The sailors, decked out in civvies, were off the amphibious assault carrier USS Bataan, back in Darwin after two months out with the Combined Fleet. He tried to greet them as they passed. It was always good to bump into another exile. But Darwin’s humidity and the gargantuan size of the beer bottles they called ‘stubbies’ in this part of the world – all six or seven (or, shit, maybe even eight) of which he’d sucked down on an empty stomach – conspired to unman him. And so it was that Rhino A. Ross, formerly of the United States Coast Guard, suddenly found his head spinning, his feet entangled and his balance absent without leave.

One of the sailors caught him before Newton’s laws took hold. ‘Whoa there, big guy!’

The sailors were pretty good about it, but nothing would distract them from their appointed rounds. The Rhino was passed and pushed through their group until he staggered out onto the kerb, here made up of old railway timbers, where more drinkers stood around the huge, open-sided shed that was the Duckpond Tavern, laughing, cursing and roaring. A steady trade in empties and newly filled glasses continued through the vast openings, where slatted wooden bi-fold shutters had been lashed back to allow a tepid breeze some chance of flushing out the crowded beer hall.

A couple of the brown-shirted local cops meandered past, showing zero interest in enforcing the city ordinances against drinking in the street. They’d have been more zealous in the old town, but the tavern sat squarely in the middle of twenty blocks of warehouses, factories, cheap boarding houses, brothels and bars that had filled up a couple of acres of waste ground behind the old Darwin Duckpond marina. Even now the Rhino thought he could hear the grumble of earth-moving equipment and the dull concussion of explosive excavation work a short distance south, at the site of the abandoned convention centre. A giant wharf was going in there to service the Combined Fleet of the newly formed Pacific Alliance.

The Rhino decided to head in exactly the opposite direction from the cops. Turning awkwardly, he fought the head spins that threatened to send him spiralling into the old railway sleepers – a Wild West design touch that extended only as far as the corners of the tavern. If he fell, drunk, to the ground beyond that, he’d face-plant in the mud and the brown-shirts probably wouldn’t ignore him. Besides, he had a powerful need to get something other than Duckpond Lager into his belly, and there was a takeaway rib joint around the next corner that did a Rhino-size newspaper cone filled to the brim with buffalo wings in hot sauce. His stomach started rumbling a split second before he’d even made a conscious decision to drop his last ten bucks on a feed there.