The rotating hologram of a dead Earth was surreal to Quaritch. The projected image did not adequately portray the extent of the desolation. It was a world without atmosphere, oceans and trees—nothing but barren landscapes filled with debris. While Man was away chasing dreams of wealth, the mother they had left behind died overnight.

"When our ships reached Earth," Parker went on to explain, "It was too late. We discovered the planet was in a state of emergency. The RDA was already cobbling together a massive migration operation."

"What happened to it?" he asked distantly, looking upon the grey landscapes of his former home.

"Nuclear warfare. Things were already in a critical state. When the fight broke out for resources, it just accelerated. It lasted less than a year, but it was enough. Millions of lives… The images were just… Jesus Christ, it was a nightmare." Selfridge sighed; this wasn't something he wanted to go over.

"Mutually Assured Destruction…" Quaritch commented grimly after taking another sip of carbon dioxide.

"It was pure hell, what we came back to, but it had one good outcome. The armistice reached meant everyone would work together on the Xenogenesis Fleet—what we're on right now. That right there was where my childhood home used to be." Selfridge pointed to a section of the world that came into view; he was from Minneapolis. Quaritch's eyes wandered south, and he realized they were being drawn towards his hometown.

Hopewell was never a city on the map, just a set of homes you'd drive past on your way to more important places. Before now, that's all it was to him. He looked at the indistinguishable speck in the vast desert that swept across America and realized that all history of his hometown was regulated to a memory. The people he knew, the kids he played with, and the friends he made were all buried in that desert. Only through his recollections could their souls ever rise out of the sand and feel alive again. Only through him would anyone ever learn of Hopewell, USA. His lips rolled, holding back a strange feeling welling inside him; then, all at once, Quaritch pulled away, seemingly unaffected.

Parker resumed, "So if it's any consolation, you're in the same boat as us. No one's going back to Earth—there's nothing left. This fleet has been orbiting Pandora for five years. At least with your body, you can go wherever you want, land-wise. The rest of us are stuck until Bridgehead completes production."

"Bridgehead?"

"The one settlement we were able to build." Selfridge then shouted to a nearby operator to draw up the image of it. Earth was reduced to a footnote in history as the hologram morphed into her successor. The city of Bridgehead was still undergoing construction, but what was presented to the Marine still managed to impress. Built on a coastline, it was a giant city, circuited by nineteen miles of defensive wall. Half the ring incorporated the ocean, granting them a massive, heavily fortified port. The extraterrestrial boom town was a marvel of human ingenuity, with most of its sections devoted to processing Pandora's resources for better use.

"The site has a two-mile thick kill zone, as you can see. It's strewn with weapons that automatically shoot anything that gets within radius. Since coming back, we've found that the animals have gone berserk. The whole planet is on high alert. It sends out anything it can after us. I heard even the plants are attacking people now—crazy down there."

Quaritch recalled that battle against Sully's horde. The humans had the upper hand when, suddenly, all manner of beasts showed up to join the fight. Flocks of banshees came out of nowhere and attacked their gunships. Hammerheads stampeded through their defences and crushed his men. It was a bizarre phenomenon he didn't have time to process, seeing as how he died not long after.

"Anyway, that's why we're confined to the area. Which also makes all military ventures to retake the old unobtanium mines a bit tricky. We're not interested in its monetary value—we need that superconductor to boost our growth—but Sully's not letting anyone near it. We're struggling to fight his insurgents too. He's been training the Na'vi, and they're armed to the teeth with weapons stolen from Hell's Gate."

Quaritch chuckled to himself, then turned to face Parker directly. "Is that when you remembered my brain collecting dust among the apricot and peach preserves and said, 'Hey, why don't we use one of these? A gyrene in a Na'vi body might be just the ticket for fighting off these blue mother****ers.' So you baked us some avatars or—what did you call them, again?"

"Recombinants."

"Recombinants. So you whipped up a fresh batch of recombinants with the hope that we would help you colonize your new world."

Selfridge nodded throughout. "And our only batch."

"What do you mean?"

"We only made the dozen. The science to produce the, uh…" Selfridge snapped his fingers, trying to remember the name but couldn't. "Plant brains—was lost during the assault. We can't make more or reuse the ones we had, or did have."

"Why not?"

"The brains died the moment we uploaded your minds into the recombinant bodies—not sure why. To make matters worse, the man behind the research also decided to die on us." Parker rolled, then continued, "But we have his head assistant, Dr. Gavin. He's on a different ship. The shareholders—I mean, investors—that's what they're called now—are keen on getting him moonside to have the research reinstated. They want their minds preserved for the day they can be transferred into cloned bodies. However, that transfer isn't possible without the…" He snapped his fingers again.

"Plant brain?"

"Gah, yes. What was the word for that stupid thing? It sounded like a woman's-only disease."

"I noticed you didn't bother cloning us human bodies."

"It was either that or remain floating in a tank. The investors would never have agreed until I explained to them the advantages of having you back in blue, such as not triggering that immune system of Pandora."

Quaritch chuffed. "Pandora's a touchy gal. How can you be sure?"

"Your body's a chimaera, just like Sully's, and clearly, no animals have eaten him, unfortunately."

"What about the others?"

"What others?" Selfridge blinked.

"The other recombinants. Have they been debriefed yet?"

"Oh. No, that's your job."

Quaritch knew he had to get a move on. For all he knew, they were huddled in the fetal position somewhere, waiting for someone to explain to them what the hell was going on.

The recombinants floated about the crew chamber as some hung in midair without purpose while others applied themselves in locating their locker. The former SecOp soldiers were in strange bodies, in an environment even stranger. They drifted around the white geometric chamber where the only thing familiar to them was the world of Pandora, visible through the porthole. Although they were anxious, they took comfort in knowing that there were others going through the same nightmare, and that shared emotion made the whole experience a little less frightening.

"This is all some weird dream," one said aloud, with arms stretched out like he were adrift on the open ocean.

A woman hovered past him. "It's not a dream, Fike. You really are blue." She nudged his side, and he listed into a roll.

"Am I dead? I remember dying," the only other woman commented.

"We all do, CJ," answered another. He was busy combing over his locker marked "L. WAINFLEET." An empty rifle cartridge, something he always kept for good luck, drifted out from his locker. He grabbed it delicately and held it between his large fingers to study the engraving written on the side. It was a well-wishing for his trip out to Pandora, gifted by his only living relation. He had forgotten about it until now. As he looked upon the engraving, he felt its importance more than ever—a connection to someone the Marine felt he'd never see again. He gently set it back inside with a wordless goodbye.

"Lyle?" a cocky voice rang out. "So that's what you look like blue. Sorry, Corporal, but looks like the pukes did ya dirty."

The corporal's eyes brightened the moment he saw his old colonel swimming down to meet him. "Sir?" He beamed, then called out to the others. "Guys, it's the colonel!"

Everyone rejoiced. They had been miserable, adrift in their feeling of abandonment, but when their leader arrived, having undergone the same alien treatment, their dread abated. They weren't forgotten, and more importantly, they weren't alone.

Lyle shot up to meet Quaritch with a chortle he couldn't contain. "Is that really you, sir?"

"The blue makeover aged me back a couple decades, but it's me. Too bad you're still a hideous bastard."

"You have no idea how good it is to see you again."

"Alright, Lyle, don't make it gay." Quaritch shrugged, pushing him aside.

"Hard to believe it's you, Colonel. You look so different."

"Which one are you?" he replied, eyeing the largest of the team.

The Marine saluted. "Thomas Hardy Warren, sir."

"Ah, Thomas—I see you now. In that body, it's hard to tell you're even black."

"Don't remind me."

The younger of the two women levitated into view. "Can you tell which one I am?"

"Hell, Prager, did they ever screw you over."

They all laughed as Samson Prager, the 32-year-old male from Pennsylvania, prodded the colonel's shoulders from behind in jest. "She's CJ. I'm Prager."

"Could've fooled me."

The more serious-looking one came forward and spoke in a thick Russian accent. "Sir, none of us understand what is happening."

"Yeah, we've been told nothing," Fike complained.

With the general humour dispersed, it was time to break the news. "There's no gentle way of putting it, kids. You're soldiers. You knew the risks. Fact is, every one of you here is legally dead."

There was a moment of silence as the floating spirits accepted what they had been dreading; the awful nightmare they had woken from wasn't a nightmare at all but their last living memory.

Quaritch moved down to the porthole, landing firmly upon the glass as his boots rested over the vision of Pandora. His lips curled maliciously, and a tongue glided over his fangs as he leered down at the slumbering moon. He readdressed the others. "All of you paid the ultimate price fighting the enemy." He then pointed to the world. "Even as we speak, our carcasses are down there, being used as fertilizer." The colonel took a brief pause. "Only our minds were preserved. And you're probably wondering how this was possible. Turns out, none of us were in our bodies when we died but linking to them instead, just like them avatars."

Over the murmurs, Lyle spoke up. "How could we be linking to our own bodies?"

Here came the hard part. It was Quaritch who had forever sealed their fates to a permanent tour on an alien world, a decision he never would have made had he known the true outcome. To say he felt guilty didn't do it justice. "Before that battle, you were all asked to do a backup of your memories." The soldiers nodded along. "Well, we weren't backing up. We were hard-transferring our minds to a holding bed. Afterwards, we were linked back to our then brain-dead bodies. And before any of you ask—no. I had no idea at the time. If I did, I'd've never gone into battle with that kind of coward's reassurance."

CJ sank to her colonel. "So… That battle… We were all just avatars?"

"Just us dozen."

"But why us?" Lopez rued.

Quaritch took a moment to draw the words to himself. "Because I was asked to select eleven of my best." He stopped there and awaited their reproach; however, instead of the blame he expected, their faces gleamed with pride.

"Wait," Alexander said with a growing smile. "We were your best? Us?"

"You thought we were that good, sir?"

"That's right, Brown—You—All of you," the heartened colonel declared with an affirming nod.

The soldiers looked at one another with a badge of honour across their hearts. The outcome of this decision didn't matter anymore. They were hand-picked by the colonel himself.

"Cranes among chickens," Zhâng laughed.

"We are now with these stilts!" CJ beamed as she pointed out her giant legs.

"Now, the situation below isn't pretty," warned Quaritch, returning to centre. "It's been fifteen years since our DOD. That's right, it's been that long." He watched their faces stiffen as slow gulps rolled down their throats. "The fight now is to help our race's effort colonize Pandora. Make no mistake, the planet's ticked the hell off. What we saw in that battle was just the beginning. You thought the wildlife was rabid before? It just got a hundred times worse. Pandora's now in a constant state of PMS. Any man who so much as sets foot outside the settlement gets a viperwolf to the balls—and he'd be considered a lucky one. That's why they need us recombinants—resurrected soldiers in bodies made from human and Na'vi DNA. You see, we won't set off this pretty miss' immune system, and it's high time we dealt this mad b**** some payback of our own!"

Spirits roused, every soldier pumped and pounded their fists. The time for mourning was over. They were back and ready to fight. Quaritch opted not to tell them the situation regarding Earth. They had only just found out they died; there was no need to tell them their families did too.