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Chapter 2: Pandora
Pandora.
You grew up hearing about it.
But I never figured I'd be going there.
- — - — - — - — -
Kate focused on her breathing against the G-forces as the Valkyrie shuttle pulled up from its initial dive into Pandora's dense atmosphere and into level flight. She and about fifty other people, mostly former military grunts from the look of them, were packed into the folding jump-seats lining the walls of the Valkyrie's cargo hold, the two sides of the hold separated in the middle by enormous pallets carrying all manner of supplies.
As soon as the shuttle leveled off, a slightly older man in military-style fatigues with what looked like a Marine Sergeant's insignia on them unstrapped himself from the safety harness and stood up. "Exopacks on! Let's go! Exopacks on!" A few other voices around the hold repeated the command, and everyone began strapping on the clear-visored full-face masks that would provide human-breathable air while outdoors in Pandora's toxic atmosphere.
Kate slipped her own exopack over her head, tightening the straps and pressing the purge switches at the mask's chin for a few seconds as she'd been instructed. A blast of slightly cool, dry air washed over her face as the mask's accompanying belt pack expelled any remnants of the previous air from the mask.
"Remember, people," the Sergeant continued without a pause as he walked the length of the hold making sure everyone was complying, "you lose that mask, you're unconscious in twenty seconds, you're dead in four minutes. Let's nobody be dead today. Looks very bad on my report."
Kate quirked an eyebrow at that. She'd known Pandora's atmosphere was toxic to humans—much higher levels of carbon dioxide than Earth's atmosphere and significant hydrogen sulfide content would do that—but either the RDA folks who'd briefed them back on Earth had undersold the severity of it, or this guy was exaggerating it. Possibly a bit of both.
- — -
A few minutes later, there was a slight thump as the Valkyrie touched down at Hell's Gate, the RDA's base of operations on this part of Pandora. Kate briefly wondered who had picked the name, and how accurate it was.
"Harnesses off! Get your packs! Put it together, let's go!" the Sergeant started up again the instant the shuttle stopped moving. Everyone else in the hold unbuckled, stood up, and started grabbing duffel bags and rucksacks before lining up in the narrow space between the seats and the cargo pallets.
Kate undid her own restraints and kept an eye on her own pack to make sure nothing happened to it in the shuffle, but stayed put.
"When that ramp comes down, go directly into the base, do not stop!" the Sergeant continued. "Go straight inside! Wait for my mark!"
Less than a minute later, the massive cargo ramp at the shuttle's rear opened, Pandora's denser atmosphere making visible ripples in the air as it invaded the previously sealed cargo hold. As the ramp touched the tarmac, the Sergeant gave the Go order and the other people on board started jogging down the ramp and toward the buildings a few hundred meters away.
Kate waited until everyone forward of her had passed, then unfolded her wheelchair into the aisle and heaved herself into it. She unclipped her pack from where it had been strapped to the floor, slung it over her back, and started wheeling herself after the others.
"Let's go, special case!" the Sergeant called from the top of the ramp. "Do not make me wait for you!"
She almost said something snide in reply, but stopped herself.
Technically nobody here was military. Back on Earth, these guys were Army dogs, Marines, fighting for freedom. Out here, they were just hired guns. Taking the money, working for the company.
But all of the RDA's Security Operations staff were officially expected to comport themselves as if they were active military personnel. That included her, and mouthing off to a Sergeant would almost certainly be a bad start to her new career.
She rolled down the ramp and looked around, drinking in the sights.
Aside from distant plumes of smoke and dust from the mining operations, the air was unbelievably clear. Almost no place on Earth had had air this clear since well before she'd been born.
The portion of Hell's Gate she could see was bustling with activity. Armed and armored ground vehicles were moving every which way, numerous rotorcraft were parked a few hundred meters to her left, and several of the RDA's proprietary twelve-foot-tall humanoid Amplified Mobility Platforms were walking around, most of them carrying firearms that would normally qualify as cannons but were being held by the AMP suits as if they were common infantry rifles.
She turned and rolled out of the path of one AMP suit, which walked past her before stopping and turning for the pilot to shout "Look out, Hot Rod!" at her through the suit's loudspeaker before turning back to continue on its way.
A loud rumbling sound that had been growing in intensity to the point she could feel it through her wheelchair made its source known as an enormous dump truck, two or three times the size of any found on Earth, came around the wing of the shuttle. Kate stopped short, both in awe of the behemoth and to avoid getting turned into a smear on the tarmac as it drove past.
Protruding from its tires were the shafts of several arrows. Because the truck itself was so large, it took her a few seconds to register that the arrows were the size of Olympic javelins, nearly an inch thick and five or six feet long.
- — -
Kate rolled into the base's mess hall just as the safety briefing was getting started. A middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a trio of scars across his right temple was pacing slowly between the tables as he spoke.
"You are not in Kansas any more," he said as she rolled to a stop and shucked her pack, setting it on a table. "You are on Pandora, ladies and gentlemen. Respect that fact, every second of every day. If there is a Hell, you may want to go there for some R-and-R after a tour on Pandora.
"Out there beyond that fence," he continued, pointing out the mess hall's window and to the perimeter fence in question, "every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubes."
The man's pacing had brought him back toward where Kate was sitting, close enough for her to make out a Colonel's insignia on his uniform. She figured this must be Colonel Miles Quaritch, whom she'd been told was in charge of RDA SecOps at Hell's Gate.
"We have an indigenous population of humanoids called the Na'vi. They're fond of arrows dipped in a neurotoxin that'll stop your heart in one minute. And they have bones reinforced with naturally-occurring carbon fiber. They are very hard to kill.
"As head of security, it is my job to keep you alive. I will not succeed. Not with all of you. If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong mental attitude. You've got to obey the rules. Pandora rules. Rule number one..."
Kate leaned on her pack and listened with a faint smile on her face as the Colonel went on. It had been a long time since she'd had an old-school safety brief like this, and there wasn't much like it to put her mind at ease.
- — -
The safety briefing concluded, and with a sense of caution about her new world slightly heightened but nearly matched by a similarly piqued sense of curiosity, Kate had left the mess hall and gone to find the Science Operations team, to which she'd been assigned. She was rolling down one of the bustling corridors in the maze that was the main Hell's Gate building, hoping she was going the right way, when she heard someone calling her name—her deadname, dammit—from behind her.
She slowed down to let the person catch up, and was joined by a lanky man with brown hair and maybe a week's worth of scraggly beard growth on his chin.
"Ken! You're Kenneth, right? Toni's bro—uh..." he stopped short as he came alongside and got a better look at her.
She stifled a sigh. Of course nobody told them. Fucking figures.
"It's Kate," she said. "And yes, Toni's sister."
"Kate, got it," he said as he composed himself. "Sorry. Toni told me about herself, but not..." he cut himself off and extended his hand. "I'm Norm. Spellman. I went through avatar training with her."
Kate took his hand and shook it. "She didn't tell many people, and even less about me. Anyone else here know?"
"A handful of the science team," he said, releasing her hand. "People she took a liking to, either in person back on Earth or by correspondence here on Pandora. You heading to the bio-lab?"
"Assuming I can find it in this rat's nest."
"Follow me," he said, and turned to lead her deeper into the building.
- — -
Kate was pretty sure they'd gone basically clear across the compound by the time Norm led her to a room with sliding glass doors full of...well, she wasn't sure what most of the equipment was, but it all looked very science-y.
"Here we are, the bio-lab," he said, smiling. "We're gonna spend a lot of time up here."
Kate looked around as Norm introduced himself to a few of the lab techs at work around the room. There were a few pieces of equipment she recognized, but even those were far larger and more complex than the kind she remembered from high school.
"Uh, link—here's the link room right here," Norm continued, leading her around to the far side of the bio-lab and pointing to a curved wall with several panoramic windows overlooking a larger, circular room. "This is where we're connecting to the avatar."
Kate's attention was drawn away from what he was saying by a blue glow emanating from her left. A group of people led by a man of Indian descent in a lab coat were removing the transport shielding from a pair of large, transparent, fluid-filled tanks. She could see humanoid shapes in the tanks, but they were much bigger than any human.
The man in the lab coat turned, spotted Kate and Norm, and offered his hand first to Kate and then to Norm. "Hey, welcome. Max Patel, avatar link technician. Welcome to Pandora."
"Kate Simmons," she said, shaking his hand. She glanced at Norm and quirked an eyebrow. Norm gave a slight nod, and she added, "Toni's sister."
It was Max's turn to raise an eyebrow, but he took it in stride. "Glad to have you with us."
Kate moved to get a closer look at the tank behind him. "Damn," she said, marveling at the form inside it, "they got big."
She'd been told that the avatars were grown from human DNA—that of the specific individual that would link with them, so that the avatar's brain would be as close a match as possible with its driver's—mixed with the DNA of the natives. Hearing that, and seeing the tiny embryos in the tanks before leaving Earth, was one thing; but seeing the final product was something else.
The avatar in the tank was almost ten feet tall. It had blue skin, with darker blue stripes like a zebra or tiger; black hair that had at some point been styled into a single long braid that reached its hips, and a tail that ended in a leonine tuft of fur. Its face, aside from the slightly wider, flatter nose and long, narrow ears that occasionally flicked like those of a cat, was a near-perfect duplicate of Norm's.
"Yeah," Norm replied, "they fully mature on the flight out." He glanced at Max. "So the proprioceptive sims seem to work really well."
"Yeah, they've got great muscle tone," Max said, checking the readouts on a status display connected to the tank and transferring data from there to a handheld tablet. "It'll take us a few hours to get 'em decanted, but you guys can take them out tomorrow."
Max turned and gestured to the other tank as its shielding was removed as well. "There's your..." he trailed off. "What the hell?"
Kate and Norm both glanced at him, seeing his confused expression, then followed him over to get a better look.
The face of the avatar in the second tank was, strangely, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. In some ways, besides the color and an even more flat, pantherine nose, it was nearly the same face Kate saw in the mirror, and the same face she'd seen in the box at the crematorium. But it was smoother, more feminine. And the rest of the nine-foot-tall body was, as far as any of them could tell by looking at it, distinctly female.
Max went around to the status display and started poking at both it and his tablet. Kate followed, looking back and forth between Max and the avatar. "What? What's wrong?"
Max paused to look at her. "I know Toni was transgender," he said, a bit quieter than he'd been speaking previously. "I gather you are too. But the avatar link is extremely sensitive to differences between the driver and their avatar. That's why each avatar is made using the specific DNA of the driver combined with the closest physical match of Na'vi whose DNA we have available. Beyond the changes required to achieve Na'vi-equivalent physiology, it needs to be exactly like you, or the link won't work, and it could even cause permanent neural damage." He looked at the avatar again, then went back to poking at the tablet. "This avatar was created from Toni's DNA, which should have produced a...well, a masculine avatar."
Kate frowned. "So I can't drive it? Or if I try, it could, what? Kill me?"
Max gave a half-shrug and a nod. "Yeah, probably."
"What happened?" Kate asked.
"That's what I'm trying to fig—" Max stopped. "...The hell is this?"
"What? What is it?"
"There's a...an audio file embedded in the tank's monitoring system. Let me..." Max pressed a few more buttons on the tablet, then turned and walked over to a computer terminal near the windows to the link room. With a swiping motion, he transferred the file to the terminal and played it.
A familiar voice came from the speaker. "Max? Grace? It's Toni. I'm hoping it's one of you two who gets this. I trust most of the avatar team, but you two are almost family."
Kate rolled over to the terminal as she listened, and Max turned the volume down. The voice was somewhat softer than the last time Kate had heard it, almost like Toni was afraid of being overheard.
"You know I've been working with the Avatar Project development team here on Earth. They've been working on trying to better stabilize the link and allow for less-specific genome matches between driver and avatar. They've had a little success, but not much.
"But, I saw an opportunity with the little bit of success they've had. It can't even remotely handle a full separate genome on the driver side, or even a typical sibling genome; but it can handle very small changes. And it should be able to handle almost any Na'vi sample we have.
"I almost backed out of transferring to the Pandora division of the Avatar Program because I didn't want to fly all the way out to Centauri just to be stuck with a male avatar. I don't say it much, but that would be torture for me. But with this updated genome mapping and new link protocols, that wouldn't have to be the case.
"I made a tiny tweak to my sample before my avatar was created. It should prevent the SRY gene from ever being activated. Combined with a carefully-selected female Na'vi sample and minor changes to the accelerated-growth hormone mixture, my avatar should mature as if it's a natal female, and the updated link will allow me to drive it regardless. The updated link protocols are also stored in the pod status system.
"Grace...Max...please. Let my dream come true."
- — -
Kate and Max looked at each other in silence, then at Norm, who had joined them as the file was playing. Kate looked back to Max. "Well? Could it work?"
Max looked at her again briefly before turning his attention back to the tablet. He entered a few commands on it, then wordlessly strode back to the tank and started fiddling with the monitor again.
A moment later, he glanced back at her. "It's here," he said, seemingly still processing this turn of events. "I've got the new protocols."
He spent a few seconds scrolling through things on the tablet. Kate would have been on the edge of her seat if she could. Norm put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
"At first glance, it seems legit, but I'll need to check over them myself just to be sure." He gave a small sigh. "It's gonna be a long night...but I think I can have this ready by tomorrow afternoon."
Norm gave Kate's shoulder a squeeze, then beckoned her back over to the tank.
Kate rolled up to the tank again, taking another close look at the avatar's face. The family resemblance seemed stronger now, despite the more feminine shape.
"Looks like her," Kate said.
"No, looks like you," Norm responded. "This is your avatar now, Kate."