Welcome to the Boseman

Rolazia’s fingers nimbly connected several wires and tubes underneath the hovering spaceship. She screwed her half-burnt brows together, concentrating as she did. She undid several bolts and stuck them to her magnetic arm cuff so she could fix a burn in the cloaking system. The little panel glowed blue, displaying the percentage of cloaking energy left. It was at twelve percent, then jumped to thirty-four, then dropped to three. Rolazia frowned. She adjusted her goggles and attempted to infiltrate the system and fix the problem. Her efforts were futile, the commands continued to go haywire. The entire system would have to be replaced. She grunted. Only one thing could have burnt the system out like that.

BOW WOW WOW WOW!

A loud noise erupted around her. Rolazia jumped forward, smashing her goggles on the ship. They jammed into her eyes, and it felt as if they were being suctioned out of her head. She howled and pressed a button on the side of the floating mat she was lying on. The mat whizzed and retracted. Rolazia sat up and snatched her goggles from her face and checked to see if her eyes were still in their respective sockets.

Loud music thumped around her. The interplanetary arena which was empty a moment ago save for her, was now filled with people dancing, and strobe lights flashed off the transparent dome walls making it seem like Earth, which was twenty thousand miles away, was having a universal rave.

        “Fortunaaa!” Rolazia howled as she got to her feet and literally walked through a group of women twerking. The booty-shaking holograms split and fizzled as she looked around for Fortuna. Rolazia one hundred percent regretted fixing her party cube.

        “Override 41, party cube, off!” Rolazia commanded as the holographic party fizzled, and the music stopped. She sighed in relief.  

        Sitting on the other side of the dome in a chair was Fortuna, Rolazia’s current employer. Her kinky hair was up in two bantu knots, and she licked her brown wings with her barbed tongue, and her smooth, earth colored face was feline like. Fortuna stopped, and turned, setting large shimmering green and gold flecked eyes on Rolazia. She hissed at her, revealing fangs long as fingers.

        “Heyyy, what’s the big idea?” Fortuna demanded.

“Hiss yourself! What’s your problem?!” Rolazia snapped back.

 Fortuna stopped primping her wings and got to her feet, lithely crossing the room, approaching Rolazia.

She wore half the uniform of her guild. A grey wifebeater made of flexing material, fitted sky-blue and black fatigues that covered her feet. Her jacket, weapons belt, helmet and gloves were absent.

Fortuna’s long spotted tail snaked up and directed Rolazia’s chin toward the window, toward Jupiter, where the Baneker space station sat outside its orbit. The view magnified several thousand times. Rolazia could now see several ships on launching pads and four supreme thrusters with shimmering iridescent wings painted on each. The insignia of the Avian Space Guild.

        “Those are some sexy thrusters. I would love to get my hands on them,” Rolazia admired licking her lips.” Fortuna growled. “I can only take one guess as to why you are not on another mission, and the same guess would include the reason as to why your cloaking panel box is burned out, again.”

        “Again? Gnarly. Adonis is going to kill me,” Fortuna complained.

        Rolazia, along with over ten thousand others lived on nine outposts in between each planet. Fortuna was part of the Space Force Splice Guild. In the year 2095, scientists developed the technology to splice human and animal DNA in order to create soldiers with the attributes of animals. Their goal was to send them into space to explore newfound planets that would be harder to access if they didn’t possess the skill of breathing under water like a fish or flying like an eagle. Fortuna was spliced with several big cat genes and The Kori Bustard, a bird native to Kenya where she was from. They were all picked by top Space Force scientists and were required to possess a New Age Einstein IQ, or NAEIQ which was 430 and beyond, be in top physical condition, not to mention, fearless. The majority of them used the chance to explore the unknown for the betterment of humanity, others, like Fortuna, used it to find planets that grew different strains of smoke, or “nip” which was alien marijuana, and sold it back on Earth. Unfortunately for Fortuna’s ship, most of the planets the nip grew on were superheated and often melted her cloaking panel box.

        Did it bother Rolazia that she was working for a drug dealer? It sure didn’t. So long as she was paid to repair the ship, she would gladly accept the credits. The guild was silently aware of Fortuna’s little side gig. But due to the amount of credits that was put into each soldier and Fortuna’s expertise planet trekking skills, they weren’t going to discharge her. They either sent her on missions nowhere near those planets or took them away, which she hated because she thrived off exploring. She could become an independent planet seeker, but she had to have at least ten years under her belt and a good reputation. With only being part of the force for three years and her tainted record, she lacked both qualifications. She belonged to the Space Force for another twenty years, and to go AWOL meant intergalactic imprisonment which was worse than any prison on Earth.  

        The doors to the arena opened and in walked a tall man with fine black hair shaved on the sides that was up in a ponytail. His strong nose, square jaw, and tawny skin resembled Rolazia’s, but the fine hair and pixie shaped eyes did not. He wore a uniform like Fortuna’s, but his was complete with his jacket, belt, gloves and a black, flat hat with wings on the side which was tucked underneath his arm.

        “Captain Abara!” Fortuna snapped to attention saluting him. Rolazia rolled her eyes.

        “At ease, soldier,” he told her grinning. Fortuna relaxed and went to him, draping her arms around his neck, and leaned in, nuzzling her nose against his.

        “Starshine, my cloaking panel box broke, can you get me another oneee?” She literally purred, stroking his face, retracting her claws.

        “Of course, you can get anything you want,” he answered back lustfully. Fortuna grinned. “Did the engineer take it out yet?”

        “No, she didn’t,” Rolazia answered from the corner. They turned to her.

        “Oh, they sent you again,” he said, blinking bored.

        “Yeah, they sent me again,” Rolazia mocked back.

        “You should really salute to your superiors when they enter the room,” the captain said. Rolazia sighed.

        “For the hundredth time, Adonis. I’m not in the space force, I don’t have to. My only job is to fix this busted ass hunk of trash you helped commission.”

        “I didn’t come here to argue with you sis,” he smirked approaching her.

“Half-sister,” Rolazia emphasized.

“Don’t be mad at me,” he said surrendering his hands. “I can’t help that father chose primal Neanderthal lust over intelligence in a moment of weakness.”

Rolazia reared up at that, ready to lash back, but kept her lips shut, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her upset.

At the end of the century, the space force began breeding geniuses from each country with each other, creating a separate IQ standard. It was voluntary, and the NAEIQ scale was created. They kept the breeding pool clean, but Rolazia’s father, Alpha Abara, who was a Space Force geologist and part of the breeding program fell in love with her mother, Borealis who was not. She was a born and bred comet wrangler. When she got pregnant with Rolazia, it was a huge scandal that practically started a war within the agency. They didn’t want Alpha spreading his expensive seed with anyone who wasn’t in the program. But after her mother staged a coup, and dropped several naysayers off on a comet two galaxies over, it was decided that it was frowned upon, but not illegal to marry, or have a baby with a partner that wasn’t from the program if you were supposed to be a breeder. Her parents set the example, and others began having kids with outsiders for love without fear of persecution. But the agency made them sign a contract saying only one pregnancy was allotted with a non-breeder, so if twins or triplets came from the union, that was fine, but if they had more, they would be sued for all they were worth for breaking the contract. Another stipulation was that their offspring could not have the last name of the breeder. Of course, it didn’t bother her parents, they weren’t the ones who had to basically omit half their heritage on important papers or explain to people why she couldn’t have her father’s last name like the rest of her siblings.

 Rolazia was the only one her father had with a non-breeder. His five other matches were picked carefully. She had five half siblings from each of her father’s matches who believed that they were better than Rolazia since her IQ wasn’t where theirs was, and she only had a masters in space craft engineering, and not her doctorates. Due to her lack of education, she could only work as a contractor on personal ships that were not part of the space force. Hence, fixing ships for spoiled guild warriors who trafficked space grass.

“Adonis, that’s enough.” Fortuna admonished, crossing her arms. “I’ve told you a million times, it’s not nice to make fun of them,” she said seriously, tail lashing back and forth.

        “Wowzers,” Rolazia sighed rolling her eyes. “On that note,” she said gathering her things readying to leave, “it was awful seeing the both of you.”

        “No, no, the Wranglers are about to soar by. The Boseman Dome has the best view.” Adonis said wrapping his arm around Rolazia’s neck. She grumbled.

        “Oh goody!” Fortuna exclaimed joining them in front of the dome.

Adonis swiped a hand through the air and the view outside retracted and rotated away from Earth and Rolazia found herself staring into dark space. There was no light in this quadrant not even from the burning stars that usually looked like smudges of color instead of twinkling bodies like on Earth. The lights dimmed in the dome and they stood in silence, staring out the window.

Several moments went by, and finally, from the corner of her eye, the darkness of space began to glow a twinkling olive and milky yellow hue. Rolazia squinted as the bright glow increased. Then, a black comet, oblong shaped, roughly the size of a house rotated into view. Rolazia could see several figures standing on it as if they were mere feet away. They wore stylish, shimmering tight fitted green suits embedded with Zigat geodes that absorbed radiation, black helmets with dark visors, and jet packs.

 One of the wranglers held a black sword to the body of the comet. They pressed a button as the sword sank into the ground until the hilt kissed the surface. The wrangler retrieved the sword and pulled it out, examining the blade which now dripped a mixture of silver and blue. They waved over several others with swords and other mining equipment and began to excavate the area.

 After wiping the blade down with a cloth, the wrangler sheathed it in the holster on their hip and began to dance. They leapt up in zero gravity, walked circles in the air, landed on the comet, did a split, and bowed. Everyone cheered and clapped on the comet and Adonis and Fortuna did as well.

“Your mother has the coolest job,” Fortuna told Rolazia. “I totally wish I could do it.”

Centuries ago, comet wranglers discovered comets in another galaxy with rubber like stalks long as trees that resembled forests. And underneath these rubber forests they discovered geodes that could absorb radiation, enable ships to jump into hyperspace, create light, and bind gravity. The wranglers were part of a separate guild that rarely landed on Earth. They were constantly in orbit, harvesting the geodes that sold for billions back on Earth and space. They cared nothing about the politics of IQ’s and what they meant; their only purpose was to hunt comets and harvest their resources. Rolazia was terrified of being in the vacuum of space for long periods of time. Suffice to say comet wrangling was not her calling.

“My dear darling, you don’t have the IQ to do it,” Adonis said, kissing Fortuna on the forehead.

“Ugh, I know, but It would be really cool just to dance on a comet at least once.”

Apparently back in the twentieth century, telling one they didn’t have the IQ to do something would have been an insult, but now, it meant that you were to intelligent to do something.

Borealis raised her wrist to her mouth and Rolazia’s wrist com crackled. A voice chuckled on the other side.

        “I never get sick of seeing the shocked faces of you cosseted dome dwellers,” the smoky feminine voice spoke on the other end.

        “Hey, that radiation would do a number on my wings!” she purred into the com. Borealis held her stomach and chuckled.

        “Hello, Commander Polazia,” Adonis started in a sweet voice. “It’s always a pleasure to see you work”,” he put-on an award-winning smile.

        “Thank you, Adonis. I hope Roli isn’t giving you a hard time.” Rolazia scoffed at that.

        “She’s been a bit of a pill, auntie,” he replied, “but I’m sure she will be fine by dinner.”

        “I, uh, I can’t go tonight, I have a class. I’m taking, uh, quantum mechanics level three,” she lied quickly. Adonis turned his head blinking slowly at her. Borealis shook hers.

“Nice try,” her mother said from the comet, wagging a finger. “So long as you are in this galaxy, you will be having dinner with your family. You know I don’t play that,” she scolded Rolazia. “See you tonight.” With that, the comet passed out of sight and her wrist com beeped as the connection ended.

Rolazia sighed, wishing she had hyperspace geodes to help her escape the Milky Way, unfortunately, she had no credits until she finished Fortuna’s contract. Her job paid well enough but living in space was expensive. Rolazia tried to limit her trips to Earth, but her mother insisted that the family have dinner every Friday night. To guarantee Rolazia’s attendance, her parents made sure she had a surplus of fuel.

She could have taken one of the galactic trains that constantly orbited Earth and dropped passengers off anywhere in the world. Most people loved the ride and enjoyed the breathtaking views, but Rolazia couldn’t stand the feeling of the claustrophobic pods that would jettison you down into the atmosphere at breakneck speed.

        “Well, Roli, see you tonight.” Adonis grinned. Rolazia made a face. He turned to Fortuna. “Let’s go have lunch darling, I’ll have that new panel box sent over sometime this week.” Rolazia’s heart sank.

        “Seriously Adonis? I need those credits to fix my terrarium,” Rolazia said throwing her hands up.

Her terrarium, which was composed of all her plants that were her oxygen supply, was so full that it cracked, and roots and dirt were starting to snake through and spill onto her floor.

“Maybe if you moved back to Earth, you wouldn’t be strapped for resources,” he shrugged.

Rolazia frowned. Those were the same exact words their father told her months ago when she asked him for credits for a new one.

She decided to move to the Boseman intergalactic rotating abode between Earth and the moon when she turned eighteen, that was seven years ago. She had been struggling since and her family, especially her father, kept trying to get her to come back to Earth, which she refused.

“Adonis, I need it sooner than that,” Fortuna purred. “I want to go to the hexagon on Pluto tomorrow to shop, and I hate taking the train. They never let me take all my stuff in one trip.”

One side of Pluto was a giant hexagon shaped shopping center that contained everything that one could need to live, or work in space. Ship parts, medicine, plants, seeds, food, geodes, clothes, helmets, electronics, and everything in between. It was beyond expensive, and Rolazia hardly ever shopped there, but those like Fortuna, whose father owned a spaceship company, could.

Adonis sighed. “Fine, he relented.” Fortuna yipped with glee. “I’ll have the part sent over, after dinner.” Rolazia gritted her teeth but didn’t say anything. She would be up until the wee morning hours fixing the ship, but at least she had time to take a nap and nurse the headache that was blooming due to whacking her head before. “Let’s go, darling.” He told Fortuna.

“I’ll meet you in a sec, let me grab my bag.” She told Adonis who nodded and left, waving to Rolazia behind him. She rolled her eyes and began to gather her stuff.

        “Hold on, I have something for you,” Fortuna told Rolazia as she waved her hand in front of a panel and the door of her ship opened. She emerged a moment later holding a cube shaped glass box about ten inches long with what looked like gold dust on the bottom of it. Jutting out of the dust were two fat violet stems holding up teal orbs with throbbing chartreuse veins. She handed it to Rolazia.

        “Wow, this is cool,” Rolazia marveled, turning the glass.

        “That one is from Nerafie 5, a planet whose outer atmosphere is composed of gold dust clouds,” Fortuna told her excitedly. “I collected some of the dust and found the plant at the bottom of an ocean of gallium. Do you love me again?” she asked batting her eyes, purring. Rolazia grinned as she examined the plant.

During Fortuna’s planetary travels, she would collect specimens of all kinds, mainly plants. Once they deemed them non-deadly, they would catalogue and bring them back to be examined by botanists who would figure out how they could be of use. Some plants were just for decoration and would be sold in the hexagon and on Earth. Rolazia was a collector, and once Fortuna found out, she would bring her back an extra plant or flower as a souvenir to add to her collection once it was deemed non-deadly.

“Thanks Fortuna, yes, I love you again,” she replied, still marveling at the plant.

        “You’re welcome! I know your condition isn’t easy, but you’re a great mechanic,” Fortuna said patting Rolazia on the shoulder, and left the room.

        .