#hhng

| Chapter 1

Prologue

Dead man walking!

That was what the RDA soldiers had yelled in her direction as she stepped off the Valkyrie onto Pandoran soil late last year.

She tried to walk proudly into the buildings of Bridgehead City, with her head held high and her back straight. It was easier in the lower gravity. Intimidation might work on greenhorns, but it wasn’t going to work on her.

She’d already been through more in her life than any of them would ever know.

“This better than Earth.” Ellie struggled to convince herself as she got used to breathing with an exopack for the first time. “It has to be.”

A second chance. A second life. Wasn’t that a saying amongst the natives? That you were born twice?

Ellie dug that. She’d take all the chances she could get.

Six years of cryosleep for this. She was guaranteed Paradise, back on Earth when she signed on with the RDA. Instead, all she ever saw of Pandora was infrastructure, concrete and steel.

None of the greenery, impossible colours and bioluminescence her orientation literature had promised. It was too dangerous, apparently. The local tribes were still referred to as hostiles. The RDA had tried, and failed, to tame Pandora.

Her world was brown, grey and that disgusting khaki green she had grown to hate. Same colour as the food she was served in the canteen every damn day.

Bridgehead was plenty hostile as it was.

She didn’t fit with the two main factions in Bridgehead. Not a soldier, neither a scientist.

A goddamn shrink. That was what everyone called her. Intellectuals and hired thugs alike. They didn’t think she was useful, or necessary. She didn’t study the native wildlife or know how to handle a gun. She didn’t speak Na’vi. Practically useless in survival situations.

“Tibbs!”

General Ardmore caught her attention after breakfast. Ellie didn’t like the older woman much, she was a textbook narcissist, but fortunately she wasn’t paid her generous annual salary to like people. That would cost you extra.

“Guess who woke up yesterday?”

Ellie silently stared at the name on the file in Ardmore’s hand. She’d heard the stories, which by now seemed more like legends passed down through the generations of human settlers. This particular soldier, and future patient of hers, was the one member of Project Phoenix she was least looking forward to meeting.

He had quite the reputation. Even from beyond the figurative grave.

“That’s right, sweetheart-“ Ardmore grinned widely at the pained expression on her face. “Colonel Miles Quaritch, back from the dead.”

***