Here We Stand, page 28




“It’s the ocean,” he said. “Damn.”
“Yeah, you do generally find it around islands.”
“Wow.” Chris walked over to the edge of the course and stared at the fringe of white sand and the ferociously blue sea without a rational thought in his head for a few seconds. Nothing prepared him for this. The plain surrounding Nomad was a big horizon to contemplate, but it was made up of low rolling hills and he could see mountains in the distance. But the ocean was absolutely flat, infinite, yet constantly moving. It stretched way past his peripheral vision. “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
“Says the bloke who’s arrived from another planet.”
“I’m going to walk on that beach.”
Chris was conscious of being a large, slow-moving, conspicuous target against a white background. He knew doing carefree things made him look less suspicious if anyone was watching, but for a moment he actually didn’t care if a sniper took him out as long as he got to trudge a few yards through that powdered-sugar sand.
Marc joined him, leaving a trail of footprints. Chris paused a couple of times to pick up a handful of sand and let it fall through his fingers. He wasn’t acting now. All this mesmerised him, and it wasn’t his inner geologist that it spoke to. It was the kid who’d never been to the beach. He made an effort to focus and stay alert. However vast and beautiful the shoreline was, he had a job to do and he was behind enemy lines.
“Jetty,” Marc said quietly. “Dead ahead.”
Chris squinted against the sun. He could see the inlet now, a mini-harbour with three boats tied up at a wharf that formed a T-shape with the jetty, but there were only a couple of guys working on the fanciest of the three. As he got closer, one of the men looked up and waved, then turned and headed their way at a jog.
Tev looked happy.
For a Brit from South London, he’d adapted to the tropical life pretty well, right down to an eye-wateringly bright shirt in turquoise and green. He gave Marc a rib-breaking hug.
“Mate! How are you?”
“I’ve just gone blind from looking at that bloody shirt, but apart from that, great.”
“And you brought Chris. How are you doing?”
“Good to see you, Tev. Now I know what heaven looks like. With my record, I never thought I’d see it.”
“Yeah, it’s nice here. Bit of a struggle lately, but at least we can feed ourselves.” Tev slapped Chris on the back, grinning with delight. “We’re safe here for the time being as long as we keep a low profile. Where exactly did you come from, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“That’s what I came to see you about,” Marc said. “You’re on the run and now your family’s caught up in it. That breaks my heart because I talked you into this. But I’ve got a proposal.”
“Marc, I’m glad you did persuade me.”
“I can get you all out, Tev. Somewhere APS can’t touch you.”
“Britain?”
Marc looked like he was holding his breath. There was no point in a slow build-up. If he didn’t blurt it out, Chris would. But Marc found his voice.
“If that’s what you want, yes,” he said. “But if you want to get even further away, we can do that too.”
“How far’s further?” Tev asked.
“Two hundred and forty-six trillion miles.”
“What?”
“And it won’t take forty-five years, either. This is all classified, by the way.”
Tev looked at him for a moment, then at Chris. A slow disbelieving grin spread across his face and he started laughing.
“You’re still going to Opis, then. I had my doubts.”
“Past tense,” Chris said. There was no point in dancing around this. “We’ve been there a few months now and we’ve come back for you because things are going to get worse here. Especially for you.”
“Seriously? There and back? No. Never.”
“There’s a lot of background, but yes,” Marc said.
“You’ll be telling me there’s aliens out there next.”
All Chris could do was stare at the ground with his hands on his hips and leave it to Marc now. Tev had left Ainatio before the trouble started with Pham, so he didn’t even know Solomon carried out the sabcode attack. There was a lot of ground to cover. Chris wondered how Tev would feel when he realised Solomon was behind the cyberattack.
“Yeah, aliens, five different species so far,” Marc said. “Some of them love us and some probably don’t. We only got here so fast because of their technology. Shall we sit down and discuss this somewhere quiet? It’s complicated.”
“This has to be a joke.”
“It’s true,” Chris said. “And nobody else on Earth knows about this. We’re trying to keep it that way.”
It was hard to read Tev’s expression now, but his permanent cheerfulness had evaporated. “Come home with me,” he said. “The rest of the family wants to meet you. Becky’s made a big meal. Joni’s got to drop off his fresh orders in town on the way back, but then we’ll dig in for the day. Can you stay a while?”
“As long as you need us to,” Marc said.
Joni was still transferring fish from his boat, which looked like a pretty serious vessel, with twin engines, radar, aerials, and all kinds of shiny stuff that Chris couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a simple wooden hull and a big net. The name on the bows was Sautu.
Joni shook Marc’s hand like he was a visiting dignitary. “We’ve heard all about you, Marc. You were in the army too, Chris?”
“Yeah, in the States.”
“Must have been tough over there.”
Chris wasn’t sure how much Tev had told Joni about Nomad. “It was pretty bad. We ended up at Ainatio, which is where I met these two guys.”
“I won’t be long,” Joni said, heaving another tray onto the pile. “I’ll leave the power running and unload the frozen catch later. But I can’t let my customers down.”
“No problem,” Marc said. “Nice boat.”
“Yeah, I got her at a good price. I’m building the business again.”
Poor guy: Chris hadn’t thought about it before, but uprooting the family meant Joni’s business had lost customers. Chris gave him a hand loading the fish onto the pickup truck and got into the back seat next to Marc.
“So what’s happened since I left?” Tev asked while Joni was safely out of earshot locking up the boat.
Marc sighed. “Headlines? Tim Pham tried to stop Shackleton launching and blew up Da Gama, so Sol trashed APS’s infrastructure with a cyberattack, and we had a really tricky armed standoff with APDU until we managed to lock Pham in the campus and get away.”
Tev turned and looked at Marc, arm resting on the back of the passenger seat.
“So Sol did all that.”
“Yeah, sorry. He didn’t know how far it would spread. He just had to stop their air force paying us a visit. Pham found out pretty well everything. Sol, the biosecurity breach, the nukes, even the alien FTL.”
Tev made no comment about Solomon trashing Asia and moved on. “So Pham’s sharper than we thought.”
“No, Abbie Vincent grassed us up. Well, not about the FTL. He actually saw that.”
Tev just shook his head, bemused. Joni jumped into the driver’s seat and they set off along the dirt road.
Chris leaned his head against the side window to catch some breeze from the air conditioning and watched the passing landscape. The first things that got his attention were brightly coloured birds, species he’d never seen before, and picture-book palm trees, then the single-story houses along the way, some with regular pitched roofs and plastered walls and others in traditional style with thatches. The road was unpaved until they got to the small town, where it became tarmac.
Joni parked and stacked the fish on a sack truck to deliver around the centre of town. Marc watched him carry a tray into a shop and tapped Tev on the shoulder.
“How long is he going to be?” he asked. “Because I need to tell you exactly what’s going on so you can decide what to tell your family.”
“About fifteen minutes,” Tev said.
“Okay. Let me explain about the aliens.”
Marc briefed Tev about the teeriks, Gan-Pamas, and the risk of being found. Chris was used to being among men who took bad news with a shrug, but even he was surprised by how matter-of-fact Tev was about it all. But Marc stopped short of mentioning the Caisin gate and the detail of how they actually left Earth.
Tev was trying to fill in the gaps, though. “So Ingram got pally with these crow people and they sent a ship to pick you all up.”
“Tell him, Marc,” Chris said. “There’s no point in hiding it.”
“There is,” Marc said. “What Tev doesn’t know —” He stopped dead. Chris could complete the sentence. But this wasn’t about making sure Tev couldn’t reveal the existence of the Caisin gate if Pham caught him, because he wouldn’t. It was about giving Tev and his family enough honest information to decide if they wanted to leave all this behind. “It’s not actually a ship, Tev. But it does move ships and people very, very fast. I don’t understand the physics, but Fred will tell you all about it.”
“So if things get awkward here, we can go to Opis, but there might be aliens showing up one day with scores to settle,” Tev said.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Thanks for levelling with me. If I was single again, it’d be easy. But I’m not.”
“All I can say is the offer’s there and it stands. I’ll come and get you all out any time.”
“I’ll talk to the family after we’ve eaten. It’s a lot to take in.”
While they were waiting for Joni to come back, Chris noted the occasional heavily-tanned white guy walking around the small town, and wondered if any of them had come from the US or even Britain years before die-back sealed off the Pacific. There were worse places to be exiled. Everyone here checked out strangers, though. It was only a small island, so Joni’s pickup must have been familiar to a lot of folks in town, but they took a second look when they spotted Chris. One guy standing outside a bar was talking on his phone and stared for a little too long. Chris decided to slide further down in the seat. Perhaps he just looked like trouble to them. He’d cultivated aposematism too well.
“Have they got a warrant out for you here, then?” Marc asked.
“It’s a small place,” Chris said. “They know who doesn’t belong here.”
Chris felt uneasy. He was relieved when Joni got back in the truck and drove off, oblivious of what Tev now knew.
“That’s me done, Dad,” he said with a big grin. “Let’s get the party started. You ever had kava, Marc?”
“Yes, but I’m all better now.”
Tev and Joni laughed their arses off. “How about you, Chris?” Joni asked.
Chris assumed it was either alcohol of some kind or a weird, pungent food. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m ready to give it a try,” he said.
Joni laughed again. “Dad, go easy on him, okay?”
It was kind of cute to hear this guy still getting used to calling Tev Dad, because Chris was pretty sure he was. It didn’t sound automatic. It was like he just wanted to hear himself say it as often as possible because he’d missed years of having his father around, and now he wanted to make up for all the times he hadn’t been able to say it.
How old would he have been when Tev’s marriage broke up and Becky decided to take the kids to a Fiji she didn’t know? Chris did the math. Joni must have been at least nine if they arrived before die-back started spreading, but maybe they came later, in the brief window before APS realised how serious the disease was and closed the borders.
It was still touching to see a grown man who clearly worshipped his dad. And it hurt a little too.
“Here we are,” Joni said, turning down another dirt track into what looked like farmland. “Home. I hope you’re hungry.”
Tev’s house was on the western side of the island, about three miles on foot along the coastline from the wharf, five by road. Chris always made a note of transit times in case he ever needed to move people fast. The place looked like it was being rebuilt. Stacks of timber stood in the yard and there were tarps over the roof. Tev had come here in a hurry with his family and it showed. Chris wondered whether he had distant relatives already here who found somewhere for him to live, or if the islanders had simply been generous to neighbours in need and given them a house to do up. This didn’t look like a rich resort.
“Gents,” Tev said, ushering them into the front room, “I’d like you to meet my wife Becky, my daughter Karalaini, my daughter-in-law Sera, and Sera’s mum, Mere Valisi.”
Marc took the gin out of his rucksack and presented the bottles to Tev rather formally.
“I apologise if I’m doing this wrong,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality and letting us come to visit you all. It’s a special gin. But not as special as seeing my buddy again and meeting his lovely family.”
Becky walked straight up to Marc and hugged him. “This is all your doing.” She had an English accent, even more English than Tev’s. “You talked him into coming to find me. Thank you.”
“I do occasionally have good ideas. I’m really pleased it worked out.”
“Tev’s been telling us all about you. Please, sit down and eat. Welcome.”
The floor was laid out like the most lavish picnic Chris had ever seen and he had a moment of minor panic as he realised he’d have to sit cross-legged on the carpet for a few hours with his concealed pistol digging into his hip. It took a little discreet rearrangement before he was comfortable. He’d never seen food like this or tasted anything like it — fish, shellfish, curries, something that looked like a Chinese stir-fry, roast pork, and mangoes and bananas in desserts of some kind.
Tev gave him a bowl of murky liquid — okay, this was kava — and Chris downed it in one as Tev advised. It tasted terrible but made his mouth feel numb, which scared the shit out of him but felt good. He shouldn’t have been envying this life, but he wished he’d travelled and seen the good, ordinary, everyday parts of the world like this one, not the historic landmarks and monuments he’d regretted never being able to visit.
At least it gave him something to talk about with Tev’s family to avoid the inevitable questions about what he and Marc had been doing and that he wouldn’t be able to answer yet. Marc seemed a lot more practised at avoiding awkward topics and regaled everyone with the story of how he and Tev escaped from DC after they’d evacuated the British embassy staff, and how he’d hot-wired the embassy limo as the getaway vehicle and kept it. He’d never told Chris much detail about that day, or what he and Tev had had to do to get out of the city, but Chris had fought his way through places like that and he knew for sure that it couldn’t have been pretty.
That was Earth. Opis still had the chance to be different.
For once, Chris didn’t have to work at being sociable with strangers. The kava had done its job. He ended up talking to Sera and Karalaini about names for the baby and when it was due, asking Mere how she made the curries, and learning a lot about commercial fishing from Joni. Maybe it was the mouth-numbing liquor thinking for him, but Chris was more convinced than ever that this was how life was meant to be lived. It seemed sad that by the end of today, Tev’s family would have to think about leaving all this behind, and, perhaps even worse, Tev would break the news about Opis and aliens, and they’d never see the universe the same way again.
Eventually, Tev tapped the table. “There’s something we all need to discuss as a family,” he said. “It’s about why Marc and Chris came here to see us. We’ve got some decisions to make.”
Marc picked up his bottle of beer. “We’ll go for a walk while Tev tells you what’s going on. If we’re here, it might stop you discussing things frankly. But if you need any questions answered, just call us in, okay? We’re here to do whatever you decide to do.”
Well, that was one way to kill the party mood. Everyone looked dumbfounded.
“Is this bad news, Dad?” Joni asked. “Are you going away again?”
Chris winced. That said it all. Tev shook his head.
“No, we stay together, whatever happens. It’s just something that’s going take some explaining.”
Marc ushered Chris outside. They sat on the plank bench by the front door. Marc carried on drinking his beer.
“I’m going to take a load of mangoes back,” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Did you see that stall down the road? They’re dirt cheap here. I bet Howie’s never had one.”
“I’m glad you’re relaxed about this. I hope we haven’t ruined their lives.”
“I think APS already did that when Tev had to leave Viti Levu.”
“Would you want to leave this place, or hang on in hope like we’re doing on Opis?”
“Nowhere’s guaranteed safe, mate.”
“Yeah.”
“You drank the kava, didn’t you?”
“Just one bowl.”
“It’s a sedative that makes you feel good.”
“Not alcohol?”
“Psychoactive drug from a plant, basically.”
“Shit.” Chris had to stay alert. He felt for his sidearm just to make sure he was ready. His loaded ruck was still in the house. “I thought I was feeling happy because it’s nice here.”
“It is nice here. But you’re probably happy because you’ve been at a party and eaten yourself to a standstill. Just enjoy it while you can.”
It was late afternoon. Chris stood up to walk around, trying to shake off the pleasant haze of whatever went into that kava. He hoped Tev would come out and say everyone wanted to leave, because he wanted at least one thing to be simple and tidy. But he knew it wouldn’t be.
“Should have brought Boadicea,” Marc muttered. “All that food. She’d have gone through it like an industrial vacuum cleaner.”
“Yeah, you do generally find it around islands.”
“Wow.” Chris walked over to the edge of the course and stared at the fringe of white sand and the ferociously blue sea without a rational thought in his head for a few seconds. Nothing prepared him for this. The plain surrounding Nomad was a big horizon to contemplate, but it was made up of low rolling hills and he could see mountains in the distance. But the ocean was absolutely flat, infinite, yet constantly moving. It stretched way past his peripheral vision. “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
“Says the bloke who’s arrived from another planet.”
“I’m going to walk on that beach.”
Chris was conscious of being a large, slow-moving, conspicuous target against a white background. He knew doing carefree things made him look less suspicious if anyone was watching, but for a moment he actually didn’t care if a sniper took him out as long as he got to trudge a few yards through that powdered-sugar sand.
Marc joined him, leaving a trail of footprints. Chris paused a couple of times to pick up a handful of sand and let it fall through his fingers. He wasn’t acting now. All this mesmerised him, and it wasn’t his inner geologist that it spoke to. It was the kid who’d never been to the beach. He made an effort to focus and stay alert. However vast and beautiful the shoreline was, he had a job to do and he was behind enemy lines.
“Jetty,” Marc said quietly. “Dead ahead.”
Chris squinted against the sun. He could see the inlet now, a mini-harbour with three boats tied up at a wharf that formed a T-shape with the jetty, but there were only a couple of guys working on the fanciest of the three. As he got closer, one of the men looked up and waved, then turned and headed their way at a jog.
Tev looked happy.
For a Brit from South London, he’d adapted to the tropical life pretty well, right down to an eye-wateringly bright shirt in turquoise and green. He gave Marc a rib-breaking hug.
“Mate! How are you?”
“I’ve just gone blind from looking at that bloody shirt, but apart from that, great.”
“And you brought Chris. How are you doing?”
“Good to see you, Tev. Now I know what heaven looks like. With my record, I never thought I’d see it.”
“Yeah, it’s nice here. Bit of a struggle lately, but at least we can feed ourselves.” Tev slapped Chris on the back, grinning with delight. “We’re safe here for the time being as long as we keep a low profile. Where exactly did you come from, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“That’s what I came to see you about,” Marc said. “You’re on the run and now your family’s caught up in it. That breaks my heart because I talked you into this. But I’ve got a proposal.”
“Marc, I’m glad you did persuade me.”
“I can get you all out, Tev. Somewhere APS can’t touch you.”
“Britain?”
Marc looked like he was holding his breath. There was no point in a slow build-up. If he didn’t blurt it out, Chris would. But Marc found his voice.
“If that’s what you want, yes,” he said. “But if you want to get even further away, we can do that too.”
“How far’s further?” Tev asked.
“Two hundred and forty-six trillion miles.”
“What?”
“And it won’t take forty-five years, either. This is all classified, by the way.”
Tev looked at him for a moment, then at Chris. A slow disbelieving grin spread across his face and he started laughing.
“You’re still going to Opis, then. I had my doubts.”
“Past tense,” Chris said. There was no point in dancing around this. “We’ve been there a few months now and we’ve come back for you because things are going to get worse here. Especially for you.”
“Seriously? There and back? No. Never.”
“There’s a lot of background, but yes,” Marc said.
“You’ll be telling me there’s aliens out there next.”
All Chris could do was stare at the ground with his hands on his hips and leave it to Marc now. Tev had left Ainatio before the trouble started with Pham, so he didn’t even know Solomon carried out the sabcode attack. There was a lot of ground to cover. Chris wondered how Tev would feel when he realised Solomon was behind the cyberattack.
“Yeah, aliens, five different species so far,” Marc said. “Some of them love us and some probably don’t. We only got here so fast because of their technology. Shall we sit down and discuss this somewhere quiet? It’s complicated.”
“This has to be a joke.”
“It’s true,” Chris said. “And nobody else on Earth knows about this. We’re trying to keep it that way.”
It was hard to read Tev’s expression now, but his permanent cheerfulness had evaporated. “Come home with me,” he said. “The rest of the family wants to meet you. Becky’s made a big meal. Joni’s got to drop off his fresh orders in town on the way back, but then we’ll dig in for the day. Can you stay a while?”
“As long as you need us to,” Marc said.
Joni was still transferring fish from his boat, which looked like a pretty serious vessel, with twin engines, radar, aerials, and all kinds of shiny stuff that Chris couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a simple wooden hull and a big net. The name on the bows was Sautu.
Joni shook Marc’s hand like he was a visiting dignitary. “We’ve heard all about you, Marc. You were in the army too, Chris?”
“Yeah, in the States.”
“Must have been tough over there.”
Chris wasn’t sure how much Tev had told Joni about Nomad. “It was pretty bad. We ended up at Ainatio, which is where I met these two guys.”
“I won’t be long,” Joni said, heaving another tray onto the pile. “I’ll leave the power running and unload the frozen catch later. But I can’t let my customers down.”
“No problem,” Marc said. “Nice boat.”
“Yeah, I got her at a good price. I’m building the business again.”
Poor guy: Chris hadn’t thought about it before, but uprooting the family meant Joni’s business had lost customers. Chris gave him a hand loading the fish onto the pickup truck and got into the back seat next to Marc.
“So what’s happened since I left?” Tev asked while Joni was safely out of earshot locking up the boat.
Marc sighed. “Headlines? Tim Pham tried to stop Shackleton launching and blew up Da Gama, so Sol trashed APS’s infrastructure with a cyberattack, and we had a really tricky armed standoff with APDU until we managed to lock Pham in the campus and get away.”
Tev turned and looked at Marc, arm resting on the back of the passenger seat.
“So Sol did all that.”
“Yeah, sorry. He didn’t know how far it would spread. He just had to stop their air force paying us a visit. Pham found out pretty well everything. Sol, the biosecurity breach, the nukes, even the alien FTL.”
Tev made no comment about Solomon trashing Asia and moved on. “So Pham’s sharper than we thought.”
“No, Abbie Vincent grassed us up. Well, not about the FTL. He actually saw that.”
Tev just shook his head, bemused. Joni jumped into the driver’s seat and they set off along the dirt road.
Chris leaned his head against the side window to catch some breeze from the air conditioning and watched the passing landscape. The first things that got his attention were brightly coloured birds, species he’d never seen before, and picture-book palm trees, then the single-story houses along the way, some with regular pitched roofs and plastered walls and others in traditional style with thatches. The road was unpaved until they got to the small town, where it became tarmac.
Joni parked and stacked the fish on a sack truck to deliver around the centre of town. Marc watched him carry a tray into a shop and tapped Tev on the shoulder.
“How long is he going to be?” he asked. “Because I need to tell you exactly what’s going on so you can decide what to tell your family.”
“About fifteen minutes,” Tev said.
“Okay. Let me explain about the aliens.”
Marc briefed Tev about the teeriks, Gan-Pamas, and the risk of being found. Chris was used to being among men who took bad news with a shrug, but even he was surprised by how matter-of-fact Tev was about it all. But Marc stopped short of mentioning the Caisin gate and the detail of how they actually left Earth.
Tev was trying to fill in the gaps, though. “So Ingram got pally with these crow people and they sent a ship to pick you all up.”
“Tell him, Marc,” Chris said. “There’s no point in hiding it.”
“There is,” Marc said. “What Tev doesn’t know —” He stopped dead. Chris could complete the sentence. But this wasn’t about making sure Tev couldn’t reveal the existence of the Caisin gate if Pham caught him, because he wouldn’t. It was about giving Tev and his family enough honest information to decide if they wanted to leave all this behind. “It’s not actually a ship, Tev. But it does move ships and people very, very fast. I don’t understand the physics, but Fred will tell you all about it.”
“So if things get awkward here, we can go to Opis, but there might be aliens showing up one day with scores to settle,” Tev said.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Thanks for levelling with me. If I was single again, it’d be easy. But I’m not.”
“All I can say is the offer’s there and it stands. I’ll come and get you all out any time.”
“I’ll talk to the family after we’ve eaten. It’s a lot to take in.”
While they were waiting for Joni to come back, Chris noted the occasional heavily-tanned white guy walking around the small town, and wondered if any of them had come from the US or even Britain years before die-back sealed off the Pacific. There were worse places to be exiled. Everyone here checked out strangers, though. It was only a small island, so Joni’s pickup must have been familiar to a lot of folks in town, but they took a second look when they spotted Chris. One guy standing outside a bar was talking on his phone and stared for a little too long. Chris decided to slide further down in the seat. Perhaps he just looked like trouble to them. He’d cultivated aposematism too well.
“Have they got a warrant out for you here, then?” Marc asked.
“It’s a small place,” Chris said. “They know who doesn’t belong here.”
Chris felt uneasy. He was relieved when Joni got back in the truck and drove off, oblivious of what Tev now knew.
“That’s me done, Dad,” he said with a big grin. “Let’s get the party started. You ever had kava, Marc?”
“Yes, but I’m all better now.”
Tev and Joni laughed their arses off. “How about you, Chris?” Joni asked.
Chris assumed it was either alcohol of some kind or a weird, pungent food. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m ready to give it a try,” he said.
Joni laughed again. “Dad, go easy on him, okay?”
It was kind of cute to hear this guy still getting used to calling Tev Dad, because Chris was pretty sure he was. It didn’t sound automatic. It was like he just wanted to hear himself say it as often as possible because he’d missed years of having his father around, and now he wanted to make up for all the times he hadn’t been able to say it.
How old would he have been when Tev’s marriage broke up and Becky decided to take the kids to a Fiji she didn’t know? Chris did the math. Joni must have been at least nine if they arrived before die-back started spreading, but maybe they came later, in the brief window before APS realised how serious the disease was and closed the borders.
It was still touching to see a grown man who clearly worshipped his dad. And it hurt a little too.
“Here we are,” Joni said, turning down another dirt track into what looked like farmland. “Home. I hope you’re hungry.”
Tev’s house was on the western side of the island, about three miles on foot along the coastline from the wharf, five by road. Chris always made a note of transit times in case he ever needed to move people fast. The place looked like it was being rebuilt. Stacks of timber stood in the yard and there were tarps over the roof. Tev had come here in a hurry with his family and it showed. Chris wondered whether he had distant relatives already here who found somewhere for him to live, or if the islanders had simply been generous to neighbours in need and given them a house to do up. This didn’t look like a rich resort.
“Gents,” Tev said, ushering them into the front room, “I’d like you to meet my wife Becky, my daughter Karalaini, my daughter-in-law Sera, and Sera’s mum, Mere Valisi.”
Marc took the gin out of his rucksack and presented the bottles to Tev rather formally.
“I apologise if I’m doing this wrong,” he said. “Thank you for your hospitality and letting us come to visit you all. It’s a special gin. But not as special as seeing my buddy again and meeting his lovely family.”
Becky walked straight up to Marc and hugged him. “This is all your doing.” She had an English accent, even more English than Tev’s. “You talked him into coming to find me. Thank you.”
“I do occasionally have good ideas. I’m really pleased it worked out.”
“Tev’s been telling us all about you. Please, sit down and eat. Welcome.”
The floor was laid out like the most lavish picnic Chris had ever seen and he had a moment of minor panic as he realised he’d have to sit cross-legged on the carpet for a few hours with his concealed pistol digging into his hip. It took a little discreet rearrangement before he was comfortable. He’d never seen food like this or tasted anything like it — fish, shellfish, curries, something that looked like a Chinese stir-fry, roast pork, and mangoes and bananas in desserts of some kind.
Tev gave him a bowl of murky liquid — okay, this was kava — and Chris downed it in one as Tev advised. It tasted terrible but made his mouth feel numb, which scared the shit out of him but felt good. He shouldn’t have been envying this life, but he wished he’d travelled and seen the good, ordinary, everyday parts of the world like this one, not the historic landmarks and monuments he’d regretted never being able to visit.
At least it gave him something to talk about with Tev’s family to avoid the inevitable questions about what he and Marc had been doing and that he wouldn’t be able to answer yet. Marc seemed a lot more practised at avoiding awkward topics and regaled everyone with the story of how he and Tev escaped from DC after they’d evacuated the British embassy staff, and how he’d hot-wired the embassy limo as the getaway vehicle and kept it. He’d never told Chris much detail about that day, or what he and Tev had had to do to get out of the city, but Chris had fought his way through places like that and he knew for sure that it couldn’t have been pretty.
That was Earth. Opis still had the chance to be different.
For once, Chris didn’t have to work at being sociable with strangers. The kava had done its job. He ended up talking to Sera and Karalaini about names for the baby and when it was due, asking Mere how she made the curries, and learning a lot about commercial fishing from Joni. Maybe it was the mouth-numbing liquor thinking for him, but Chris was more convinced than ever that this was how life was meant to be lived. It seemed sad that by the end of today, Tev’s family would have to think about leaving all this behind, and, perhaps even worse, Tev would break the news about Opis and aliens, and they’d never see the universe the same way again.
Eventually, Tev tapped the table. “There’s something we all need to discuss as a family,” he said. “It’s about why Marc and Chris came here to see us. We’ve got some decisions to make.”
Marc picked up his bottle of beer. “We’ll go for a walk while Tev tells you what’s going on. If we’re here, it might stop you discussing things frankly. But if you need any questions answered, just call us in, okay? We’re here to do whatever you decide to do.”
Well, that was one way to kill the party mood. Everyone looked dumbfounded.
“Is this bad news, Dad?” Joni asked. “Are you going away again?”
Chris winced. That said it all. Tev shook his head.
“No, we stay together, whatever happens. It’s just something that’s going take some explaining.”
Marc ushered Chris outside. They sat on the plank bench by the front door. Marc carried on drinking his beer.
“I’m going to take a load of mangoes back,” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Did you see that stall down the road? They’re dirt cheap here. I bet Howie’s never had one.”
“I’m glad you’re relaxed about this. I hope we haven’t ruined their lives.”
“I think APS already did that when Tev had to leave Viti Levu.”
“Would you want to leave this place, or hang on in hope like we’re doing on Opis?”
“Nowhere’s guaranteed safe, mate.”
“Yeah.”
“You drank the kava, didn’t you?”
“Just one bowl.”
“It’s a sedative that makes you feel good.”
“Not alcohol?”
“Psychoactive drug from a plant, basically.”
“Shit.” Chris had to stay alert. He felt for his sidearm just to make sure he was ready. His loaded ruck was still in the house. “I thought I was feeling happy because it’s nice here.”
“It is nice here. But you’re probably happy because you’ve been at a party and eaten yourself to a standstill. Just enjoy it while you can.”
It was late afternoon. Chris stood up to walk around, trying to shake off the pleasant haze of whatever went into that kava. He hoped Tev would come out and say everyone wanted to leave, because he wanted at least one thing to be simple and tidy. But he knew it wouldn’t be.
“Should have brought Boadicea,” Marc muttered. “All that food. She’d have gone through it like an industrial vacuum cleaner.”