Sean Macuisdin

A Company Soldier: Tongs, Tartan, and Tin Pot Battleships Sean Macuisdin

In the Spring of 2098, I was sipping a stolen beer from my father's fridge at a bush party above Naramata, British Columbia while staring at Peggy Williams in drunken infatuation. Three months later I found myself twenty light years from Earth and on the deck of a paddlewheeler plying the frigid waters of the colony of Samsara. With a knife against my throat a Sindhi pirate whispered, "Breathe deeply, jawan, for it shall be your last."Fleeing my smothering parents and yearning for adventure, I was seventeen when I ran away to join the United Nations Off-World Legion. I figured myself lucky to have survived the knife to my throat, but it was merely the first of many deadly and curious encounters. Dancing a Scottish battle dance amidst a flurry of dirks and tomahawks; chasing after an eight-year-old boy who thought nothing of charging a cloned bull mammoth for sport; and digging a golf ball out of a rotting caribou carcass with a bent pitching wedge after a terrible slice. That I lived through it all, even leaping from the flaking bow of that same paddlewheeler through a withering storm of rifle fire to charge a beach and take a Tong fort with the Legion and a few score drunken Neo Celts, is still a pleasant surprise to me. To this day, I'm unsure if I survived the ordeal because of, or was there by the design of, my decuria leader, Subedar Angus Motshwega. He was a towering, yeti of a man better known throughout the Legion as MacShaka the Tartan Zulu, and he was both my bane and my saviour as he pushed me into the many deadly trials during my deployment to Samsara.