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

“Breathe deeply, jawan, for it shall be your last.”
Spring 2098 – That spring was long ago when I was a weak chinned, hollow chested teenager from the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. When I looked upon the snowy tundra of Samsāra, the United Nations colony some twenty light years from Earth, all I could see was my doom. I was a foolish runaway seeking adventure in the United Nations Off-World Legion, with dreams of camaraderie in the rough and just enough danger to thwart the imposed tedium of the future planned by my parents. The colonists and other jawan soldiers of the Legion had very different plans for me, however.

There were the Tongs of the Black Hand that held the rocky beach of the Coloe Vallis where I and the Legion and a few score Neo-Celts under their chief, Amandeep MacGrogan-Singh, assaulted from a trio of wretched paddlewheelers. There were those Gliesiun refugees that I and their champion, a prospector named Fremantle Freya, led an attack against the murderous Tongs that hunted them. Of course, there was that Sindhi pirate that threatened to cut my throat on the paddlewheeler Naimadan Regina as we defended a boat load of fresh, terrified settlers.
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My name is Alexander Rutherford Armstrong and in my years of retirement I can look upon the events of my youth with a certain dispassion. Back then, however, I was a terrified and screaming teenager soon to be called Sikunder. I endured the rough ministrations of my sometimes vicious comrades, and much else in my years in the Legion though it was always in the shadow of my decuria leader, Subedar Angus Motshegwa, who was famously known in the Legion as MacShaka the Tartan Zulu.