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?


I woke to a pounding headache and the sight of the sky through armored glass. While I tried to orientate myself, I found that I was still strapped into the suit, but it was on its back and slowly rocked from side to side.

The rocking stopped as soon as I made the first movements and the titanothere's head appeared above me, tilted slightly as two golden-red eyes glared down at me. I froze in fear, I had watched these giants smash armored cockpits with ease just a few weeks ago, after all. When he didn't move, I tried to slowly crawl out from underneath him.

The moment I moved my arm, he turned away, walked a few meters and lay down, watching me. Having frozen again as he moved, I tried to stand up, but the suit wouldn't move its legs. Looking at the status-screen in front of me, I quickly noticed the problem. The hip-joint of the right leg read as damaged and the software had locked both legs and the hips to prevent further damage.

It was then that I remembered how this had started. As soon as I had tugged at the injured hammer, the attached animal had, with a loud bellow, woken from its unconsciousness and swung its head. The uninjured part had caught my suit directly under the cockpit and thrown me head over heels for the opposite side of the clearing. While tumbling, I must have hit my head somewhere inside the cockpit.

Now, while I had more than enough spare parts for the suit and the skills to use them, I would have to get out of the suit, look at the damage, walk back to the camp, find the parts and make it back to the suit. All while under the watchful gaze of a giant herbivore which could stomp me into the ground at any time.

Reasoning that it could have killed me easily during my own brief stint in morpheus' arms and would, hopefully, not just wait until I crawled out of my crunchy shell, I put on my exopack and opened the canopy.

When the hammerhead didn't move, I slowly climbed out, complimenting myself on the foresight to put some tools into the cockpit, and went around the suit. The joint was completely smashed up. The upper end of the thigh had taken the brunt of the blow, but the thigh itself had only a small dent. Instead of breaking it had, while being moved backwards by force, ripped out the connectors and fiber-optics for the sensors and actuators down the leg, even bending the titanium-alloy of the load-bearing axis that connected the leg to the rest of the suit.

The first thing to do was removing all the damaged parts, which was actually easier due to the supine position of the suit. This way, I didn't have to find a way to hold up the bulk of the suit while removing one of its legs. Opening up the armor on the bottom of the cockpit, I was relieved to find that the fiber-optics had just been ripped out of their sockets, not torn off, as one can't just splice them back together like regular copper cables.

That left the mechanical connectors and the axis. I went to the camp to get the replacements, rooting around inside the crates some time until I found the right ones. Standard RDA thinking, if you field expensive vehicles, build them sturdy and send enough spare parts to build at least two new ones.

That a field crew wouldn't have the time nor the mind to catalogue where each part was, never crossed their minds. As long as you could give each part back to the Quartermaster or at least point out where on your vehicle you replaced anything broken, they were happy. And if something broke, you faced a stack of paperwork. Where did it break, under which circumstances, describe the part, which serial number did it have and, the most absurd form ever, please sign here for your guarantee that no toddlers were involved in the breaking.

Needless to say, I was happy to have an abundance of parts and, due to a distinctive lack of superior officers, no paperwork following my using of them. For the first time I was really happy about being stranded.

I became less happy upon stepping outside to the sight of one hammerhead standing over my partially disassembled AMP-suit, apparently doing an up-close examination of the field of tools and scrapped parts spread around the hip joint.

Since yelling and running would probably result in my quick transition into a pink, mushy paste, I merely jogged back to the suit. Still not easy with the parts in my arms, because while sturdy, they're really heavy too.

As I approached, the hammerhead looked up and ambled around the field, so that the scraps stayed between him and me. Warily, I placed my parts on the ground and began rebuilding the joint, every minute or so casting a glance over my shoulder to see if the hammerhead had moved. He just stood there and watched me work, though.

When I was finished with replacing the axis, I heard a quiet snort from behind me. Whirling around, I saw that the hammerhead had not moved. But while I was watching, he looked at the ground and extended one its antennae to nudge a warped steel strut towards me. When I just looked between him and the strut, he nudged the strut again.

I turned around, dug an undamaged copy out of my pile of spares and put that down next to the warped one, waiting for a reaction. He seemed satisfied to just look at the pair, so I turned back to my work. The next time I looked, he had shifted them around, apparently to look at them from another angle.

While I worked, we repeated this process a few times. A snort to gain my attention, nudging a piece of scrap until I produced a sound copy of the part and an investigation of the differences between the two.

Shortly after I took the strut I had shown him back to install it in the joint, a shadow fell over me. I froze as I didn't have a doubt to just who created the shadow. I was proven right as an antenna curled over my shoulder and tapped the wrench I was using to fasten the bolts around the base of the strut.

Now I was baffled. The database hadn't mentioned anything about this level of curiosity. But I dutifully showed him the wrench and then grabbed the strut and give it a good tug. As the bolts weren't that tight yet, it moved visibly in my hand. I resumed my work and tugged again after I had finished. The strut didn't move at all.

After this demonstration, the hammerhead didn't interrupt me anymore, but he stayed close and watched me work.

When I had finished, it was mid-afternoon and I still had to find a few about twenty feet long poles and some rope to splint the head of my 'little' friend. The poles were relatively easy, young trees are in abundance in a jungle, the rope was a bit problematic. After I remembered that the Na'vi use razor palm fronds for their velcro-like underside, I tried to recall where exactly on my foraging expeditions I had seen a grove of razor palms...

When I got there, it turned out to be a struggle to find fronds long enough to fit around the hammer. But even that was solved once I had navigated deep enough into the grove to locate several older plants. The arms and hands of the suit were full of scratches afterwards, nothing deep, just enough so the dulled metal began to gleam, but it served me as a reminder of just how sharp razor palm fronds are.


Getting the hammerhead to allow me to strap wood to his head wasn't easy, especially since he seemed to derive some kind of pleasure from bumping his head into me with just the right amount of force to topple the suit!

Standing up for the fifth time in thirty minutes, I thumped the injured part of his hammer with a fist. The wince and gasp the hammerhead emitted was enough for me to know that the injury still hurt, even if he acted like it didn't. Demonstrating how the young trees I had been trying to tie around his head didn't bend when I hit them, I was rewarded with a tilted head. Taking that as encouragement, I stepped forward and, as he held still this time, began to wrap the palm fronds around his hammer. After I had loosely tied two fronds on the right and two on the left side, I took the poles and, one by one, slid them in between the hammer and the fronds.

When I was finished, my patient shook his head as if unsatisfied with the added weight, but he didn't wince anymore when I hit the injured half of his hammer. The revenge followed on the spot though, as I landed on my back once again.


That evening, while I shared a large part of my stored fruit with my patient, I saw the first woodsprite. It came out of the jungle, danced across the length of my patients hammer, settled shortly on the canopy of my suit and finally vanished into the trees again.