Chapter Text
The first time Spider’s name appeared in an RDA briefing document, it wasn’t under “hostile.” It was under “infrastructure.” The file opened in a muted blue glow across the conference holo-table, projected above the polished surface of the RDA forward ops room. Outside the thick glass, Pandora’s sky rolled black and alive with distant lightning. Inside, the air smelled like recycled oxygen and cold metal.
“Subject: MILES SOCORRO,” the header read, in sharp clean type.
Underneath, smaller, bolder:
ALIAS: “Spider”
STATUS: High-priority adaptive asset
THREAT LEVEL: Moderate
STRATEGIC VALUE: CRITICAL
“You have got to be kidding me,” one of the junior analysts muttered, squinting at the holo. “The feral kid?”
General Ardmore didn’t look away from the projection. “Not feral,” she said. “Adapted.”
The holo shifted with a hand swipe, revealing medical scans—lung images, bloodwork comparisons, before-and-after respiratory profiles. Two silhouette outlines appeared side by side: baseline human, standard exopack dependency; and Spider, post the second Tulkun incident, walking through Pandoran air with nothing on his face but dirt and attitude.
The difference wasn’t subtle.
On the “baseline” model, red crosshatching marked everything from trachea to alveoli: lethal environment without filtration. On Spider’s model, those same pathways glowed in an eerie, muted teal.
Someone had overlaid faint branching structures along the bronchi and pulmonary vessels, like coral grafted to a tree.
ANNOTATION:
“Foreign biological integration observed along airway epithelium and alveolar surface, consistent with symbiotic xenobiology.
Preliminary hypothesis: off-world symbiote (designated ENTITY A-01) performing active gas exchange and/or buffering hostile atmospheric components.”
A biologist at the far end of the table leaned forward, eyes bright behind her lenses. “Entity A-01 appears to metabolize atmospheric toxins and facilitate Oxygen delivery while protecting host tissues,” she said. “We’re seeing stable arterial blood gases in atmospheres that should destroy unmodded human lungs in minutes.”
Another slide: Spider on a grainy feed—bare chest streaked with mud and sea salt, hair wild, laughing at something one of the Sully kids had said. He turned his head; behind him the air shimmered in the heat. No mask. No exopack.“Respiratory rate: slightly elevated but stable,” the biologist continued. “No cyanosis. No structural lung damage. No fibrosis. No exopack. He is—by every metric—breathing this moon like a native.”
A low whistle went around the table.
“And he’s human,” the analyst said. “Full human genome. No avatar.”
“That,” Ardmore said, finally turning toward the group, “is why you’re all here.”
The holo zoomed back to the twin outlines.
“We tried to tame this rock with hammers and bombs,” she said. “Didn’t work. We tried reshaping it with bulldozers and climate towers. Not fast enough. Meanwhile, the locals—” a flick of her fingers, a Na’vi silhouette flared briefly above the table, bow raised “—have biological advantages we can’t outgun without bankrupting Earth twice.”
She gestured back to Spider’s model. The teal branching flared, pulsing faintly.
“But this,” she said, “this is different. This is the first time one of ours has something like what they have. Atmospheric compatibility. Native survivability. If we can separate that thing from him, replicate it, control it…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.
No more fragile masks. No more workers dropping dead if a seal cracked in a corrosive pocket. No more soldiers ripped apart because their air went out eighteen seconds too soon. If they could pull the symbiote out of the boy and force it into others, Pandora would stop being a hostile environment and start being… property.
A nervous cough broke the silence. “There is one complication, ma’am,” the biologist said carefully, tapping her tablet. “The field reports—Sully’s human scientists—have identified the relationship as…mutualistic. Interdependent. They claim removal would likely be fatal to the host.”
“Quote it,” Ardmore said.
The holo shifted again, this time to a transcribed audio log. The time stamp placed it in High Camp, not long after the events now classified under the codename FIRE & ASH INCIDENT.
DR. MAX PATEL: “Look, I can’t stress this enough. The symbiote and Spider are keeping each other alive. This is not plug-and-play. You pull it out, you don’t just kill it—you kill him.”
DR. NORM SPELLMAN: “Yeah, and it’s not just his lungs. It’s integrated into his cardio-respiratory system. Maybe deeper. Maybe neural. You try to reverse that without understanding it, you’re committing murder.”
Under that, in RDA red:
ANALYSIS:
LOCAL SCIENTISTS COMPROMISED / BIASED.
MORTALITY RISK TO SUBJECT: HIGH.
STRATEGIC REWARD POTENTIAL: EXTREME.
The room held its breath.
“And there it is,” Ardmore said, almost conversational. “The line between ‘biological curiosity’ and ‘worth losing sleep over.’”
One of the military liaisons shifted uneasily. “Ma’am, with respect, if they’re right—”
“If they’re right,” Ardmore cut in, “and we do nothing, then the advantage remains with the Na’vi and their pet human. Earth’s governments will ask what we did here, and our answer will be ‘we let a miracle stay in the jungle because we were afraid of getting our hands dirty.’”
She let that sit for a beat.
“Make no mistake,” she added. “I am not planning to kill the boy. I’m planning to understand the thing keeping him alive. Big difference.”
The biologist held her ground. “If mutualism is that tightly integrated, separating it might not be technically possible without—”
“Is a surgical transplant ‘technically possible’ if you refuse to pick up a scalpel?” Ardmore asked.
“You’re researchers. Research. Find the margins before you tell me where the line is.”
Her gaze swept to the tactical side of the table. “In the meantime,” she said, “we need him on a table. Alive. Relatively intact.”
A new holo pane flicked on: movement vectors, probable waypoints, rough maps of the Sully clan’s relocation zones. The Metkayina reef systems glowed in oceanic blues, dotted with labeled marui structures and hunting channels.
“Intelligence confirms he spends significant time between High Camp and the reef village known as Awa’atlu,” said one of the operations officers. “Rides with the clan, sleeps in their pods. Often in open structures. Security not designed for human-target snatches.”
“He’s planetary famous now,” another analyst added. “Half the Na’vi call him ‘the air-breather.’ He’s…visible.”
“Good,” Ardmore said. “Visibility means predictability.”
She zoomed in on the small human silhouette among taller Na’vi forms.
“Draft two operational pathways,” she said. “One covert, one opportunistic. No open engagements unless absolutely necessary. We don’t spook the Sullys before we have to; they’re useful locators for the subject.”
“And if they resist?” the military liaison asked.
Ardmore smiled, thin and humorless.
“They will,” she said. “They always do.”
She turned the holo back on and zoomed in, this time on a cluster of bright teal along Spider’s bronchi.
“Which is why we don’t start with the heart,” she added. “We start with the air.”