Trapped with the Alien Transporter (Ragrim Explorations #1)

Chapter 3

Earth being open to trade from other planets might not have been a good thing, Ophelia reflected as she glared at the numbers scrolling on the tab. Looking for a pattern line by line hadn’t worked, so now she was hoping something popped up with quicker scans. She’d known that Earth didn’t have a lot to offer the more sophisticated planets, but she hadn’t expected low-level grifters like Hsinth who obviously just wanted to make a quick buck.

And now those same grifters had their sights set on New Earth. Ysenys-IV-G. Whatever. The nickname had started to stick on Earth, but she was pretty sure the moon should have its own name, even if it was something like The Forest Moon of Ysenys-IV as opposed to The Ocean-Desert Moon of Ysenys-IV, which had a tiny human settlement at the edge of one of the only green spots on the moon’s surface and nothing else.

Ophelia had heard that the settlement was starting to produce interesting blown-glass pieces with the unique and abundant local sand, but that was a problem for when she actually made moonfall. Hopefully Hsinth wouldn’t find out about those before she could set up an actual trade line for whoever was making them.

What was it about him that ruffled her feathers so much? She’d met plenty of friendly humans back on Earth. Maybe it was seeing an alien act so human that was tripping up her sense of appropriate behavior, but then he’d started in on the Lukrimians and the hybrids, and she’d just started seeing red…

She’d been a hair too young for the bride program, and when things had blown open with the war, Ophelia had taken it all a little personally. She hadn’t quite been able to articulate that it was about possibilities lost and a horrible, deep feeling of frustration until she was in her teens, and by then, the war was over. Getting access to information about new aliens had given her an incredible rabbit hole to dive into, though she’d always returned to the safety of Earth, and later, the new colony on the moon of Ysenys-IV. She’d eventually started talking to people there, and she didn’t even know some of them were half-Lukrimian until their video chats. Sekele’s pale blue skin and ear frills had startled her at first, but then she’d realized that no matter their parentage, they were still people .

And yet people like Hsinth wanted to see them just for who their fathers had been. It was infuriating.

Sekele wasn’t still in contact with her fathers—either of them—for her mother had left them behind on Lukrim when she’d left, but several of Ophelia’s other contacts in the colony were. Hell, there were still dozens of older full-blooded Lukrimian men in one of the outer cities. They had passed dozens of checks after the war to prove that they hadn’t been part of the Great Lie and at worst wanted to still be part of their childrens’ and wives’ lives. Ophelia didn’t anticipate much contact with them, but she still wasn’t going to treat them like lepers.

She forced out a frustrated breath and tried to focus on her breathing, wishing she was already there, settling in, and focusing on nothing harder than numbers and her little farming efforts. Moving like this was the most adventurous thing she had ever done. The few friends she’d had on Earth had been shocked to hear of her plans, especially relocating to Ysenys.

“ The Smurf colony?” Annamaria asked, eyeing Ophelia with surprise. She turned around in the workpod they shared. “Why the hell would you want to go there? It’s still full of them .”

It occurred to Ophelia that though she’d shared a workspace with Annamaria by choice, and they’d spent the last six years re-upping their contract to share the pod rental, they’d never really discussed Earth’s past with Lukrim and their own feelings about it. Maybe they should have.

“Only half,” Ophelia said. She tapped her fingertips on the desk in a quick staccato. “Besides, it’s been twenty years. I think that’s long enough that the halflings who’ve grown up there without being brainwashed by the Lukrimians that enslaved us should have their own opinions about things.”

“You think they’ve changed?”

“I think the Lukrimian-heritage colonists have had the chance to learn differently. They aren’t the generation that decided Earth was a source for breeding stock,” Ophelia said. “And there are humans there, too. A lot of the brides who didn’t have kids ended up heading out that way.”

“I hope you’re right,” Annamaria said. She bit her lip. “I never really thought about what happened to the kids after… well. Women were going there for exactly that purpose, right? I probably should have thought about it.”

“Probably,” Ophelia said. Pulling up pictures of the colony assets was easy; she had a ton saved on her work computer, and she started clicking through, leaning to the side so Annamaria could see them. “I’ll admit I didn’t until I started reading up on the colony cities, though. They started off with the full-blooded males going to a different town in the beginning, and for the most part they still stay in Talltree, close to where the hot springs are. I’m really looking forward to going there. The exports seem really interesting; did you know the wood is really dense and while it’s a pain to get here, the cyanocellulose makes this awesome blue hue that reacts differently with Earth’s sun than the Ysenys star? You’ve probably seen it in pictures from the Republic embassy. There’re also some new gems coming over that I’m excited about because of the technological applications and—”

It wasn’t until Ophelia saw that Annamaria’s eyes were glazing over that she realized she’d probably gone on a little too long and reined herself in. “Anyway, I hope you read up on it. I think it’s going to be a good move for me.”

“I hope so,” Annamaria said. She stared at the still of the steam rising from the hot springs. “How are you getting there? One of the quarterly ships?”

“I hired a privateer,” Ophelia admitted. A click brought up the image of Hasila’s shining green ship. “I thought it was the easiest way to go; the exports bureau wanted me quickly, and neither one of us wanted to wait until July for me to get there. I wish they’d sent the acceptance sooner; then I could have hopped on the one in April, but nooo—”

“A privateer?” Annamaria interrupted her, leaning close to peer at the ship on her screen. “How do you know they’re trustworthy?”

“Oh, I asked my Ysenys contacts and they gave me a list,” Ophelia said blithely. “I went with a female captain. Have you ever met a Geshallan before?”

“Are they the ones with uh—” Annamaria started. She lowered her voice and leaned in, then split her fore and middle fingers meaningfully like scissors. “You know, the double penis thing?”

Ophelia snorted. “No. These are the ones with the little scales.”

“Reptilian?” Annamaria asked. “You’ll fit right in.” She stuck her tongue out to show that it was a joke.

Ophelia rolled her eyes. Annamaria had called her reptilian occasionally when they’d first met, before Ophelia had been more open about being autistic and Annamaria had gone through a crash course in Ophelia-isms. She’d adjusted her behavior to use exaggerated facial tells to indicate sarcasm or certain things that Ophelia might otherwise have missed, and Ophelia appreciated her efforts and tried to recognize when her mannerisms might not communicate what she was really trying to say.

She would miss Annamaria.

“If you ever want to come visit, I’ll probably have my own place in six months,” she offered. “Come see the sights, get off-planet, local makeup salons… you know… girl stuff?”

“Girl stuff,” Annamaria echoed. “Ophelia, you are one of a kind.”

Ophelia winced at the compliment. It rarely meant what the words themselves implied.

“I mean it,” Annamaria said. “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing, but here you are, going for it. It’s ballsy.”

Ballsy. Not quite how Ophelia wanted to be thought of, but she’d take being brave however she could get it, even if she was technically running away from something.

Earth was busy and getting more so every year, and the sheer number of people moving back to the cities and jobs shifting and the accounting gigs she handled was getting to be too much. At least on the forest moon, she’d be dealing with the same exports and the same regions and generally the same people until one day she retired. Whenever that was.

“Thanks,” she said awkwardly. “Before I go, did you want any fungi?”

“Because you’re such a fun guy,” Annamaria said. The joke had become old hat between the two of them, but Annamaria was always good at taking excess psychedelics off Ophelia’s hands.

“Sure,” she said. “Whole or capsules?”

“Capsules,” Ophelia said. “I figured it was easier to transport that way.”

She fished a small jar out of her bag and handed it over.

Annamaria’s eyes widened. “That’s a lot. Are you sure?”

“Half of one of my bags is inoculated grain spawn and a few syringes in cold-tubes,” Ophelia told her. Psychedelics weren’t illegal and hadn’t been since the Lukrimians came, but they still weren’t the most popular thing to grow at home. “I’m hoping once I get set up over there, I can have my own little business on the side. I haven’t heard of anyone growing these strains over there, so… you know.”

“Yeah,” Annamaria said. She tucked the gift into her purse. “I’ll think of you every time I take these. I’ll tell people they’re the Ophelia strain.”

“Please don’t,” Ophelia said. “If you get to a point where you actually want to try growing your own, I’ll try to get some inoculated spawn back to you. With the transit time I think you’d be okay with it not dying or fruiting in the container.”

“Uh, maybe,” Annamaria said. “I just kind of like using them, I don’t necessarily want to go through the whole process of finding stuff to grow it in.”

“It’s not poop,” Ophelia said. “I mean it is, but it’s not straight out of the animal stuff.”

“I’m good,” Annamaria said. “But I’ll let you know if that changes.”

Ophelia shook herself out of the reverie. Right now she almost wished she had manure, anything to throw at Hsinth.

With him back in the cockpit, she reached down into her bag and peeked at her sterile bags. It had only been a few hours since she’d last checked on them, but she was still wary about something going wrong. Excess heat, some kind of alien checkpoint that would take them away, something bad that meant that she’d be down to whatever she could get on Ysenys-IV-G instead of the varieties of psilocybin she knew worked for her.

Fresh, dried, and powdered psilocybin mushrooms had worked getting Ophelia back on an even emotional track for years, and she wasn’t about to give them up even while moving to a new world. They made her more in touch with her own emotional state, granted her more intuition when it came to reading cues people around her gave off, and made it just easier to connect with other people. She needed that, especially in a new place where she needed to make good impressions.

Ha. Now there was an idea. If dosing other people without their consent wasn’t against everything she stood for, she’d almost think Hsinth could use the empathy that the mushrooms offered.

But since she wasn’t about to do that… Ophelia closed her bag up and turned back to her pads. The Republic’s longterm terraforming projects meant that wood was in short supply on Earth while they reforested huge regions of the planet, so that was something she could focus on as an export. Trying to get the ice caps to reform was having some effect, meaning the sea levels were lowering again and exposing abandoned, flooded cities along the coasts, along with everything in them. There was nothing that Ysenys-IV-G could offer with that, but it did mean that gas harvests from the gas giant that the moon orbited were something she could look at. She remembered something about the gas isotopes having an interesting effect on Earth concrete, and with the waterlogged old concrete slowly coming back out of the sea, seeing if the gasses might stabilize the crumbling buildings and make them safer, if not inhabitable again, would be worth some research.

She bent her mind to the datapads and the information held in them. Whatever she found, it would be for the moon and the moon’s benefit alone. She would not be sharing any of it with that money-grubbing pilot at all. He might be attractive, but he wasn’t exactly sneaky with what he wanted. The sooner she was off his ship, the better.