‘Another perfect day,’ Julianne muttered to herself as she fought through the heaving masses of sour, sweating bodies on a sidewalk that had reverted to rammed earth. The city still hadn’t got around to paving the New Town development, and water trucks rolled through every couple of hours, spraying, to settle the dust down until the monsoon arrived in late afternoon to turn it to mud. If the monsoon arrived. Mostly they did, but even now the weather remained unpredictable.

*

He felt a little better being mobile again and heading towards a meal. With any sort of luck, he’d get paid this afternoon when Hughie came back from the seafood markets with their cut from the week’s haul. With a wad of the folding stuff in his pocket, a decent feed, and maybe a nap to sleep off the worst of the daytime drink, he might even turn his mind to the depressing topic of what next.

The Rhino had been in Darwin for three months and in that time he’d done no more than establish the flimsiest toehold. The free port was one of the busiest, most kinetic places he’d been to since the Disappearance. Vast flows of money and people passed through here, and the power structure of the city was constantly shifting, protean, moving in time with the erratic tidal changes that the fall of America had sent washing around the globe. As much as the presence of thousands of US servicemen and women created the impression that Seattle was the big dog around here, the Rhino knew differently.

We’re just the dumb muscle, he figured, like a boxer who’s taken too many hits to the head. They’ll keep us around until they don’t need the help, and then we’ll get flushed like a used condom.

The real power here took the form of Indian money-changers and the former Chinese Communist Party bosses, legions of them, who’d survived the civil war and transformed themselves into princes of the middle kingdom’s coastal megacities. These old CCP chiefs rarely appeared on the streets on Darwin. But the city seemed to clench in on itself whenever they arrived in numbers. They flew in and choppered straight out to the rooftop landing pad of the new Mirvac Mirage Hotel in the old city, there to contend for the mountains of coal, iron ore, gold and uranium being raked out of the earth’s oldest continent. And, perhaps even more crucially, to bid for the crops of one of the few reliable large-scale food exporters left in the world.