The Journal of Virgil Harrison

[Acolyte]

Silas Lapham, the little Texan boy from Tau-31. I could still see his scrubby hair, falling in loose curls over his face, sticking to what blood dried there. He was the only one of his family to have survived the attack on the Stella Nivalis; the Bretonian liner sent to evacuate Harris during the Gallic invasion.

I swallowed my discomfort. "What about him?"

"Well, the boy is not so much a boy now."

"What do you mean? The kid was maybe thirteen."

"And now the boy is fifteen, but two years in a refugee camp can change a person," Geoffrey left the statement hanging.

I knew what he meant. It had been two years since I left Silas and the other five colonists with the port authority on Leeds. Brighton, the urban and commercial center of the planet, was locked down. Ever since the Kusari antimatter bombing of the Mullingar district, the armed forces kept a strict no-fly zone over the planet's capitol. It was the Mullingar district that received us, on a makeshift platform of rubble, and surrounded by Bretonian ground forces.

It had become the reception district for refugees of the war - Planetform colonists, workers from Stokes and LD-14, and those involved in the shipping industry; victims of Kusari's war on the Bretonian economy. Once the industrial heart of the system, it was now a graveyard to skeletal giants, and a tent city began filling in the space between the bones with particolor canvas. The armed forces quickly became too swamped with facilitating the influx of refugees and repelling periodic Kusari landings to care about maintenance of the law.

In short, the camps in Mullingar and other refugee havens across the House became a den of drugs, human trafficking, and gang violence. Children especially had to grow up quickly.

"How bad is it, Geoffrey?" I rose from the couch and ran weary fingers through my hair. I began pacing.

"It depends how you're asking. For us? The boy has money."

"And for him?"

"He did not say, but I suppose the scars to be White Lion initiation marks."

There was tension in Geoffrey's voice. The White Lions; owners of every illegal saloon and brothel in Mullingar. Not the most violent, but far from the least influential. I stepped over to the table at the end of my couch and empty my bottle of ale into a snifter.

"And what does he want with us?"

"The question is what his fifty million credits want with us. These questions I do not know the answer to. Only that he wishes to meet you at the Grand Florentine Hotel on Curacao," the ship dealer sighs on the other end of the line. Almost as an afterthought, he adds, "A shuttle leaves in three hours from Grand Central."

The tone in his voice didn't seem to suggest I had a choice.

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Rebirth | The Journal of Virgil Harrison

[\JG/] - AU - RepEx - OSI - .:j:. - XA - SCRA - ELE - VE - Zoner for Life

I've seen it all, man.