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Worms: Chapter One

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A/N: I have a few ideas in mind for this story, but I'm going to play by ear for the most part and respond to the community's comments. Please note that my reference for this fic is the extended collector's edition for the film, which has a few scenes that I found very important.

There's going to be a lot of violence, but it won't be too much above the level of action that we saw in the movies. There may be a couple extremely violent scenes, but these will be infrequent enough that I'm comfortable with rating this as a T. I don't have much else to say beyond that, except that I'd like to thank you for reading my first fanfiction on this profile. Let's begin.

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"That was a Hell of a speech you gave today."

"Yeah. I always was good at public speaking."

"That's not the only thing you're good at."

Quaritch half-smiled and touched his lips against Parker's head. It was a moment that they couldn't have enjoyed in public, but deep in the dark recesses of the latter's considerable private quarters there was a bed where they had shared many intimacies. Even then, both were nude and covered in a brief layer of sweat from their recent exertions. A moment later, though, Parker felt Quaritch recoil and turn away. His tough, scarred face shortly took on an expression it almost never did when he was in public: one of deep, careful consideration.

"What's on your mind?" Parker said.

"The hit on Home Tree," Quaritch said.

"What about it? We were attacked—our men were killed, and we lost millions of dollars' worth of gear. We had to respond, you said it yourself."

"And I meant it," Quaritch said. "And I did it, with minimal casualties. It was humane… more or less."

"So what's the problem?" Parker asked.

Quaritch sighed. "We kicked a fuckin' hornet's nest."

Parker turned around and rested against his elbow to look at his lover eye to eye.

"Hasn't that been the point from the beginning? To push the Na'vi more and more to find out their limits? We escalated the war on purpose," Parker said. "That's what you told me—keep turning the temperature up until they fold."

"Well, they didn't fold," Quaritch said. He sneered and faced away from Parker. "They didn't give up, and now they're calling in enough reinforcements that they could overrun this base without even breaking a sweat. Fuck," he swore. "I didn't see this coming. If I had, I wouldn't have done this. I tried to take a shortcut and it bit me on the ass. Our men died for my mistake, and more are gonna die when we fight."

"So why fight?" Parker asked. "If we just… if we call off the attack and ground all of our vehicles and personnel, then… we can just surrender, and they'll leave us alone. Won't they?"

"I don't know," Quaritch said. "A week ago, I'd have told you that the Na'vi don't have the guts to execute their enemies, but now, I don't know. The Omaticaya Clan doesn't have the guts, but some of their allies might. And I can't put my men in that position—unarmed, unprepared to fight, so that they're all ready to be lined up against the wall by some alien thug Jake and his people don't see fit to stop."

"So we evacuate," Parker said. "I'll send out the order now. We can have half of our people back in orbit by dawn—"

"No," Quaritch said, "we're not surrendering and we're not retreating."

"So what? We commit to the attack and hope for the best?"

"You're on the right track," Quaritch said. "But I had something a little different in mind. When we struck Home Tree, I was overconfident. I also held back."

Parker's eyebrows arched. He reached forward and traced a finger up and down the lean musculature of Quaritch's chest. "You gassed their children, set their home on fire, and then knocked the whole damn thing down. And you're saying that you held back?"

"Yeah," Quaritch said. He took Parker's fingers into his hand and drew them to his lips for a moment. "If I hadn't held back, I'd have razed the whole area to the ground with missiles, shot the survivors with machineguns, and sent in ground forces to mop up. Afterwards, I would have had their remains impaled on stakes and set up as reminders of what we're capable of." He grinned. "I learned that trick in Venezuela."

A moment passed.

"At times like these, I don't know if I want to go again, or I'm scared to death of you," Parker said.

"I do," Quaritch replied. He placed his hand against Parker's arm, so fair, young, and unblemished compared to his own. Then, he drew the younger man toward him and didn't let go.

-/-

Parker was asleep, exhausted and satisfied, but the night was just beginning for Quaritch. He looked fondly at his love, reclining in bed, and then he stood up and began to dress. When he finished, his was wearing his normal attire, camouflage pants and an undershirt that was obviously out of reg, but just made him look so powerful and imposing that he had to wear it.

Then he walked back to his room, sat at his desk, and didn't move for two hours.

He had fixed the objectives of the mission in his mind, and they were simple: the Na'vi, and the Omaticaya Clan in particular, had to be hit hard. Their forces had to be destroyed thoroughly enough that they couldn't form a counteroffensive at a later date, or bog the RDA down in a permanent guerilla war. Beyond that, they had to be taught a lesson, so that the RDA's future ventures on Pandora would never meet resistance from the natives again.

The most certain way to attain these objectives was to destroy the Tree of Souls. Doing that would send an even stronger message than knocking Home Tree down, because the Tree of Souls was where the Na'vi deity was said to reside. If it was destroyed, it wouldn't just mean the end of the Omaticaya clan: a hole would be blasted in the Na'vi's collective racial memory, and it would be so deep that it was unlikely to ever heal.

Quaritch briefly entertained the idea of capturing the Tree of Souls, and maintaining a bomb right on top of it indefinitely. It would be a hostage… that would require constant oversight, and that the Na'vi might eventually sacrifice anyway.

No. The Tree of Souls had to be destroyed.

But the parameters of the mission would make that difficult. It had to be done with minimal friendly casualties, and maximum enemy casualties. Apart from that, Quaritch didn't have half of the power he'd have liked to tackle a mission like this one. He had Scorpions, AMPs, a Dragon gunship and dozens of ground forces, but that wasn't nearly enough for what he had planned. He didn't have artillery, tactical missiles, or nukes, either. He also didn't have time—he had to attack that day itself, or else the Na'vi forces would become too strong and there would be nothing he could do to stop them from marching on the base and razing it to the ground.

And then there were the externalities to consider. The most obvious was the Hallelujah Mountains, which lay right between base and the Tree of Souls, and Jake was a Marine. He'd keep his forces in the mountains, where radar wouldn't work, and where a large force of helicopters and gunships could be ambushed from behind every corner by rapidly-moving and ultra-agile fliers. Another problem was that there could be no sneak attack and no surprise. Jake knew that he was coming, just as certainly as he knew that he was coming for Jake.

But Quaritch had a few advantages. He was a seasoned military commander, whereas Jake was just a washed-up ex-Marine. He had machineguns and anti-personnel rockets, whereas Jake had bows and arrows. He also believed in his cause more strongly than Jake ever could, and that was because he sincerely, truly loved the men and women that served under him.

Jake couldn't understand that. He'd gotten himself a little local tail and that had messed with his mind enough to let him think that he was in love. But Quaritch really was in love, and not just with Parker—he loved his soldiers, his comrades, the brave men and women who put on the uniform, saluted him, and, under his orders, marched to their deaths with pride and honor. Even then, one of the several holographic displays Quaritch had open showed pictures of them: pictures of them standing at attention, or loading missiles onto Scorpions, or eating dinner, or talking, or laughing, or joking, or struggling to maintain their composure as they saluted the passing coffins of their fallen brothers.

That was love, and that was what would give Quaritch the motivation to find a way to win.

He glanced at the changing photographs on his screen for another moment. Then, he looked back at the rest of them and started to draw up his plan.

The real challenge was the Hallelujah Mountains: they made a direct assault foolish. The unpredictable waves of EM flux they produced went kilometers into the atmosphere, but the mountains themselves did not. So, Quaritch believed he could get over that hurdle.

But there was another problem, and that was that he would not attack the Tree of Souls with the full strength of his forces. In fact, he doubted that he could spare a quarter of his forces for that mission. The rest would be doing other things elsewhere, in no position to effect reinforcement if it became necessary. So, Quaritch resorted to technology to solve his problems.

He spent hours developing firing solutions and running simulations on how HELLFIRE missiles could be programmed to explode on reception of a signal, rather than on contact with a target. He prepared algorithms that would allow for WAFAR rockets to be dropped like bombs toward the ground, only to have their motors ignite when they were danger-close to their targets. He also ran the numbers endlessly on how many enemy fliers he could take out at extreme distance with machineguns, but it was useless.

No matter how he fudged the numbers, it seemed that he was set on an impossible mission. He simply could not do what he needed to do with the forces he could allocate to the hit on the Tree of Souls. The Hell of it was that he didn't dare to strike the Tree of Souls with full force, because if he did, he'd succeed—and the Na'vi would know about it. Then, their survivors would retreat into the forest before he could do anything to stop them, and the RDA would be bogged down in endless guerilla war.

He needed to think outside of the box, to do this one. He needed to be unconventional, and—

And then he thought about a shipment the base had received two years ago. It had been before the heavy bulldozers had gotten planetside; in those days, mining operations had to be carried out on the small scale. That had been a problem for many reasons, the most significant of which was deforestation. It simply hadn't been practical to hack at the forest with a thousand papercuts, and that was why they'd placed an order with the dying remnants of what had once been two huge American-based multinationals: Monsanto and Dow.

In the end, their product hadn't worked. But now, Quaritch had a new use for it.

-/-

"Wainfleet here."

"Lyle. This is Quaritch speaking."

He heard the sound of moving cloth and imagined the soldier getting out of bed and standing at attention, naked except for his skivvies.

"Colonel. What can I do for you?"

"Remember that defoliant we had a couple years ago, ZKD-19?"

"Agent Orange? Yeah, Colonel, what about it?"

"What happened to it?" Quaritch asked.

"It's all in storage, sir," Wainfleet said. "There's got to be tons and tons of the stuff in the basement. We just stuffed it all down then when we realized that it doesn't work on Pandora's plants."

Quaritch smiled. "Yeah, we put it away because it doesn't work. That's what we told you."

"Sir?"

There was a pause. "Get Kowalski, Hanson, and Serrano together. Find the ZKD-19 and get it prepped to move and wait for further orders in the basement."

"Yes, sir."

Quaritch's voice softened. "And once you've got it ready, get some sleep. You're going to need it."

-/-

Dawn.

Quaritch allowed himself the luxury of a few hours of sleep. He'd never needed more, and in his youth, he'd found that he could go for several days without sleeping a wink. Those days were behind him, though. Now, he needed at least three hours of rest per day to function. And since he'd given himself five, when he woke up, he started to move without stopping.

He showered. Then he shaved. Then he dressed in his freshly-pressed uniform and emerged from his quarters so that he could eat breakfast with his soldiers. On most days, he'd dine with Selfridge and the several other ranking executives on Pandora, but on that day, he mingled with the men and women who would have their boots on the ground for him.

And then he went to the main deck of the installation and started to prepare the attack. It wasn't even eight am.

An hour later, a klaxon informed him that someone was trying to contact him. So, he pressed the button on the comm unit on his belt and answered.

"Quaritch here."

"Sir—it's Patel, sir. I've got him."

Quaritch nodded. "Alright. Patch him through." He spent a few seconds tapping code into his computer terminal. When he hit enter, a tanned, curly-haired face popped up on almost every computer screen in the base.

"Jake, it's crazy here. It's full mobilization, they're rigging the shuttle as a bomber fitted with these huge palettes of mine explosives for… some kind of shock and awe campaign."

"Frickin' daisy-cutters," a voice off-screen said.

The confusion had passed, and every person in the RDA base except for Patel was starting to realize what was going on. Quaritch could see the effects of the betrayal on their faces.

"When?" another off-screen voice said.

"They're gonna roll in two hours."

The conversation continued, but Quaritch and the rest of his forces—the rest of his loyal forces—had heard enough. He tapped the button on his comm unit again to contact the cybersecurity operative that had caught Patel in the first place. "Cut him off," he said.

A heartbeat later, the Patel's face was replaced with static. Only after Quaritch took off the manual override did the screens all around him return to normal. He looked over the faces surrounding him. Then he drank in their anger and took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly.

"Security, arrest Max Patel and throw him in a cell. As for his colleagues… I want you to watch over them, but do not arrest them and do not mistreat them. They're as loyal as the rest of us… probably. Cybersecurity," Quaritch said, addressing the men on the other side of his comm unit, "cut off all non-military communications and maximize security protocols. I don't want a word over the airwaves unless you know what it is."

There was a chorus of "yes, sir"s before Quaritch's orders were executed. He trusted that they would be carried out competently, so he turned back to survey the attack preparations. The Scorpions were fully armed by then; only his Dragon had a few of its dozens of missile pods left to fill. Patel was already on his way to solitary confinement and Jake had successfully been fed inaccurate information.

Quaritch hailed Wainfleet from his comm unit and instructed him and the other ultra-loyal soldiers that were with him to move Agent Orange to the surface.

Everything was going to plan. And that meant that he had an announcement to make.

After sitting down at a free computer station, Quaritch logged into a special, ultra-secure part of the network that was reserved for him and a few others alone. He accessed a certain piece of management software, and then released a whole new set of instructions to the base.

"We've had a little change in plans," he announced, as everyone around him paused, for a split second, to read over their new orders. "Now that Jake knows when we're coming and what we're going to do, we're gonna have to improvise a little bit. Is that understood?"

He took a sip from the mug in his hand as an uncertain chorus of "yes, sir"s echoed around the room. In seconds, though, he saw the faces around him change as RDA leadership started to understand what he had done and what he was going to do. The dangerous tension in the air had been broken, and now, the mercenaries were starting to smile and laugh with one another. They'd realized what Quaritch had done and why, and so he didn't even need to order the officers who monitored the satellites in orbit around Pandora to give him feeds of the homes of the rest of the Na'vi clans in the area. Once they had realized that he wasn't the tough, overly-macho cowboy figure he let them think he was, they had started to rally around him like the genius that he was.

-/-

Two hours passed. Then, four. Then, Quaritch ordered his troops to eat MREs. He'd have told them to get to the mess hall for proper meals, but they had to be on-call and ready to roll at a moment's notice. The dozen or so Scorpions he had running patrols some twenty klicks from the base weren't enough to defend it from a serious attack, and while Quaritch hadn't seen any troop movements around the Hallelujah Mountains from the satellite feeds, he knew better than to trust technology. He also knew better than to let his troops relax, even in their minds.

Fortunately, the officers at least knew what he was up to. He wasn't waiting around because he was lazy or uncertain. Instead, he was waiting around so that Jake and his supporters would have to cling to the mountains for hours in the baking heat, waiting for an attack that might never come. They'd get restless. They'd get angry. They'd get paranoid. Some of them would call Jake a liar and leave. And when the battle finally began, the Na'vi would be unprepared and caught off-guard.

Quaritch had read The Book of Five Rings. He knew how Musashi Miyamoto had defeated Kojiro Sasaki, and he knew that a half-baked ex-jarhead caught up in his own grandeur did not.

The tanks of ZKD-19 had been jerry-rigged into parcels of tanks that would be carried inside the shuttle, the only vehicle large enough to carry them. That was ready to roll, and Quaritch had just had meetings with the several junior officers that would be in charge of the attack groups he was sending out alone. They knew what they had to do and it showed on their faces, sometimes as anticipation, sometimes as fear, sometimes as forced numbness.

The missiles had been programmed, too, and soon, all of the troops were in position to rock and roll. All of them, that was, except for Quaritch.

He was in a private corner of base headquarters, holding Selfridge tightly by the arm. None of their words reached anyone else, but the expressions on their faces made their conversation clear.

"Listen, Parker, no matter what I tell the boys, this mission is a long shot. So, the minute you get an opportunity to, I want you in that mini-shuttle you keep around, you and whoever else can fit. If things get bad, you might not have a warning."

"No, I'm not leaving Pandora without—"

"Without who? Without me?" Quaritch asked. He laughed. "I'll be a hundred klicks away, kid; there's nothing you can do to stop that—"

"I was going to say, I'm not leaving Pandora without everyone else," Selfridge said. "I'm not abandoning anyone on this Hellhole to get torn apart by the Na'vi, or whatever… hammer-headed, glow-in-the-dark freak show they have with them. Either we're all saved, or…" His voice cracked and he looked away.

Quaritch looked at the man before him. Parker was younger than he was, and not just by a little bit, either. He'd always thought of the CEO as a boy—a brilliant, incredibly competent boy, but a boy nonetheless. Now, he saw that he had been mistaken. So, he drew his pistol and handed it butt-first to Parker.

"There's just enough bullets in the magazine for everyone left here," Quaritch said. "So if you have to use it… don't miss."

He touched his lips to Parker's forehead for the first and last time in public. Then he strode away, exiting headquarters to make his way onto the Dragon gunship that would lead the attack on the Tree of Souls.

-/-

A/N: Remember to drop me a review if you enjoyed this fiction so that I will know how to proceed. Thanks for reading.