The Emperor's Honour Guards were as off-duty as their commander ever allowed them to be. They sat at a waterfront bar in the busy downtown of the capital.
"Skoll, skoll, skoll," chanted the men, as Lieutenant Espey downed a pint of dark ale.
It didn't take much at all to encourage Loveday's brother, Niko Espey, to drink, and being six foot four and built like a brick shithouse, it took a lot for him to get drunk.
"Oh, the gentle giant's so sozzled now he won't be able to get it up, even with Bunny!" crowed Baer.
Bunny was one of the only half-decent looking State-sanctioned prostitutes in town.
"This giant's not gentle!" roared Niko. "And he can always get it up!"
He leapt onto Baer, tipping the man's chair backwards and trying to throttle him while he had him trapped.
Baer might have been an inch shorter than Niko, but he was even thicker set, with arms like slabs of meat, so they were a well-matched pair of combatants.
Their commander, Alton Meyer, watched on coolly as the two men rolled across the floor of the bar, the rest of the unit surrounding them and egging them on. He wouldn't pull them up unless it got really messy. In their rare downtime, his men needed to blow-off steam.
When the pair of young men rolled right to his feet, still trading blows, he leant down and grabbed them by their collars, hauling them up off the floor. On seeing it was their commander, they let go of each other and ducked their heads.
"Sir," nodded his second-in-command Niko, sheepishly.
"Sorry Sir," Baer said cheerfully, clearly not at all sorry.
"Sit back down and stop destroying the place," said their commander mildly.
"On it, Sir," Niko saluted.
"Stay sharp men," he called to his team, "I don't want a repeat of last time we got called back to the palace after the pub when Cormac was sick in the Chief Consort's garden…"
The men all laughed at Cormac; his best friend Magnus punched him in the ribs good-naturedly.
Like most of the population, they were a mixed-looking bunch; lots of blended ancestry. Young men their age were 4th-gen post-WW3 and by now ethnic groups had broken down and disappeared, along with the countries they came from.
So far as they knew, this little Island and the Mainland, were all that was left above water. Boatloads and boatloads of survivors arrived from the old countries after constant cloud cover from the Fallout inundated the Earth with rain. The planet tilted, rearranging the newly swelled oceans, and sinking continents under its surface.
The invader-survivors ran an almost bloodless campaign of suppression against the lightly armed inhabitants, ruling by dynastic Emperor.
"Thank God they never found out who did it, or I might have to do another year in this shitty unit before the Emperor gives me a wife," Cormac joked.
First wives were allocated by the Emperor after two years of military service for soldiers, and on turning twenty for ordinary men. A couple more years of good service and you would be given a second wife if you were lucky.
"Next year should see us all married if we don't stuff this year up," Commander Meyer reminded them. "If you lot keep training hard and working hard, we'll all be well-rewarded."
Young women were veiled, covered and chaperoned, so it was impossible to get to know them unless they were relatives. Like most of the young men in the city, they still knew where the attractive ones resided.
So did the Emperor, so you had to get in line after him. He liked to take his women into the palace as small children and raise them there until they were of age. That was how Niko had been separated from his sister Loveday more than ten years ago. The siblings only occasionally had fleeting contact after he became one of the Emperor's Honour Guards.
Faint shouts floated across the water from one of the long piers that crisscrossed the harbour.
"Shhhh!" Commander Meyer hushed his men.
The shouts turned into frightened screams.
"Let's go men!" he shouted.
The eight young men jumped up from their seats and pounded out of the bar and down the waterfront, turning right at the first pier and thundering heavily along the old timber walkway.
It wasn't well-lit out here, but the area was always busy with people enjoying the sea walk and eating at the restaurants that were dotted along the piers. Right now, people were running en masse back towards the shore, screaming as they ran.
Alton grabbed a father running past with his family. "What is it?" he barked at him.
"Komodo dragon!" yelled the man, taking in their uniforms and light armour.
"Komodo Dragon!" Alton called to his team. "Niko, Wolf, grab whatever you can find for shields."
The men had come out lightly armed with only their swords and bows.