"What the hell are you doing?" demanded the decanting room technician of the Avatar driver.
"Stretching," said Nadia, sitting on the decanting room floor. She had wordlessly followed his instructions during the Avatar familiarisation tests, passing every one perfectly. Nadia wanted to know what her new body really could do – not what the techs thought she could do.
Her legs spread wide, Nadia stretched over each leg, lowering her forehead to touch both ankles in turn. The clean pain of her hamstrings lengthening and releasing was a joy, nothing like the raw agony she felt in her human body.
"You're not supposed to be able to do that!" exclaimed the tech, fluttering his hands in the air in distress. "It's not within the standard operating parameters."
Nadia smiled faintly. "I asked the Avatar gestation tank team to modify the transit training program to emphasize flexibility," she replied, signing as she spoke. It was odd being able to hear herself speak. "The modified program was based on the physical training required for classical dancers. I am sure they will be interested in the results." She rose smoothly to her feet, perfectly balanced. A faint shiver of joy rippled down her spine – Nadia had not moved like this since...she would not think about that, not now.
"Your personal effects are..." started the tech, but Nadia was already casting off her hospital gown, causing the male tech to look away in embarrassment. She had coded up her preferences for clothing before she left Earth, and she was interested to see what the stereolithography plant could produce. The crop top and shorts were unadorned black, and perfect – she puzzled a little how to guide her tail through the hole in the shorts, but they were easy enough to put on.
"Fuck!" she swore, looking at the container for her shortswords. She had forgotten to unlock them with her human thumbprint before linking up. Suddenly, she began to laugh. The container was meant to be proof against human efforts to gain access, and she would never need it again. "Kiya!" she shouted, her clenched fist striking the lock, smashing it into a dozen pieces.
Nadia did not notice that the tech had retreated to the furthest corner of the decanting room. The snarling expression he saw on her face as she broke the lock was one of the most terrifying things he had ever seen.
It took a little while to adjust the leather harness so it rested comfortably on her back. Once that was right, Nadia took her blades by the hilts, and smoothly slid them into their scabbards. Now she was ready to go outside.
Nadia walked out of the decanting room, swords riding in the harness resting on her back, driving her Avatar on the surface of Pandora for the first time.
Driving was such an inadequate word.
Outside, there appeared to be Avatars everywhere, playing one-on-one basketball, tackling a confidence course, tending plants, or just standing around talking. It seemed that they were all taller than her by at around a foot.
Nadia sighed. It would have been nice to be tall. She had been short all her life, so at least having a short Avatar was consistent. Then again, she was almost double the height of her human body – although everything about her was scaled to what the grunts here called smurfs.
No-one took any notice of her when she found a piece of empty ground, the short grass caressing her bare feet. Nadia closed her eyes, feeling her place in the world as she breathed in an out. She was acutely aware of every piece of her body – the curling of her fingers, the tilt of her head, and each twitch of her tail. It was time.
The blades hissed out of the scabbards as she began her sword katas, still with her eyes shut.
It was perfect.
"Look at that!" exclaimed Chandrasekhar, his English accent so prominent it could have cut glass. An unfamiliar female Avatar was doing some slow tai-chi kung-fu shit with swords. Not only that, she was good – better than good.
Martinez turned to face where his friend and colleague was pointing. "Holy crap!" he murmured. The woman had to be the hottest ever Avatar he had ever seen. She just oozed sex with every movement, like some viddy star in a swords and sandals fantasy epic. "Who the fuck is it?"
Chandrasekhar answered, "It has to be Khudoshin. There was only one bint in the Avatar intake on the Venture Star."
"If she moves like that out here," growled the xeno-entomologist, his Hispanic blood boiling, "I have to see how she moves between the sheets."
"In your dreams," started Chandrasekhar, but Martinez wasn't listening as he strode towards the woman. It was only then that he realised she was the smallest Avatar he had ever seen. What the hell – it wasn't the smurf he wanted to screw, it was the woman in the link unit driving it. Besides, everyone was the same height lying down.
"Hey babe," he called out. "Wanna have some coffee when you unlink?"
The words directed at her disturbed Nadia's reverie. Fuck. Some guy who thought he was hot stuff was trying to pick her up, only five minutes into her first time out.
Nadia lowered her swords and opened her eyes, facing the man who had called out to her. "Excuse me?" she asked coolly. "Are you talking to me?"
"Sure thing," responded Martinez, thinking that women with Russian accents were so fucking hot – never mind that she was actually Ukrainian.
Nadia smiled sweetly. "Not a chance," she replied.
Chandrasekhar drew alongside his colleague. "Give it over, José. Doctor Khudoshin has your number."
"I'm sure she'd rather play with me than those swords," grinned Martinez. "An M60 will shit all over a set of kitchen knives next time I come across a slinger."
"Play?" Nadia's left eyebrow rose in concert with the incredulous note of her voice. This was not play.
"José, you're being a shite again," warned Chandrasekhar. His research partner could be an absolute pain in the butt sometimes, especially around women. "Remember what happened in the bar at Baikonur."
Nadia sheathed her blades with a simple, economical movement. "So you think a gun is better than a blade."
Martinez snorted, "No contest."
"Throw that fruit at me," said Nadia. She gestured with her chin at a small bush to the left of Martinez.
"Forget it," he snorted in derision. "It's no challenge - you're ready for it."
Shrugging, Nadia retorted, "I'll shut my eyes. Throw when you're ready." An idle thought crossed her mind that this could get very embarrassing.
The xeno-entomologist plucked the rip purple fruit from the bush, and held it speculatively in one hand. It was soft and juicy, and a sudden evil thought crossed his mind. "Only if I get to lick it off you," he said.
"Ok," she replied, and shut her eyes. What did she have to lose? She waited for an indeterminate time, and then exploded into action. Nadia drew her swords, and started to turn. She made one, two three strokes, using the energy of each blow to increase the rate of her spin. The final blow reached up behind her as she dropped to the ground, ending in a dramatic lunge, both of her blades held out in extension from her body.
"Fucking awesome," said a very English voice.
Nadia opened her eyes, a little surprised she wasn't smeared with bananafruit juice, and smoothly resumed her starting position. "Do you want to do that again?" she queried, tempting fate. There was no way she could repeat what she had just done – or was there? The English Avatar was right –she felt fucking awesome.
Martinez was too busy to give an immediate answer. He was staring open-mouthed at the six pieces of fruit lying on the grass behind Nadia. The final cut was a little ragged, as the fruit had started to come apart during the third blow. Somehow, he didn't know how, Khudoshin had managed to hit the damn fruit three times in three strokes, all with her eyes shut. "If I hadn't fucking seen it..." he started to say, and then changed his mind. "I'd still like that cup of coffee."
However, this time his voice was filled with respect.
Kalinkey saw the uniltìranyu brought to Kelutrel, taken prisoner by the young hunters of the clan. His stink was rank in her nose. Small shivers ran down her spine as she remembered the tie that she spent with Toktor Grace Augustine, teaching her the plants of the forest. She had stunk like this male.
She had long known that Zha'nelle had prophesised the coming of the two broken ones. Kalinkey looked curiously at the strange male. He looked less like a tawtute than most dreamwalkers she had seen, although his eyes were still too small, and he had too many fingers and toes. She idly wondered if he was one of the broken ones .
Clutching her son to her side, Kalinkey listened to the words of Eytukan and Mo'at, as they decided the dreamwalker's fate. Was this the right thing, to allow the tawtute back amongst the clan? She knew, better than anyone, what evil they could do.
When she heard that he was to be brought into the clan and taught the way of the Omaticaya, she felt a sense of foreboding. Not for the young man, but for what would follow him. She glanced at Zha'nelle, hoping for reassurance, but all her sister did was nod slightly, as though she was satisfied by the outcome.
When Nadia unlinked from her Avatar for the first time, well after sunset, an unusual scene presented itself in the link room. The entire Avatar support team was clustered around one link unit, almost praying. It was obvious by the stench of tobacco smoke and the sight of the head of the Avatar program pacing up and down, chain-smoking, that something was wrong. Very wrong.
One of the techs noticed her link unit opening. "Are you ok, Nadia?" she asked as she hurried over, her speech exaggeratingly slow and careful, as though Nadia was stupid.
"I'm fine," replied Nadia, her voice flat. She hated being treated as though she was handicapped, but decided there was little point in annoying the woman by standing on her high horse. "What's happening?"
"One of the new Avatars – Jake Sully – has gone missing in the field," replied the woman anxiously. Nadia remembered her name was Alicia.
Getting out of the link unit stretched the scar tissue on Nadia's back, sending waves of agony pounding into her brain. She could not help but flinch slightly. It wasn't that it hurt so much, she thought, she was used to that. It was for the incontrovertible fact that Nadia had a blessed twelve hours without feeling any pain at all.
"I wouldn't worry," snapped Nadia, abrupt from the sudden onset of pain. "Sully is tough. He'll survive."
Alicia drew away, an expression of revulsion appearing on her face. "Doctor Augustine was right about you. You are a cold bitch."
"Well fuck you too," snarled Nadia back. She fumbled on the floor for her shoes, slipping them on without doing up the closures. By the time she stood back up, Alicia had returned to the cluster of people around Sully's link unit.
Nadia limped slowly out of the link room, deaf to the celebrations that erupted when Sully's link unit opened.
There was no record of Sara anywhere on the Hell's Gate network. It was as though she had never come here.
Nadia knew differently.
Her v-mails had been dispatched without any difficulties to Pandora. After all, she had used the RDA's own directory service to send them, and the extortionate deductions charged for interstellar v-mails had definitely been extracted from her credit account.
Perhaps this was why Phred Palmer had been so evasive when she asked him about Sara.
She drummed her fingers on the desktop in her quarters, while she considered the results of the crawler she had used to search for Sara. The only thing she had found were in the v-mail archive – the v-mails that she had sent, together with the acknowledgement that they had been read by the addressee.
There was a subtle change in air pressure, indicating that the door behind her had opened. Nadia swivelled on her chair, to face a Sec-Ops grunt leaning against the door-frame.
"I thought you were supposed to be deaf," he commented. He looked like he had been left out in the sun for too many decades, his face deeply tanned and wrinkled, and what little hair he had was a solid grey. There were even grooves worn in his face where his exo-pack mask had ground its way into his skin.
"I am," she replied. "And you would be?"
"Lewis," he said calmly. "You haven't aged since I watched you a whole bunch of years ago in a v-mail with Sara the Smurf."
The news that Sara was still alive and living with the Omaticaya was more than welcome – even if she had to keep it to herself. It made the sitting on her ass doing nothing almost bearable.
What was unbearable was that Nadia could not go to the Omaticaya. That upright prig Augustine had told her relations with the clan that had adopted Sara were extremely hostile, and she would not be permitted to endanger her Avatar.
The Avatar support staff had frozen her out, so no-one talked to her – except for Martinez, who had tried to for a week to manoeuvre her into his cot.
When she eventually dragged off her wig to show Martinez what she really looked like, he behaved like almost every other male she had encountered since she had lost everything. He retreated in confusion and dismay and disgust. The only other reaction she had received over the years were from medical staff, who viewed her injuries with clinical detachment, or sometimes pity. That was worse than revulsion.
Sergeant Lewis, on the other hand, seemed to be an exception to the rule. It was a shame he was as gay as a troupe of airline stewards – otherwise she might have considered taking him to bed, and to hell with the pain. The fact that she was friendly to a uniformed grunt only seemed to exacerbate her chilly relations with the science team.
That was why she ate her meals alone.
So when Doctor Augustine dispatched her off to site thirty-one to be a research assistant to Martinez and his swarthy English mate Chandrasekhar, it was a relief to get out of this stinking hole.
No-one had told her that Sully had been taken in by the Omaticaya.
"Zhake'soolly," said an unfamiliar female voice from behind him. "I See you."
Jake started about. Almost no-one at Hometree had spoken English to him in the last two weeks other than dragon-lady Mo'at, that arrogant bastard Tsu'tey, and Ney'tiri.
"Oel ngati kameie," he replied. At least he knew that much Na'vi.
The woman wrinkled her nose. "Your Na'vi is terrible," she commented. "You should practice many times more."
He laughed. "I am trying very hard to learn the speech of the People," he said. "Although all I do is make Ney'tiri angry."
"You should try harder," said the woman. She paused for several seconds, as though she was nervous or afraid of him, when she said, "There is a question I would ask you."
"Shoot," he said.
An expression of confusion crossed the woman's face. "I do not have my bow with me, so I cannot shoot," she said regretfully.
Jake tried not to laugh at her expression, so he said seriously, "I meant, you may ask me your question."
"Oh," she said. "I had forgotten that 'Inglìsì has many colloquialisms. It is many years since I have spoken this tongue. I ask your apology, only."
"Of course," he replied, and waited.
The woman bit her lip, before she asked, "Is there a dreamwalker woman newly come to this world? She would be small, no higher than this." The Na'vi female made a gesture with her hand, about five feet above the ground. "Her tawtute body would have many scars, and she cannot hear."
"How..." he started to ask.
"Her name is Na'diakhudoshin," said the woman. "It is not important how I know this."
Jake nodded numbly.
"You must tell her and only her this message. It must not be overheard, or written down, or sent through a glass tablet. You must give it to her in person. Do you swear this on your word of honour?" she demanded.
"I swear," avowed Jake.
"Good," said the strange woman. "Tell her the girl from the dome is waiting.' She gripped his arm, digging her fingernails into his flesh, and glared into his eyes. "Promise me this."
Jake nodded again, "I promise."
"Good," she said, and abruptly released his arm and left to walk inside Hometree. A young boy ran to the woman, who swept him up in her arms and kissed him, before setting him down again.
Ney'tiri appeared almost unnoticed by his side. She said, "It is time to resume your lessons, Zhake."
"Srane," he agreed, before pointing to the strange woman with the boy and asking, "Who is that?"
"That is Kalinkey, the clan healer," replied Ney'tiri. "Why do you ask?"
He shrugged nonchalantly. "She spoke to me in English, but did not mention her name," he replied. "Did she go to Doctor Augustine's school with you?"
Ney'tiri hesitated for a moment, before she answered, "How else would she have learnt 'Inglìsì?"
Jake Sully did not notice that Ney'tiri answered his question with another question.