Trapped with the Alien Transporter (Ragrim Explorations #1)

Chapter 4

Trying to pry Ophelia out of her shell was harder than getting a Madriim spice-snail out, even with the provided fork. And he had no fork specialized for humans, though Hsinth suspected that whatever worked for most humans would not work on the woman furiously tapping out an export plan on her datapads. He’d gone in and out, trying to forget about the rage in her eyes, and no matter what he did, she turned him down.

He offered her snacks that he knew were rare on Earth.

She wasn’t hungry.

He offered to put up the carryall bag she had leaning against her leg.

She wanted it with her in case she needed something.

He offered her the use of the guest quarters for a nap.

She’d already put her other bag in there, but she wasn’t tired at all. And there were boxes everywhere. And there was an odor .

Hsinth wasn’t sure what to be more offended by; the implication that he was messy, or the idea that something in there smelled. Many things on board the ship smelled. When one carried spices and other things around on the off chance he’d be able to unload them, scents often came with them.

So he closed the guest room door, stopped interacting with her, and decided to keep to the cockpit. When it came time for them to sleep, he was sure Ophelia would decide that the room would suit after all, but for now, he would wait for her to be less prickly.

Hsinth idly tapped through the systems that would let the ship drop out of hyperspace, reorient according to local nav-beacons, and then hop into the interstellar route that would take them to the next system. Dropping from the swirling blue tunnels between the stars to sparkling blackness hadn’t quite gotten old, and he scanned the vista eagerly.

This high above the ecliptic plane, he could see the colorful stars that were the system’s planets, scattered around the central sun like tiny grains of colored sand. The waypoint marker was visible in the distance, more of a scattering of bright points than anything truly impressive. The little satellites were at the perfect height to remain stable against the system’s movement. As the system orbited the galaxy, he knew they would eventually need to be moved or replaced, but that was so far past when Hsinth would be dead that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Something bright flashed below the ship and Hsinth looked directly towards the sun. The automatic darkeners in the windows made it possible to see the star without going blind, but they also cut out a lot of the detail.

A proximity warning blared low and long, and he looked away from the star at the screen.

Flare warning shone in white against a red background.

The ship vibrated once, then twice, and then red plasma and radiation took over the viewport.

The Engsth shuddered and juked under the onslaught, and Hsinth slapped at the controls. Ophelia screamed from the social area and he heard the distinct sound of things falling.

“Grab onto something,” he shouted, jamming an elbow into the shipwide comm. “I’m trying to get us out of this.”

She yelled something unintelligible back as Hsinth wrestled with the controls. There was no fighting the solar flare. The waypoint beacon satellites were already gone, so he couldn’t jump away, even back to the previous system.

Something exploded deep in the ship, and another warning flashed on the screen.

Hsinth swore. That was the jump drive.

There really wouldn’t be any jumping out of this, even a short hop to coordinates he would have been pulling out of his ass.

He drove the Engsth at sublight speeds down into the ecliptic, hoping that they could use one of the planets as a shield against the flare, or better yet, just go in a different direction.

The huge gas giant was out; though the swirling purples and blues drew the eye, both poles were lit up in a light show that sent auroras skittering down towards the equator. The magnetosphere was in full display mode, telling him that whatever was happening up here was also happening down there. Any moons would be awash in radiation.

That left the rocky inner planets.

As the ship dove down, he racked his brain, trying to remember what he could from skimming the logs of the waypoints. Fifth lightspeed drop… that made this the Porris system. The computer would have something on it. He tried desperately to send a signal for help, but without the waypoint beacons to amplify the distress beacon, it would be screaming into the void.

The ship’s gravity stabilized and Ophelia stormed into the cockpit, short blonde hair mussed to the four hells. A few red spots on her face and neck had to be from where flying objects had hit her. Hsinth would apologize for that if they made it out of this.

When. When they made it out of this.

A slight tear had opened up on one of her sleeves, and he caught her fingers constantly playing with it even as he willed the Engsth to go faster.

“You might want to sit down and buckle in,” he said.

Ophelia glared at him. “Why?”

The ship jerked again, and Ophelia threw herself into the seat next to him.

“That’s why,” Hsinth said shortly. “Solar flare took out the jump drive. We’re going to have to go down and hope one of the planets has enough of a magnetosphere to shed most of the effects.”

Ophelia’s lips flattened in a wide line. “How soon can we get back on course?”

Hsinth snorted even as his fingers tightened around the controls. “When help comes. I don’t know when that will be.”

“You don’t– I have a job to get to!” Ophelia said.

“Yes, and I want to not die trying to get you there,” Hsinth snapped back.

Below them, the bright shine of one of the planets neared. White ice caught the sun and reflected it to a point where the automatic dimmers in the viewport had to activate.

“What is that?” Ophelia whispered. “It looks like it’s frozen.”

“That’s because it is,” Hsinth said, peering down at his screens. With the damaged systems, he doubted they would get a better place to land. The spectrometers said that the atmosphere was thinner than what they were used to but breathable with assistance.

A huge scar marked the daylit portion of the planet. The devastation was so deep and so severe that even under all the ice, Hsinth knew they couldn’t land there. Wherever he put the ship down, the ground had to be stable, and he just couldn’t trust that area.

He aimed for a spot still on the sunlit site but far from the impact zone and started talking aloud so Ophelia would know what he was doing.

“I don’t remember much about the system, but I remember something about an asteroid that hit the only populated planet and moved it further out from the sun. What didn’t die in the impact froze. I don’t want to land there because I need to make sure the ground won’t collapse beneath us.”

Ophelia’s knuckles were white on the armrests of her chair. She looked small in it even as she leaned forward to peer at the surface. “It moved out of orbit? That means the asteroid had to come from the direction of the sun.”

Hsinth raised his eye ridges. He hadn’t thought she’d be that quick. “The Republic you know exists for a reason,” he said. “Interstellar warfare was a huge problem a few centuries ago, and getting to a point where relativistic weapons were banned took a lot of people dying.”

“ Your regulations are written in blood ,” Ophelia muttered.

“What?” Hsinth asked, confused.

“It’s an old saying from Earth,” Ophelia said. Her gaze was fixed on the view past him.

Plasma flared around the ship again, this time from the journey down through the atmosphere.

“It means when you have rules about how a workplace is run or regulations for an industry, it’s usually because someone got hurt or died,” she said. “We had air travel before the Republic came with spaceships that could just take us anywhere on the planet. The only reason it was considered safe was because if a plane crashed, inspectors would look at everything on the plane to determine why , and because of regulations put in place after that, the accident wouldn’t happen again and sometimes it would even help prevent related ones.”

Hsinth nodded. “We have rules about a lot of things because of wars and interstellar conflicts between systems and groups. I might have to use that saying in the future.”

“I just hope there’s a future to use it in,” Ophelia whimpered.

Around them, the Engsth shuddered, and Hsinth eyeballed the readings coming from the shield. The thin atmosphere was making the ship more unstable than he’d expected.

He adjusted the angle of descent and things evened out, though he didn’t like the fuel levels. It wasn’t that they were low, but he’d rather a full tank than what they had now, especially given the vast quantity of unknown stretching out in every direction below them.

“It’s so white,” Ophelia said. “I’ve never seen snow like this.”

Hsinth risked a glance at her as he set a course for one of the mountain ranges near the equator. “It doesn’t snow on Earth?”

“Not where I’m from,” she said. “When it did when I was a kid, it was always very dirty, and they’re still getting Colorado back to what it was before… well, before us .”

“It’s not like this where I’m from, either,” Hsinth offered. “My people don’t really do well with cold.”

Ophelia ran her gaze up and down his arms. “I should have guessed.”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to ignore the way she’d lingered on the bigger scales sticking out above the collarbone of his shirt. “I’m not exactly looking forward to this.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Below them, the mountain range grew bigger. The ship was trembling again, and this time he couldn’t blame it on the upper atmosphere.

“Mountains,” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll find some shelter there. Firmer ground to land on. And the height will help the emergency beacon as long as it’s out in the open.”

“That makes sense,” Ophelia mused.

“Brace,” Hsinth told her. One of the engines was dangerously close to overheating. Something deep within the ship clanked and rattled, and the Engsth rolled dangerously to the right.

Ophelia’s eyes were wide. Her breath was coming hard and fast. “Is that you?”

“I wish it was,” he said, struggling with the yoke. “We’ll get through this, Ophelia.”

“You have a lot of experience crashing ships?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“I’ve never crashed before,” he admitted. He wasn’t sure if he would have preferred to have at least one under his belt. From the look on her face, Ophelia felt the same way.

He pulled the nose up as the dying engine sent warnings screaming across several screens. The ship skidded across the face of a glacier creeping over the low valley that cut between two mountains, bleeding speed as it went. They skidded up the other side, then the engine flared out completely. Though the Engsth managed to jump one ridge, coming down on the other side was markedly less easy.

Hsinth’s hands ached as he kept a firm grip on the control yoke, despite being jerked around in his harness as the ship bounced over snow and ice. The dark mouth of an overhang yawned in front of them and the ice ran out, leaving them scraping across bare rock.

They finally dropped enough speed as the sheer wall of a cliff edge rose up in front of them. Hsinth hit the reverse thrusters.

“Why didn’t you use those before?” Ophelia shrieked, hands held out in front of her like she could stop their forward momentum with the motion.

“It wouldn’t do anything if we’re going too fast,” he snapped back. The Engsth managed to avoid the cliff face, but now they were parallelling the escarpment in a jerky sledding motion. The cliff walls broke, leading off into increasingly wide gullies that caught his eye even as he tracked the ship’s slowing motion by how long he could study each one. The Engsth finally stopped as they skidded back out onto the glacier, leaving a broken trail of ice behind them.

“We’re good?” Ophelia whispered, looking up at the ceiling like she was afraid it might collapse next.

“I think so,” Hsinth said. He peeled his cramping fingers off the yoke.

Half of the Engsth ’s screen readouts were an angry red, and he shuddered at the thought of what fixing it was going to cost.

Maybe Hasila would help. Half this mess was her fault; if she hadn’t had to pull him into this transport job, he wouldn’t have been jumping through this system and wouldn’t be stuck praying now that the beacon worked.

In the meantime, there was no point playing the blame game and he could tell Ophelia needed a distraction.

“Want to learn about Porris?” he asked, leaning forward to sweep the alarms off the central display.

“What’s Porris?” she asked.

“This system,” Hsinth said as he pulled it up. A grainy image of the planet rotated on the screen next to an explanation of the planet’s history in Galactic Common. The planet image switched back and forth between the snowy wasteland he’d seen as they landed and a desert planet with mountain ridges that trailed the equator in stripes.

Ophelia squinted as the display dimmed slightly.

“Um,” she said. “Any chance you’d be willing to translate that for me?”

“You can’t read Common?” he asked in surprise.

“It takes a sec for me, and with the way your display keeps blinking like that, it’s harder for me to read.”

Hsinth eyed the solid display. “It’s not blinking.”

“I promise it is,” she said impatiently. “Look, all I can make out is a few words here and there, and seeing ‘war’ repeated over and over isn’t exactly reassuring.”

He began to read, still trying to see what she meant about the display malfunction.

“So the system is Porris, named after the planet we’re currently on. You may notice the battered, frozen surface,” he said. “This particular part of snowhell is the remnant of an ancient war between the Parjaal and the Armin.”

“The Parjaal?” Ophelia interrupted, stretching out the vowels. “What are those?”

“You haven’t met any?” Hsinth asked.

She shook her head.

“The Parjaal aren’t in the Republic at all,” he said. “I’ve only ever met a few. They’re lightly feathered, very heavy, very strong,” he said. “Remind me later, and I’ll show you some on the display. They refused to join the Republic and exist out on the fringes. I don’t know much about them; they don’t like traders much so I never had much reason to interact with them.”

“Is the Ermine another one?” Ophelia asked.

“Armin,” he corrected gently. “They’re actually in the Republic but really don’t interact with the rest of us. I’ve never met one.”

“What do they look like?”

“Really slender, a lot of limbs,” he said. “I think eight? It’s something like four arms and four legs.”

“Uh,” Ophelia said. “I’m picturing something like a centaur.”

Hsinth tried out the word. “Cen-torr?”

“Like a horse with a human body attached,” she said.

“What’s a horse?”

“Never mind,” she said. “So what do they do?”

“They build ships,” he said. “I can’t afford one of theirs , but they’re master builders. All the limbs give them a ton of dexterity, and they work really well in zero gravity, so they can build a lot of bigger ships in orbital stations instead of on the planet’s surface.”

“And they got into a war?” Ophelia pressed.

“Right,” he said, remembering. He could talk about Armin ships for days but pulled himself back to the topic at hand. “So this was an outpost for… one of them, I’m not sure which. They were sailing between the stars before Geshal was even starting to negotiate with the Tremallin-Krengar alliance, and their war ended before the earliest iteration of the current Republic was even established.”

She looked around at the wasteland. “ This was occupied?”

Hsinth snorted. “As an outpost. I’m assuming everything important is buried under like a mile of ice at this point.”

“There’s nowhere we can go?” she asked. Her voice was getting higher and fainter. “We’re the only two people on the planet ?”

Hsinth tried to think about what his uncle Wishfour would have said to do.

He was stranded on an icy ball of rock with a panicking human and a broken ship. Wishfour would have known what to do, but Hsinth wasn’t his uncle.

“Unless there’s an archaeological expedition I missed,” he said, staring bleakly at the screen. “Just take some deep breaths; I can tell you’re a little freaked out. We’re going to get through this.”