Disclaimer
I am not the owner of the persons of this story met with in the movie and I never will be, I am not making any money whatsoever from this little story and I will never expect to do it either. If anyone feel like building further stories on persons, localities and events here created then they can feel free to do it – provided only that they try to stay in the given pre-histories, given personalities etc., and keep from turning their stories into adult stories. R&R are welcome.
The RDA Executive Board Studies Concerning Pandora
When Parker Selfridge finally arrived at Earth, he was welcomed home by a very different RDA than had sent him out. The news from Pandora had sent the share prices south and the shareholders had been bought out by a consortium of European interests, before he and the crew arrived. He, and the men who came to Earth along with him, were interviewed thoroughly to provide the new Executive Board with food for thoughts for further action, on top of the report that had arrived from the Augustine Research Station, submitted by the mutineers. Rumours soon ran about events at Pandora, but with some PR work it was whittled down to a tribal rebellion conspiring with disgruntled employees, inquisitive journalists were tracked down and their silence was bought. Selfridge was then speedily sent to a mining station in the Asteroid Belt to be director there. It was a good job bur not quite up to the authority he had been used to.
A new colonizing expedition planned long time ago any way was sent out, with much hardware but only a medium size crew. They struck up mining colonies at the three other moons with deposits worth speaking about, and used them as bases. The wormhole was constructed up there, for communication purpose, by the crew at Svarog, where the extra-solar headquarter was now located.
The new crew at the top of RDA company was a motley bunch from Europe. It was "new money" and "old money", hard-earned money and shady cash, brains and brawns. The top brass was all from Europe, but in the middle and lower ranks no questions were asked as to religion, political sympathies or country of origin, only of willingness to total loyalty and demonstrated ability. The new Board had a longer time horizon and greater patience, but they were by no means more benevolent per se than "old RDA", only more circumspect. They might just therefore be all the more dangerous opponents.
The company leadership had moved to the Swiss mid-size city of Zug. Basically the whole city had been bought. There were of course still independent small businesses in the city, like bakers, laundries and groceries, and public utilities like schools, social services and fire brigade, but heavy donations to state coffers had bought allowance to take over most of the city – industries were bought out with fat offers. So the company was free to cordon the city off from the rest of the world, with a security perimeter around the entire city urban limit and security inspectors roaming the city with full local police rights. Inside it city buses went from Intelligence department via Hiring department to Research department. The building of the Board of Executives was easily the largest in the whole city, with offices, lecture halls, library etc. To enter that building there was yet another strict security check to pass.
A glance into the supreme meeting room of the Board would that day show the RDA Board of Executives taking a close look at the various fields of Pandora geography, presented at the map shown at a small movie screen in the room. The size of the Pandora moon was some 80 % of the Earth. This moon had more water bound in the air, less in oceans and virtually no permanent ice sheets at all. The land mass was divided in smaller pieces, less in big land masses and more in archipelagos large and small. The oceans were not so wide, not that there were no big, open ocean basins but there were plenty of islands forming bridges. Even with a canoe it should be no unthinkable act to get around the globe.
The climate was mostly warm and balmy, even at the Polar covering continent it was only temperate. There were no mountains nearly as tall as those on Earth, even the tallest one hardly touched the 1000 meter mark, and there were few of them. The northern and southern ends of the largest continent was steppe land, the extreme northern headland had a Mediterranean climate of hot summers and mild winters. Some islands were barren but there were only few, isolated areas at land of what would be called "desert" on Earth, at Namana Land those desert areas were located in parts of the plains land north of the forests. With none of the continents very large there were few large rivers either.
The map was scribbled with names taken from the reports of dr. Augustine. The largest continent was the Namana Land, straddling the Pandora Equator, somewhat the size of Australia. It was shaped somewhat like a pear, with a peninsula pointing north like the stem of the pear. The Omatikaya territory lay just south of Equator, two thirds of the length down the length of the continent, with the Hell's Gate some thirty miles southwest of their current hometree, as recent space photographs showed. The only significant mountain range lay northeast of the Omatikaya territory and the largest river of the continent ran down to the eastern coast from it.
Out west there were a stretch of ocean but there was one archipelago rather close by. To the south there was a big, open ocean basin stretching out to some few islands and then the open sea around the Pandora South Pole. To the east was a big archipelago of very small islands and south of that a quite big island named the Marakxali Island. Up north was a fairly wide ocean channel between the Namana and the North Land continents where the Pandora North Pole was located in a corner. East of Marakxali Island there was the smallish Gargoyle Fish Land continent, then a big ocean basin with some archipelagos dusted over, and then the large Nongona Land continent, not quite as large as the Namana Land though. East of Nongona Land began a multitude of small archipelagos, the easternmost was the one just out at sea facing Namana Land to the west.
The fattest deposits of Unobtanium were, according to magnetic measurements of the ISVs that had been calling, located at Namana Land, North Land, Gargoyle Fish Land, at Marakxali Island and at some of the atolls north of it. Smaller deposits were almost everywhere.
The number of clans recorded by the space photographs looked like some twelve hundred all told, give or take a few: Animal herds might have been taken for clans by the eyes in space or there might be a number of small and only partly independent clans. Given an average of 2500 members of each significant clan, that should make up some three million na'vi in grand total. That low population density was of course due to the smaller land mass of the continents, the (from an Earth perspective primitive) food collecting and storaging technologies and the larger body mass of the na'vi, requiring more nutrition. Of all those clans there were about 200 at Namana Land, seventy at Gargoyle Fish Land, some 150 at Nongona Land and at North Land ten big and a number of small clans.
"This, fellow members of the Board, are the main features of the physical and demographic geography of Pandora. Our agents are right now putting their finishing touch on their study of the political landscape, their report should be due in a couple of months." Thus Marina Krasnitskaya concluded her presentation, she was the head of RDA department of PR – in practice leader of agitation, commercials and diplomacy. She was known as a hands-on leader carefully noting down all the small details of her projects in big databases and studying them carefully before ordering actions. She was a strict leader demanding professional perfection and mostly having it too. Her hometown was Noginsk, a suburb of Moscow, she had been appointed to her job by her mentor, a Russian "new rich". She was known to be virtually "married with her job" and she looked the part: She cultivated a boring, anonymous look and she wore big, thick glasses.
Soon miss Krasnitskaya could present the Board a diplomatic map of Pandora too. The main resistance against RDA business at Pandora was likely to be at Namana Land because that was were Jake Sully and his Omatikaya clan was located, so the affairs at Namana Land had been studied with most care. Agents researching the land found out that he was now the head of the clan, and with assistance from those humans who had remained at Pandora after the incident 12 years ago.
Most of the about two hundred clans at Namana Land could be roughly grouped in four different categories: Forest dwellers, edge-of-the-forest dwellers, plains nomads and coastal dwellers.
The Omatikayas was the best known of the fortyone jungle clans at Namana Land but then there were the Ali'tutean clan west of them and the Ekanagis east of them. North of the Omatikayas was the best known of the fiftytwo edge-of-the-forest dwelling clans, the Tipanis. To their far southwest was the Rongloa clan, to their distant southeast the Eymastua. North of the main forest, in a sort of "forest island at the sea of the plains" the Tskaha clan lived. A stripe of prairieland stretched out beyond the edge of the forest on both sides of the Equator line. The northern plains were inhabited by the Pa'li and the Nantang clan the southern plains, plus some forty more. There were fortysix coastal clans at Namana Land, the best known among them were Ikran to the south, partly living at some offshore islets. Then there were the U'o'ne at the southwestern seaboard and the Iranali'k at the eastern, the small Sunara clan lived at a number of small islands just offshore, overlapping at the Namana mainland. Finally there was the very large Amananga clan at the northern peninsula, at the "stem of the pear".
Furthermore there were twenty-something clans that didn't quite fit into this division. Among these were the Kilvan clan (River clan) to the northeast and two more clans up the river, living like coastal clans inland – at the largest river of the continent. The Onati clan lived at a lake of the river, like a small coastline, three other clans lived likewise at other large lakes at the continent. Further up the river entered a highland, this was the territory of the Mountain and Highlander clans and three others. Four clans lived in riverine and mangrove swamps and three steppe clans lived in oases in an environment so arid that the word "desert" could apply.
To these mainlander clans should be added the Western Islands clan, living at a big and some small islands a short distance out at sea.
At the rebellion the RDA troopers had been faced with 15 clans, fourteen mainlander clans plus the Western Islander clan. The Amananga clan was by the time of speaking the only large fully independent clan left at Namana Land, along with some less significant ones who either mostly toed the line of the Amanangas or were isolated leftovers – like Andorra and Liechtenstein at Earth. The others had joined with Jake Sully's confederation, more or less voluntarily.
Apart from the Namana Land there was the North Land, where the Pandora North Pole was located. The Ice Hunter clan lived there, a forest clan with some smaller, dependent clans living at the coastline. At Marakxali Island lived the coastal clan by the same name. At the atoll archipelago lived the Atoll Islander clan. At Gargoyle Fish Land lived seventy clans, most significant of them was the clan by the same name. And there were a good many other clans too, at Nongona Land for instance, but they had never been in heavy contact with humans and were not sitting atop big deposits of unobtanium, so those clans could wait with studying until later.
Miss Krasnitskaya concluded her presentation with a study on central reasons for the RDA failure last time.
Her analysis explained that the reason deepest down was that the RDA company never had found the right buttons to open up any real welcome among the Na'vi clans, and they had not cared too hard about finding any either. Exploitation against resistance could go all right if the settlement was extended into a complete Earth II colony, but the RDA company didn't want to run that cost, it would take terraforming the moon, complete eradication of the na'vi population and building a complete society with all functions.
During the best of time, while dr. Augustine had held her school, they had been tolerated, later the Omatikayas had turned to a passive resistance that turned active when they were severely provoked and also got a leader of seemingly no mean military ability in the renegade marine Jacob A. Sully. Since he now was the chieftain of not only that clan but had a number of other clans in support of him too, and he was most probably a implacable enemy of the RDA company by now, those clans would be unapproachable while he was at their helms. So the New RDA would have to approach clans not (yet) in Jake Sully's confederation, and if possible make some else defect. Only then could they be approached with merchandise.
It would be to the advantage of RDA if excavation of unobtanium could be done by the na'vi themselves. They would avoid the most abhorrent techniques and the most sensitive localities because they had local knowledge, not to mention that this would be the cheapest to the company. But the big problem would then be to motivate the na'vi to dig for the mineral. There would simply have to be some merchandise they would be interested in! The single problem: Which one?
The answer would probably be to utilize the differences between the clans. The thing was that not all na'vi clans were equally endowed with natural resources, and at some localities there was likely bitter competition for them. Those clans in the hardest rivalry could be offered two things: Firearms and the martial support of RDA marines to their political wishes. That should win the RDA company some na'vi friends.
All this presentation was witnessed by all the Board, one of whom was Molly Perrington, the South African permanent secretary of the Board. She was what once had once been called a mulatto by appearance, at home she was a contended housewife with three kids and happily married with an engineer in the company, at job she was highly valued for her computer-like ability to mentally record events and her uncanny ability to grasp a growing but unspoken opinion before the members of the Board were even aware of it. With her inside knowledge and her almost clairvoyant ability she would have been a serious danger to the company – but her loyalty was evident and beyond doubt.