. I'm not a scientist, and some of the most basic equations that they throw around in the news go right over my head, but somehow they figured out a way to shorten the travel time from two years, to roughly seven months of travel time. Could still be hard as hell when it came to picking what reinforcements we needed, but it was now feasible to get the correct specialist personnel and equipment when we needed it. Still, it was bit of a- what you call it… Catch 22?
How so?
Well, in order to pull off the faster than light travel, we needed to take all of the other space ships, all ten of them, take their Pandorum and parts and whatever, and create one single super star ship about the length of a small country. The power required for faster than light was probably the same as the whole output for the Indian subcontinent. I always felt that was ridiculous. I mean, we're building a great big spaceship so we can mine Pandora, and we need to mine Pandora so we can build a bigger spaceship. How strange is that?
Regardless, that was problem of long travel times solved, or at least mitigated. The other problem was acclimatisation. Pandora in those days had some of the most hostile environments known to man. Between the fact that everything from the average viperwolf to the plants were bigger than us, the radiation levels could kill you with a sudden flare up and the fact that the air itself could not be inhaled without an exo pack, every day was a battle for survival. Lord, even today you can't cross the street without a gun in your holster. We needed to find some way of making the land as habitable as home. And the answer came in the form genetic therapy.
It was a very controversial decision at the time. Genetic enhancement came under a lot of scrutiny back in the 2120's as part of the latest round of 'what does it mean to be human?' debates. Although it had quite substantial benefits, almost everyone feared that constant tampering with the genome could undermine humanity itself, create a caste system of genetic haves and have-nots or even create some eugenics based dystopia or something. After a while, they managed to come up with a law that more or less solved the problem. Simple rule of thumb: enhancing already present abilities; like eyesight or reflexes is okay, giving new abilities; like a new arm, or colour changing skin is not.
Anyway, the RDA decided that the best way forward would be to genetically modify every soldier and colonist who went to Pandora. They certainly weren't going to put up with people choking to death because their exo pack is broken.
I assume you're talking about the treatments most humans went through?
Yes. The ones you and I took before we sent foot on this grassy rock.
You remember how it goes. All those constant injections and checkups. God, it felt to me like they took up a quarter of my life for the one year they spent preparing us for the occupation. Then you had the try outs… all the people who suffered sicknesses and illnesses as their bodies adapted themselves. Some people had to spend months in hospital. A few died for Christ sakes. But it was worth it.
The enhancements we were given are quite subtle, baseline in nature. Changes were made to our lungs to be able to breathe the toxic mix that is Pandoran air. Bones were toughened up to help accommodate the lowered gravity. Skin and tissue became much more resistant to the radiation that hammers down around here. Throw in the various minor enhancements made to reflexes, muscle mass and stamina and we're basically set for living a healthy life on Pandora.
Not everyone was happy about the enhancements though.
[Nods] Indeed. As positive as it was, there were still many who opposed the whole process. Some said the whole process was akin to creating a new breed of human. They feared that the humans on Pandora would evolve into something that could no longer be called Homo sapiens. Others in the RDA establishment felt it wasn't worth the cost of modifying tens of thousands of people in order to secure the moon. They felt that the exo-packs were enough, and that shipping even more men to replace the casualties would be more cost effective. [Scowls.] And finally, there were many colonists who, for a variety of reasons, refused it all. Maybe they're religious, and believe that the body God gave us should not be tampered with. Maybe they were worried about the side effects. Due to the cost of having to accommodate these people; the cost of building extra airtight buildings, exo-packs, radiation shielding and what-not, these people were basically let go. If they were lucky they'd either be doing administration work , or assigned to one of the units still operating security assignments.
Wasn't the Avatar Program a possible solution?
[Laughs] That program got shut down as soon as Hells Gate fell to the natives. Do you think that the company would want its employees to go frolicking with the natives ever again?
Heh… To be completely fair though, the program had lost most of its backing years ago. It was originally developed as an attempt to create miners that would be resistant to the rigors of Pandoran life and later would be used by scientists to liaison with the na'vi, but the program was just too hideously expensive. I don't know the actual costs but from what I understand the money that was spent on creating and maintaining the previous team of a dozen Avatar operators for a year could have paid and maintained a whole regiment of Gekko UCVs. When you consider the amount of people we were going to send over from Earth, it was never going to compete with gene therapy.
Still, even with the enhancements, we were still going to have a rough time on Pandora. Considering that the average na'vi is almost twice as tall as the average human, not to mention all of the wildlife dwarfing our vehicles, we knew that even if they stuck to bows and spears, the casualties that we would suffer would bleed us out in the end. Like I said earlier, the strength enhancements were fairly minor. We knew that we needed to find a way to even the playing field as it were. And this time, the answer came not with genetics, but with machines.
[He nods over to the corner of the office. Tucked away by the door, there is what appears to be a human shaped metal framework hanging on the wall, about Contreras's size. I automatically recognize what it is.]
Is that a Mk.1 Exo-suit?
[Smiles] That was what I was wearing when I first set foot on this moon. I'm a sentimental man, so I kept it around.
Exo-suits, or powered exoskeletons, were a creation that was originally developed back in the early 21st century. The idea was solid: create a mechanical framework that could increase the amount of equipment that a soldier could carry tenfold. Of course power and dexterity issues and what not always plagued the early models, so they were not considered standard issue for a long time. In the old days they were typically only given to specialized units, like .50 Cal SAW operators for example. That was when our own scientists dug up those old concepts, and adapted them to utilize current technologies.
These new Exo-suits are essentially a framework of mechanical hydraulics that is powered by an advanced battery built into the suits back plate. Worn outside and on top of clothing and threaded with the body armor, these hydraulics help to exponentially increase the strength of the wearer, allowing them to perform acts of strength and speed that were previously only limited to augmented personnel. It may give its wearer the appearance of having some terrible disability, but no one has ever denied the benefits it has given to the men and women who came to Pandora. I have seen and heard plenty of accounts of humans engaging na'vi in close-quarters combat thanks to the enhanced strength it gives. I cannot stress enough as to how important this standard-issue piece of technology is to humanity. With it, every man and women has a chance to survive on Pandora.
Anyways, that was the question of acclimatisation solved, now comes the issue of manpower: finding enough troops pull off this invasion. The fundamental problem that the RDA had was fairly simple: their losses during the first battle with the Na'vi were great enough in that they needed troops immediately. They had various other commitments on Earth that meant that they couldn't simply just drag troops out from pre-existing conflicts. That was when they decided that instead of just hiring troops into one PMC that they themselves ran, they decided to hire out eight entire army-sized PMC's to do the job for them. This had the advantages of getting a lot of troops to Pandora in quick order, an easy to manage decentralized command system and finally, armies that were more suited and specialized for their theatres of combat.
Who were the PMC's?
Everyone knows about the eight Private Military Companies that came to Pandora. They were all human obviously, but they all came from such a variety of backgrounds and cultures from Earth that they practically became tribes in their own rights. Some focused on discipline, others on initiative. Some adopted mechanized doctrines, others light attack. All of them led the charge on Pandora.
Let's see… first of the PMC's was the Grand European Legion, or just the Legion for short. This was a disciplined, professional army, composed of men and women from the old lands of the European Federation, such as France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain to name a few. They were led by some of the finest veterans from the conflicts in the African Sahara, and they poured their focus and resources, into professionalism and, and in fostering alliances with friendly tribes. They were led at first General Alain Montblanc. Fine leader he was… progressive and adaptable.
The second was Oborten Oborona Resheniya: Russian for Werewolf Defence Solutions. These guys were hardened veterans, their latest exploits being in defending some of the last oil rigs in the old Motherland from organized criminal efforts to steal them away. They were hardy people, but agile, and capable of fighting in dense forest as well as the cities. Their focus was on mechanized warfare, to make sure that if there is problem in some outpost in the middle of nowhere, a convoy of armored vehicles will be there within a minute. Good men, all of them. Especially their leader, General Nadya Ferdnova. Terrifying woman. It is little wonder they called her the Iron Mother.
The third was Sword Group. These Arab men and women, from Egypt to Iran, all the way to India, even with a few Israelis, could be counted upon to find a solution to a problem no matter how impossible. Be it siege, insurgency or all-out attack, those men would find a way to win. They had little problems adapting themselves to the hotspots of Pandora's ecosystem. Their leader was Hassan al-Nadir. He came from nothing, but he worked his way to become the leader of one of the best armies we know of today. His interest in bio-mechanical Unmanned Combat Vehicles, like the Gekko or War Hound, meant that one could be seen accompanying every squad in his army out on patrol.
The fourth was Kestral Security. They made their fortunes in peacekeeping operations in Africa. Fitting, seeing as they all came from the continent. Nigeria, South Africa, Congo… those men had plenty of experience. They may not have the discipline of the Legion, but don't mistake them as rabble. They are all brave men and women, who prize initiative, and rarely run from battle when the going gets tough. They preferred to use their light attack vehicles to do get across the plains and savannahs of their theatre of war.
The fifth was the naval outfit, Typhoon Navies, or Táifēng Hǎijūn. Most of them hailed from China, although a few come from Japan or Korea or South-East Asia. Their job was to make sure that all the offshore and coastal facilities, as well as the naval convoys that the RDA ran were safe from attack. They had plenty of anti-piracy experience and some of the finest marines in the world. Well-disciplined and experienced, they were ready to tackle the rough alkaline seas of Pandora.
The sixth was Guardia Paramilitaries.
Your group.
Indeed. We fought our battles across Latin America, fighting everyone from governments, corporations, rebels, criminals and even Norte Americano armies. I led my men against the Americans when Venezuela liberated herself from corporate shackles. We were a motley bunch, hardly any advanced firepower, but we became so renowned across mercenary circles that we were amongst the first who the RDA approached with the offer to fight in the jungles and forests of Pandora. Eh… I'm getting ahead of myself…
Then there was the American group Zenith Advanced Security. They were led by that futurist warrior David Harrison, who was a strong believer in transhumanism. He spent heavily in developing mechanically augmented soldiers. You know the ones I'm talking about, with mechanical arms and whatnot. He may have hired a strange assortment of ex-soldiers and civilians to be his warriors, but none can deny the effectiveness against the na'vi.
And finally, we had ACE. Aerial Combat Expeditions. They were essentially the air force of the invasion. Every army had transport capability and choppers, true, but it was ACE that had the strike fighters, and even that terrifying flying fortress, The Chandelier. Their pilots were from all over the world and their assistance was rarely unappreciated.
Those were the eight Private Military Companies that the RDA hired. The eight armies that they sent to invade Pandora so they could play at conquistador.
[A dark expression comes across his face.]
And best of all, if any of the forces played too rough with the native, they could simply say that it's the fault of the army in question, and not of the invasion as a whole.
There was lots of opposition from Earth governments to the use of private companies for security operations on Pandora.
Correct.
If there was that opposition, why didn't those governments band together to send in their own troops?
Are you kidding me? Publicly they said that all right. But the truth was is that they wanted us here. Hell, they were GLAD we went instead. Because if we weren't, they'd have to come and do the entire job themselves with their own resources. [Sighs] It would be a thankless, worthless, bloody job and once the body count started to rise, they'd be screwed. Any casualties here on the moon would be trumpeted by media. Once that happens, the public opinion would just shift away from the governments and even the UN. A dead kid from the States garners more public attention than the fifty or so Na'vi he'd be protecting. So even if they did give a big enough shit, their own media prevents them from paying any meaningful cost.
What if the UN takes control?
They don't have the resources to do any mining. They have the manpower and the administration, but they don't have near enough money to build new starships, even with the newer faster models. The only way forward for them would be to take one from the RDA, but they never found the willpower or the cojones to do so.
That's why the RDA Ran the whole show. Pandorum had become the new lifeblood of Earth. We needed it to survive. In the biggest machine in the history of humanity, we the Mercenaries were the necessary evil.