I Am Waylaid by Beauty
Finished 27 July 2005

After a while, it became obvious to Moran Shetland that he was only staying on board the Silvana for the girls.

There weren't many girls in the infantry. In fact, there weren't any. The only female he got to see on a reasonably regular basis was the ship's cook, who was a fearsome lady with a moustache and very difficult to fall in love with. Of course, girls weren't supposed to be the point of the infantry; he was here for patriotism and universal brotherhood – he wasn't sure how this second one was consistent with the fact that he was here to shoot Dusith marksmen, although this was apparently solved if he did it in a gentlemanly way – but while patriotism was a nice enough ideal in the day it didn't exactly keep him warm at night, and he didn't really want to consider the other, slightly more dubious, aspects of universal brotherhood.

So when Lavie swooped into his life on a messenger Vanship, plucky and young and refreshingly female, Moran lost his heart. Just like that.

And what with one thing and another, suddenly he was on the Silvana and there were girls all over the place. He didn't even mind it when they took away his uniform and gave him a mop. Or when it became obvious that Lavie wasn't remotely interested in him. There was always Tatiana, who couldn't seem to make up her mind about whether she wanted to be an ice maiden or a volcano.

But it wasn't much of a life, mopping ship decks and looking at girls all the time. Especially if they didn't seem to pay him much attention. When he thought about it seriously it seemed crazy of him to want to give this up in order to go back to being shot at, but –

– but it was what he was trained for. Anybody could mop decks, and the faintly bemused look Tatiana had given him when he asked her to leave the ship with him was enough to destroy any man's self-confidence.

And then Sophia was suddenly Queen Sophia, and Moran Shetland could be a rifleman again.

It took serious consideration. Despite his enthusiasm for his old occupation he knew that battles only ever looked interesting and glorious in retrospect. Did he really want to be shot at again – and by Guild technology this time? It frightened the hell out of him.

But if they'd given him a set of medals for staying alive, then he must have been some good at it, surely?

And there was that girl, the one from Dusith, and she actually seemed to like talking to him. She didn't have Lavie's faint exasperation, Tatiana's polite puzzlement.

When he put it that way, it didn't seem like that hard a choice after all.