Tommy

Several hours after arriving home, Tommy lay awake in bed with his eyes wide open, listening to the soft wingbeats of fruit bats and the rustling of leaves outside his window.

It felt like he’d been living the past year with a grey shroud over his head. Now, someone had lifted the corner, and a new light had shone through. A purpose, or at least the possibility of one.

Staring at the white ceiling above his double bed, he thought about his conversation with Seamus. Even if the idea was exciting, it still tied a knot in his stomach, one that hardened every time he thought about following through with any of it.

“How would you go about killing one?”

Like almost every human on Earth, Tommy had fantasised about a world in which the Imperial fleet disappeared. Dreaming about a freak meteor shower knocking every ship out of orbit, or impossibilities like suddenly gaining superpowers and single-handedly annihilating them himself was one thing though. This was something concrete, something real.

Something that didn’t require the kind of full-scale mobilisation that had brought the Imperium down hard on the Australian military, hard enough to force concessions and the one-sided ‘peace’ they were living under now.

Something he could do on his own. Something scary. Terrifying because, as crazy as the idea had seemed at first, he could see it working.

Worse, the more he thought about it, the more easily he could see himself going along with it.

He slept restlessly that night, although that wasn’t unusual for him over the past year. He woke to the warbling song of a magpie, later in the day than he was used to rising.

As he pulled himself up from beneath the sheets, he was greeted by the trimmings of what would, in any other circumstance, have been the ideal life. A wide-screen television hung from the far wall, hooked up to a PlayStation 5 and surrounded by poster artwork. He’d put up album covers from his favourite bands at first. They’d only reminded him that the musicians behind them were dead though, so he’d had to replace them.

Well, all of them except the Foo Fighters, they’d been on tour. He’d left that one up.

The rest of the room was filled with books, cushions, and other comfort items. Mary, his foster mother, was practically an angel in how she’d stepped up to take Tommy under her wing. They didn’t talk about where the funds had come from— the Australian government still technically existed, but it was the Imperium, with its technological and military superiority, that had ‘restored’ the country’s reeling economy with its own currency and system. Tommy was pretty sure a stipend had been allocated for his care— the Kespans were weird about men, both lecherously possessive and oddly patronising. He’d need to research their gender relations more when he got the chance. He really should have been a full book on all that by now, but instead, he’d shut himself away in his room, barely watching the world go by from his comfortable fortress of solitude.

Rubbing at eyes that felt like sandpaper, he stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom to splash water on his face, then paused when he met his eyes in the mirror. The blank stare was back. He needed more practice.

Ten minutes later, he stepped out onto the landing wearing what passed as a smile and went downstairs to find his foster family in the finishing stages of breakfast. There was a finished plate in his sister-in-law’s place at the table, and Mary, his foster mother, was bustling around the kitchen while her husband poured tea.

Oh right, it’s Saturday, everyone’s still home.

“Late start for you,” his foster father remarked with an easy smile. Robert was a broad man with dark hair and tanned skin, flaking from long hours in the sun. He’d been a roofer by trade until the Imperium had banned such potentially dangerous practices amongst men ‘for their safety’. He was a gardener these days, spending most of his time re-edging the neighbourhood lots. Plenty of gardens had fallen into disrepair post-invasion, and he went door to door, asking for residents’ permission to repopulate them with native flowers and low-maintenance greenery.

Unfortunately for him, working outdoors often attracted the wrong kind of attention from the occupying forces, and he apparently spent as much time waving away alien women like flies as he did at work. He still loved his new job and often moaned about how he’d wasted years climbing up and down from the rooftops of people ‘who’d never even see most of my hard work anyway.’ He was standing at the kitchen table as Tommy came down, and when the teenager approached the table, he pulled a teabag from his cup, took a sip and nodded with an exaggerated sigh. “Ah, that’s the stuff. So, Tommy. About yesterday—”

Mary swatted him lightly with a dishcloth. “Let him eat his breakfast in peace, Robert,” she said. Robert watched her with an even expression, then tipped his head in acknowledgement, waiting for her to turn and walk back into the kitchen to fetch a plate for Tommy.

“I didn’t get to speak to you yesterday,” Robert continued, keeping a steady gaze on Tommy as he pulled a chair out from under the table and sat down, gesturing at Tommy to take a seat opposite while Mary plonked a plate of bacon and eggs at his place. The trap set, Tommy had no real choice but to sit before Robert continued. “Everything all right with you mate? I hope you didn’t get into any trouble heading in.”

He dodged another half-hearted sweep of the cloth as Mary stalked back into the dining room. “Ah, give it a break love, this is the world we live in. So…” Robert laid his dinner-plate-sized palms face down on the table as he looked Tommy over. “No trouble at the clinic? Got home all in one piece? You ran upstairs so fast we couldn- ah, hey, cut it out!”

Mary stood over Robert, fiery red hair glowing in the morning sunlight, somehow imposing despite her diminutive frame. Her usually beaming face was scrunched up in a complicated range of emotions as she looked between the two boys. She hmphed, and the glare disappeared, weariness bleeding through before she covered it up with a gentle smile at Tommy. “You do look tired, dear. Did you get enough sleep?”

“Just about,” Tommy replied, glad for the brief reprieve, but Robert was still staring at him evenly, expecting an answer. “And no, nothing really happened, just…. dealing with the aliens, you know. It’s draining.” He ate, realising with the first bite that he’d skipped dinner entirely the previous night. The bacon and eggs disappeared fast.

“Tell me about it.” Robert agreed, piling another heap of bacon onto Tommy’s plate, which he gulped down eagerly. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being treated like a baby bird by half of them and a walking sex toy by the other half.”

“Language Robert,” Mary cut in, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her shoulders slumped as she piled the last of the dishes onto the rack and stood waiting for Tommy to finish with his own.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“I know it’s hard to go out and deal with that kind of thing,” Robert continued, drumming his fingers against the porcelain cup. “But if you spend all your time locked upstairs, you’re just going to end up missing out on everything life has in store for you.”

“I know,” Tommy replied, the last few scraps of bacon losing their draw as he set down his fork. “I just… I get so angry, and there’s nothing I can do about it. What am I meant to do when I can’t even walk down the road without being reminded of what I don’t— what we don’t have any more?”

Robert nodded. “It’s understandable that you feel that way, Tommy, but you can’t just sit up there in your room marinating in bitterness al day; it won’t lead to anything but trouble. You gotta find something to direct all that energy into. It could be anything. You can only control what’s around you and in your power to change. Me? I make our homes better places to live. You need to find your thing.”

Tommy rubbed his sore eyes again, a migraine forming behind them. This was an old argument, one they’d hashed out a dozen times before. He took the weathered path. “You had decades of work experience to fall back on. My whole family was military. I was gonna join as soon as I got home. What am I meant to do? The aliens are already paying all our bills. I have zero marketable skills, and the universities are all being run by the Imperials now. I’m not going to sit in a classroom and listen to a wrinkly prattle on about how great life in the Imperium is.”

“You can come with me to work,” Robert said, firmly. Well, that was new. Tommy blinked, then looked over at Mary. She collected his plate and then turned away to finish cleaning without a word. They’d already talked about it then.

Robert continued, “It’s hard work sometimes, and the pay is shit, but like you say, all your needs are being met. You’re 18 now, and that means you need to start living life on your own two feet.” He sized Tommy up before delivering the killer blow. “Plus, I’d feel safer if there were two of us on the job.” He delivered it without even a hint of embarrassment, and Tommy did a double take.

“Huh?” he managed, incredulous.

“You’re a smart lad, Tommy. Don’t act stupid. Some of the Imperium’s troops are bad news. Not just the kespan ones either. They’re all right when they’re on patrol and think someone might report their behaviour, but off duty? Around a lone man?” he shook his head. “There’s safety in numbers out there. Always better to have someone on watch when I’m doing the heavy lifting or lost in my own head. Keeps the wrinklies from thinking they might be able to grab me before I can hit my beacon.”

He patted a silver boxy device at his hip with one hand. “You make sure you carry one everywhere, you hear me? I know lots of blokes who refuse because they don’t want to feel like they owe the kespans anything, but just having it visible on your person will save you a lot of hassle.”

The emergency beacons were new. After a spate of incidents in the first six months of occupation, the Imperials had issued each male human with an emergency broadcaster, which, when pressed, put out a beacon that signalled their location down to the square metre. Response times varied, but an armed peacekeeping patrol could arrive at most locations in the metro area within a minute. Tommy hadn’t noticed his foster father wearing one when he left the house, but now that he thought about it, he hadn’t been paying much attention.

Robert caught Tommy’s flash of incredulity and frowned at him. “You think a bit of muscle is going to stop them from trying something? I wear mine, you wear yours, and we both look out for each other. You can start on Monday, after we’ve bought you some gloves and a few other bits and pieces.”

Before he could even start to think it through, Tommy found himself nodding. If he was being honest, he needed something else to do other than play video games and guitar in his room all day, and being with Robert would be safer than going out alone.

In the days after the nanite drop the Imperium had cut the subsea cables connecting Australia to the rest of the world, but they still had access to a limited countrywide internet. It was on those forums that Tommy had heard plenty of first-hand accounts from men who’d tried to live a normal life through the occupation. Their accounts were the thing that kept him from going outside for anything but an emergency, like the time his appendix had burst some three months ago. The drive to the hospital in the city had been surreal, with alien soldiers standing on every street corner. When they’d arrived, he’d been ushered into a male-only wing of the hospital to undergo his operation, which, using new alien tech, had taken just half an hour. That had been when his translator had gone in too, though he still hadn't quite forgiven Robert for making that decision for him. Apparently the doctors had been quite persuasive.

“Oh, and we’ll need to get you a ring as well,” Robert said.

“A ring?” Tommy asked.

“A wedding band. It might not deter the really bad ones, but most of them will keep it to pervy looks and won’t touch you if they think you’re married. Their higher-ups have them on short leads and they’ve drummed it into their skulls that humans are monogamous and bad at sharing.”

“That seems kind of… wrong.”

“It’s just a suggestion, but I’d strongly advise it,” Robert’s voice dropped. “Listen, these aliens, they’re the ones calling the shots now. For all intents and purposes, they’re the British navy, and we’re the native women sitting around with our tits out on a sandy beach in paradise. How many male Kespans have you seen?”

Tommy blinked. “None.”

“That’s because, for every twelve or thirteen kespans, only one is male. There are so few of them they’re basically treated like pampered housewives. All their needs are met, and in return, they keep all their women happy. But there’s only one bloke to every twelve of their chicks, right? So, plenty of their women will never even touch a man, which means that when they find themselves here, and they’re surrounded by them, to their eyes, there’s plenty to go around. So, if I were you, I’d wear the ring. Even the ones that don’t understand monogamy do understand possessiveness. The less available you make yourself seem, the less trouble you’ll end up in.”

“Fine,” Tommy agreed. “I’ll wear a ring.”

“Perfect,” Robert snatched his keys up. “I’m free now. Let’s go.”

“Now?” Tommy wracked his brains for an excuse, but nothing came to mind. “I guess.”

Leaving the house twice in as many days, go me, he thought to himself as he pulled on shoes and followed his foster father out to the car.

---

The short drive across town was uneventful, but he’d spent it glued to the window anyway, watching the outside world go by as the sleek green Holden commodore glided across the sticky asphalt.

There was a heavy Imperial presence on the roads, and more of their soldiers on patrol than there had been the last time he’d left the house. There was a greater variety too. He counted half a dozen different kinds of aliens, in addition to the familiar pink cats.

Robert noticed him staring. “New additions to their fleet just came in,” he commented as he parked outside the Derrimut Jewellers store. “Makes you wonder what’s next for us now they’re tightening their grip on Earth.”

The store owner, a grey-haired spectacled man, had nodded at the request for an ‘expedited wedding band’ and ushered them downstairs.

“If you’d come three months ago, it would have been cheaper,” he said apologetically. “Tungsten is getting hard to source, and so is gold and silver. The wrinklies put a cap on all purchases of suitable materials; I think it’s because they use it for components. As if they hadn’t taken enough from us already.” He rummaged through several drawers, each filled with rows of gleaming metal rings. “Here, try this one,” he handed a band to Tommy, who slipped it onto his finger. “Hmm, you could probably go a size smaller if you were going to wear it all the time, but…” he raised an eyebrow. “Somehow, I think you’ll be taking it off regularly.”

“Yeah, this is better, thanks,” Tommy mumbled as Robert retrieved his Imperium-issued credit card from his wallet.

“They’re starting to catch on to the whole fake marriage thing,” the store owner warned. “Best to have a wife on paper or at least a woman you can call at short notice. Better yet, don’t go out at all without a woman around. They’re pretty much conditioned to leave you alone if you have a chaperone.”

Gee, thanks for the depressing tip, Tommy thought, but he nodded anyway. The old man probably wasn’t wrong.

They’d just paid for the ring and walked out of the building when a sharp whistle from behind stopped them in their tracks. Tommy felt Robert step closer, and the larger man wrapped a meaty hand wrapped around his bicep, squeezing in warning. His pulse quickened, and even before he turned around, he had a pretty good idea of what they were dealing with.

“Why hello there boys,” a voice purred through a translator behind them, and the hairs on the back of Tommy’s neck stood up. He squashed the crawling sensation that ran down his spine, but like a light switch had been flipped to the off position, the easy smile he’d glued into place that morning dropped like a stone from his face.

If he’d learned anything from the forum posts, it was that ignoring that voice wasn’t an option. He turned around.

Ah, shit. Here comes trouble.