Recombinant Bridgehead

Prologue

Dedicated to
Stephen Lang

Hope for Quaritch

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Jake Sully was a paraplegic Marine who arrived on Pandora to serve in the Avatar Program: an ambassadorial effort by the RDA (Resources Development Administration) to help improve relations with the local indigenous, known as the Na'vi. An avatar was a Na'vi body hybridized with human DNA that could be temporarily possessed via a brain link, but a driver can only link to an avatar of their genetic equivalent, so when driver-in-training Tom Sully was killed in a mugging, his fraternal twin brother, Jake, was offered his contract.

It takes nearly five years to reach Pandora from Earth, and when Jake arrived, relations with the Na'vi had taken a turn for the worse. This race of giant blue humanoids were a primitive people at one with nature and actively protested the RDA's destructive mining operations for the valuable mineral, unobtanium, exclusive to their world.

Grace Augustine, head of the Avatar Program and sympathizer for the Omatikaya—the clan the RDA had the most contact with—distrusted the Marine, fearing he'd be another trigger-happy moron. However, the Omatikaya saw differently. After receiving a sign from their goddess, Eywa, they decided to take Jake under their wing and train him in their ways.

This arrangement pleased the chief of security, Colonel Miles Quaritch, who had trusted Jake to gather intel from the Omatikaya in his mission to force them out of their village—a giant tree that rested atop the moon's largest unobtanium deposit. Jake was vigilant at first, but something threatened his mission that couldn't be prevented—he fell in love.

She was Neytiri te Tskaha Mo'at'ite, daughter of the clan leaders. Before the Marine knew what was about him, he had pledged himself to her, heart, body and soul.

When Quaritch discovered that Jake was showing signs of expatriating to the enemy, he rescinded his mission and had him thrown in confinement. The gunships were rolled out, and in one hour, twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds, twenty thousand years of history was destroyed in a blink. Quaritch felled Hometree, and more than half the clan was crushed to death under its mighty trunk, never to rise again.

Jake was later rescued by his friends, and together, they escaped the RDA base known as Hell's Gate. However, as their tiltrotor took off, the colonel opened fire, and Grace Augustine was hit. Jake's mentor was fading fast by the time he got her to the Omatikaya. He begged the help of Eywa, and Mo'at, the tribe's tsahìk (shamanic matriarch), had a plan. The Omatikaya gathered at the Tree of Souls—a site considered to be their strongest connection to Eywa—and attempted a ceremony to transfer "all that Grace was" into her avatar body. Unfortunately, there was not enough time, and the beneficent Dr. Augustine slipped into Eywa's embrace.

Dawn came after the mourning, and on wings of fire flew Toruk Makto, "Rider of Last Shadow": a warrior who forms a bond with the king of the Pandoran skies. Only five others in all Na'vi history had ever succeeded, and Jake had just become the sixth. He now had the authority to rally all the great clans together to war against the invaders.

Quaritch knew when he learned the clans were amassing that his only option was a preemptive attack. Converting miners into a militia and loading every available gunship to the hilt, he set out to bomb the Tree of Souls, knowing this would forever demoralize their enemy into submission.

The Na'vi were overrun, and just when all hope seemed lost, a miracle happened; Quaritch's fleet was brought to ruins. The fight now boiled down between him and Sully. Battling from within his great mechanical AMP suit, Quaritch held Jake's life in his hands, but fate intervened in the form of Neytiri.

With two arrows fired from her fallen father's bow,
the princess sent into the void, the demon's wayward soul.

With the battle won, the invaders were expelled from Pandora. The Na'vi once again knew peace, but this did not last.

A decade later, the threat returned as an overwhelming force. Profit no longer being the drive; the goal now was survival. The fleet adrift in space was all that was left of the human race; another loss would spell their extinction. In the span of five years, they quickly built Bridgehead: a heavily armoured city of impenetrable defence. Yet despite their strength, their numbers were small, and resources stretched thin. The unobtanium deposits they needed to expand were heavily guarded by Sully's troops. With the future of humanity looking grim, they needed a miracle of their own.