Savior on Tazboa

By Cassie Bobo

Jane Caraway is an ambitious young woman attending the Earther academy at the capital in North Castle, the planet she was brought to by her adopted parents after she was left not only a refugee on a strange planet, but an orphan too.

 

A bright mind and an enthusiastic inventor, Jane considers herself extremely fortunate to receive an invitation to the capital to attend school from the newly instated Earther Minister Gordon Moorhouse, but her studies are placed on hold when she is summoned to Minister Moorhouse's private apartment within the capital building.

 

All the things Jane could have imagined on her way there, she never suspected that she would be sent off world on the adventure of her life, or that she would find outside of the capital the rest of the Zion galaxy is not the Utopia she naively believed it was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cassie Bobo
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393302780

Book preview

Savior on Tazboa

Cassie Bobo

1

Balzu, Planet Sous – A Visit

The gleaming pearl-colored Rolls Royce with its champagne-colored privacy curtains and it’s mahogany and gold interior accents pulled up to the tiny ramshackle prefabricated house that Jane grew up in. Balzu a small village on the outskirts of the Zion galaxy on the planet of Sous. It surprised Jane that the harsh solar winds of this planet hadn’t completely blown it away.

Instead, it still stood, the winds had blown fresh sands onto its unbalanced porch and her adopted mom was outside, diligently sweeping it away only for a fresh gust to redeposit it onto her doorstep.

Thank you, John. Jane smile, taking his hand as she stepped out into the hot dustbowl that is Sous. How it’s considered a suitable environment for human life is still staggering and the promises of help to make life here easier to the humans who had colonized the planet and learned to live in peace among its alien indigenous still have not come so many years after humans came to stake their claim after losing their own planet.

It is always a pleasure Miss Jane. John smiled back, closing the door of the Rolls Royce and tipped his chauffeur’s hat at the woman standing on the porch, the swish of her broom stopping once she saw the young brunette, who despite being only twenty-four, already had a few grey hairs.

Jane! Oh, my Janey! The broom and her task forgotten; she hurried off the porch to meet the young woman halfway up the barely visible pathway that led up to the should-be-condemned tin can that served as her childhood home.

Hi, mom. Jane’s chin nestled against her shoulder and together they shared an embrace for several long moments.

Jane wasn’t born on Sous; she came here after Earth’s atmosphere had finally collapsed. She was twelve years old then, and her family was poor, her parents spent every last penny that they had to get her on a ship that was leaving Earth’s orbit. Jane never saw them again. When Jane arrived in the Zion Galaxy on one of Earth’s outposts, a leaky boat of a ship called The New Horizon she had no illusions that she would ever see her parents again and that she was an orphan. News of Earth’s collapse was talked about everywhere in the galaxy and its lose was felt by every survivor that arrived daily speaking of narrowly missed departures.

Oh, how I have missed you my sweet, Janey. Bora, her adopted mom cooed into her ear. Since the day that Bora laid eyes on a poor, boney little human girl in Atrusca, a city that had largely become a refugee camp for the Earthers, begging for scraps of food, Bora fell in love with her. Bora never tried to replace her biological mom, but she never gave Jane the feeling that, though she was a take in, Jane was never treated any different from Bora’s own children. Blood or not.

I missed you too, mommy. Pulling away to look into her emerald green eyes, Bora was an alien, native to Sous the differences in their appearances couldn’t have been more marked. Her species was accustomed to the harsh environs of the planet and when Jane was sick as a girl, receiving injections to help her body acclimate to the new climate, she never left Jane’s bedside, Jane’s own ivory skin flushed red and burnt from the intensity of the three suns surrounding the planet and Bora’s, a deep violet purple nursing and fussing over the, to Bora, little alien-human child in need of love and compassion even chastising her other three children who of course, looked just like her and Jane’s new adopted dad when they didn’t understand what kind of new bug Jane was.

Come inside, inside. Bora was already fussing, while the injections had worked – Jane was now heat acclimated to the planet of Sous, the heat was still exhaustive to her, thus a trusty umbrella was always at hand. Following Bora into the house, Jane’s eldest brother Casca and her dad Tarren were sitting at the table waiting to be served their supper.

Look whose home! Casca shouted, his lanky figure erupting from his seat to tower over Jane and hug her, his lips planting a kiss on top of her curly haired head. My favorite Bug, welcome home, Jane.

Twelve years later, the nickname Bug hadn’t disappeared. Now, it was a heartfelt endearment though.

Hello, sweetheart.

Hi, Daddy. It is so good to see you. Jane smiled, feeling his arms lock around her frame and squeeze her to his bony chest.

It is so good to see you, too. Tarren smiled broadly, pulling Jane to sit down at his place at the table while he and Bora got busy, setting the table around Jane and Casca, his eyes which matched his mothers were now eagerly trained on Jane, awaiting her next words

So, Casca urged expectantly.

Casca, let her settle. Bora chided; ladling bowls filled with some of her heartiest soup. Soup, in this heat. It was a normality in Balzu and one that Jane had eventually gotten used to. At least it was much cooler inside than it was outside and soon, the suffocating heat of the day would give way to a paralyzing cold once the suns went down.

It’s okay, mommy. I know Casca likes to live vicariously through my little stories about the Capital.

Well, come on then, I’m dying to know what you’ve been up to. Casca edged, sitting on the edge of his seat with excitement as their bowls were placed in front of them and a basket of Bora’s freshly baked bread was placed in the center of the table.

Picking up her spoon, Jane wavered a moment for dramatic effect, tilting her head from one side to the other for a second or two, glancing up to see three people all staring at her. Waiting.

Well, it all began last month when I received a summons from Gordon Moorhouse himself...

2

North Castle, Planet Sous – A Campus Dash

Just a little bit further, Jane’s exasperated dulcet tenor strained as her slender fingers reached and fell short of the volume with each attempt. She had hoped to accomplish reaching Doctor Ferber’s Index of Biological Species without retrieving the step ladder, yet it seemed that once more her deficiency in height was out to get her, again, even in one-inch heels which she had specifically purchased from Abbeydale’s Haberdashery for Fine Footwear for exactly this purpose.

They certainly weren’t for comfort sake, but the troublesome volume was still dodging her.

Oh, come on! Jane’s voice echoed throughout the corridors of the mammoth library; her explosion was immediately met with aggressive shushing from patrons who were within earshot of her outburst.

You shush, but Jane didn’t speak the words loud enough to merit a response.

At the age of twenty-four she thought herself incredibly lucky to have been afforded the position she was given; her parents had no extra funding to send her to any school. Her mother taught her the tasks of a simple life, cooking, cleaning, and child raising but because of her species and the limited funds given to children living on the outskirts of the galaxy she soon found herself at the age of eight-teen given opportunity that she would have received had she not been orphaned the day she reached The New Horizon, a sad little outpost in the middle of the solar system that was just a gate way to the Zion galaxy and many others.

The Earthers had been busy in Zion for far longer than people understood before the collapse of Earth. In fact, it had been colonizing there for nearly three decades when scientists realized that within a few years the well of Earth’s natural resources would finally be tapped. Earthlings needed a new home, and thus the human races expedition into the farthest reaches of space as they knew it began and the Zion system was more than happy to take them in, for a fine fee of course. Tickets aboard the fleet of ships that the cooperation sent to receive its huddled masses were ten thousand dollars per person.

Upon arriving, Jane realized that space wasn’t the frontier that she thought it would be and for the better part of a year she had atmospheric poisoning, a side effect of the harsh environs that newly arriving Earthers hadn’t built up immunity to. Adults had it the hardest, leaving behind more orphans than just Jane, but the Capital city in North Castle – that was the place that every human living or dead, at least the ones from the nineteenth century forward had imagined when they conjured up dreams of the Utopia of the far away future. North Castle, which Jane now lived, often reminded her of the fabled Lost City of Atlantis. It was perfect, but even she wasn’t naïve enough not to realize that the golden cities streets were built on the backs of those less fortunate.

Minister Gordon Moorhouse had plans to change all of that.

Moorhouse had opened the gates for Earther’s who had been left destitute twelve years ago. They could attain jobs, homes, educations, and that was how Jane found herself in North Castle. When the previous Earth Minister passed, Moorhouse stepped in and made it his priority to track down every living Earther on every planet no matter how far to offer them the opportunity to come to North Castle, to work and live or simply just to visit. What you did with the invitation was up to you.

Jane had reservations, she had already lost one family and she didn’t want to lose another. Bora and Tarren