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There are so many things Lyle’s put up with when it comes to Quaritch’s inconvenient fixation on capturing Jake Sully.
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Dying. (Like, literally dying).
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Finding a ledge (read: finding a precarious ledge) to tame a banshee on while it’s actively trying to kill him.
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Waking up early (read: waking up obscenely early) to listen to Ardmore and Selfridge argue over a) whose operation is the least worthwhile, and b) whose marginally more worthwhile operation capital should be exhausted on.
But this, going out of their way to track down Sully’s passel of kids for the umpteenth time on the off-chance that the tribe of homicidal pyromaniacs hasn’t gotten to them first, takes the cake.
And Quaritch is going along with it, because Spider’s with them, because of course he is, and he doesn’t have his spare mask, because of fucking course he doesn’t.
And for all Quaritch’s grand, sanctimonious speeches about sentiment being a liability, he’s still trying to father the son of a dead man.
The memory of a son.
It’s a story so old its teeth are falling out.
He points the muzzle of his rifle at Sully’s back and grunts noncommittally, wondering if he can just shoot him now and be done with it, if only to be able to remove himself from this stupid fucking situation.
“You’re gonna get me killed,” he grumbles, reluctantly conceding that he can’t.
“Again,” he adds unnecessarily, and laments internally that you can always trust this asswheel’s kids to be missing when you need them most.
—
It starts with a polite suggestion.
(“If you’re gonna fuck up, get it out of the way early.”)
Lyle doesn’t appreciate the remark, considering he’s crouching on the concept of a tree branch.
He’d made the mistake of saying “Can’t see shit” loud enough for Quaritch to hear, and so the colonel half-seriously suggested climbing up a tree to try and get a better visual sweep of the terrain.
Jake’s expression had said: That’s so fucking stupid.
His mouth had said: “That’s so fucking stupid.”
The only thing that kept Lyle from retorting was the fact that he agreed.
No matter how Lyle adjusts the scope of his rifle, no matter where he points his reticle, all he can see is tree, tree, and more tree, and all it serves to do is prove that he just wasted a full honest-to-God five minutes of his life.
—
“Did you only go up there with an idea?” Jake growls impatiently.
Lyle jumps down.
“Don’t look at me. Look at Yosemite Sam,” he carps to an unappreciative crowd, waving a hand in Quaritch’s general direction.
Shit-talkin’ smartass little bastard.
Under any other circumstances, Quaritch would make an offhand comment about keelhauling him, but Spider’s mask hangs from his belt—a grim reminder of the urgency of the situation. So he just sends Lyle a slightly more threatening expression than is customary for him and forges ahead, scanning the ground for tracks.
“Besides,” Lyle continues, “I don’t see you doing much aside from standing there with your teeth in your mouth.”
“I’ve accomplished more with my wrists cuffed together than you have with a gun in your hands.”
“Still learnin’ our way around these parts, Corporal,” Quaritch cuts in. “Quit your heehawing.”
“Yeah, I’m watching the lesson,” Jake replies, pointedly ignoring that second thing, “and it is skunk ugly.”
If Quaritch had a dollar for every grunt he’s met with a shitty attitude, he could buy more grunts with shitty attitudes.
—
Jake’s heart sinks into his stomach when they find Kiri’s ikran in a dead heap a little ways away from the massacre.
Quaritch ambles up to him.
“One of yours?”
Jake can’t find his voice. He can only nod.
Quaritch’s gaze narrows somewhere down the foliage.
“Then we have our lead.”
—
“Contact here,” Lyle calls over his shoulder.
Jake and Quaritch duck under a behemoth of a windsnap to find two bodies limp in the brush, barely hidden beneath fern and root.
Mangkwan.
Quaritch crouches over the nearest one, inspecting the wounds.
“Small-arms fire,” he says quietly.
Jake’s jaw tightens.
Lo’ak.
His eyes trail the ground. There’s an arrow buried in the dirt a yard or two away.
Bile rises in his throat.
Lo’ak engaged because they’d been found.
Quaritch follows his gaze. The look on his face suggests he’s come to the same conclusion.
“Your boy plugged this son of a bitch three times in the chest,” Jake hears him murmur, distantly, in a tone skirting dangerously close to praise. “Kept his head.”
“Don’t.”
The silence fills the air between them. Not quite enough to be hostile, but enough to be heavy.
Quaritch glances sidelong at him.
“Wasn’t an insult.”
—
Insult or not, it doesn’t bring Jake any comfort that approval only ever seems to come easy to men like them when they’ve made good killers.
—
If you’re gonna pull that trigger, son, you better not miss.
A miss by an inch is a miss by a mile.
—
The tracks end at the river bank.
“The kids went in the water.”
“Smart move.”
They follow it downstream.
—
It’s maybe a half-hour later that they find a thicket that looks flattened by movement on the other side of the river. If Quaritch has to hazard a guess, Sully’s boy likely went through intending to circle around and back to the ship.
He hadn’t opened fire back there on a willy-nilly whim. Kid seems to know his protocol.
Something buzzes near them. Lyle flinches and swats at it haphazardly. Quaritch doesn’t like how on edge he is, but he can’t say he blames him.
Lyle catches his gaze, and he nods his head at the river.
—
“How’s the water?” Quaritch asks of the crossing.
“Rank,” is Lyle’s expert assessment.
—
Traversing the river is a mostly uneventful affair. The only real commotion is caused by Lyle, who evidently doesn’t like the crossing because he mutters an unintelligible string of obscenities from one bank all the way to the other.
Sully takes a little longer to make it across.
“If you get a chance, you should try being better at this,” Lyle hisses at a slow-moving Jake.
“Can’t likely put my back into it with my hands cuffed, soldier boy,” Jake says, emerging from the water and picking his way through an expanse of rocks. “Cut me loose.”
“Sooner drink turpentine and piss upwind of a brush fire.”
“Then shut the hell up.”
Quaritch snorts, then extends Jake a hand.
Jake eyes it. “Move.”
“Suit yourself, Corporal.” Quaritch holds his hands up in mock surrender. “Just trying to help you up.”
“Not standing in the way would be considered helping already.”
“You could use a kinder disposition about you, Jake.”
“You could use a quieter one.”
—
Quaritch is getting increasingly frustrated that they didn’t ride their banshees out here, despite not really having much choice.
One, they wouldn’t be able to see much through the canopy, and two, Cupcake is offensively selective about what she considers a threat.
She doesn’t spook at the sound of explosions or gunfire. But… y’know. God forbid someone steps on a leaf three klicks out.
She reminds him of Lyle, in that she gets so wound up sometimes she could probably swallow a lump of coal and shit out a diamond hours later.
“Next time you plan on losing your kids, let us know ahead of time so we can bring some scouts,” aforementioned Lyle huffs. “And some aerial recon. Maybe a mortar. The whole shitteree.”
Jake, Great Panjandrum of unhelpful wiseass commentary, says, “If you were gonna complain this much you should’ve just stayed your ass in Nebraska or whatever latrine it is you hail from.”
“Jersey.”
“Jersey,” Jake mocks, as if the word speaks for itself.
—
They hear gunfire off to the east somewhere, and then war cries.
The gunfire stops. The screams don’t.
Dammit.
“I don’t suppose you gave your boy more than just the one clip?” Quaritch asks grimly.
“Fuck,” Jake snarls, before darting off in that direction.
—
It’s Lyle that spots the smoke up ahead.
There’s a clearing in front of them. Fire casts a yellow-orange glow on the trees on the periphery.
The raiders have Sully’s kids by their kurus, and Spider—
What. The hell.
“How’s he breathing with no mask?” he whispers.
Jake looks about as awestruck as he feels.
“I… can’t even think about that right now. We gotta get in there.”
A woman crowned in a red and black frilled headdress—their leader, Quaritch guesses—is quick to notice Spider’s condition as well.
And then she’s holding a knife to his son’s throat.
“C’mon. Get these off me,” Jake hisses, shaking his wrists in Quaritch’s face. “Come on, they’re gonna kill him.”
“Come on,” he urges again.
Quaritch presses his lips together, but cuts him loose.
“Now gimme the kni—”
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, don’t even finish that sentence.”
“Give it here.”
Quaritch shuts his eyes.
They’re outnumbered and, to his express frustration, their odds would look a whole lot better if Jake can pick someone off and loot something with a little more range to arm himself with.
And once again, he finds himself having to choose between his grudge and his son.
He hands the knife over, though not without sending Jake a look that he hopes conveys how loath he is to do so.
Jake slinks away, toward one of the raiders lurking on the fringes. Quaritch turns his gaze back to the clearing.
The woman looks down her nose at Sully’s boy with all the grandeur of a Caesar.
“You,” she says, holding the rifle in front of him, “will show me how this works.”
The Sully boy is hauled to his feet. When he makes no move to oblige her, she commands again, “Show me how to make thunder.”
“I can’t. It’s empty. No thunder,” he responds in a poor imitation of her inflection.
Quaritch snorts, despite himself.
This condescending little shit.
Kid’s got a brass neck on him, he’ll give him that.
To his right, Jake plunders a bow from a sentry he just took down.
“Keep overwatch,” Quaritch murmurs to Lyle.
After a moment, he adds, “And don’t get bushwhacked.”
Lyle shakes his head, but does as he’s told.
—
Jake catches his eye, then pounces.
Quaritch waits.
And follows suit.
—
—
—
He notices far too late the feeling of his queue connecting to something—someone—and then he’s brought to his knees by a searing, scathing pain that nearly blinds him.
Jake is bludgeoned to the ground, and Lyle’s covering fire is nowhere to be found.
Shit.
—