Trapped with the Alien Transporter (Ragrim Explorations #1)

Chapter 5

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine .

Ophelia repeated the mantra to herself, but her racing heart refused to slow down.

She was stuck in a broken ship on a broken planet with a pilot she hadn’t asked for and didn’t get along with. It wasn’t fine by any stretch of the word, but she couldn’t afford to really think about just how screwed they were, or she might start screaming and never stop.

“It’s fine?” Hsinth asked. His hand was holding a metal cup of water in front of her face. When had he left and gotten that?

“What?” she asked, snapping her head up.

“You were just mumbling ‘it’s fine’ over and over,” he said.

“That’s because it is,” Ophelia said briskly. She shoved the gibbering part of her brain into a corner and snatched the cup from him and took a long sip. When had she gotten so thirsty?

She was scared. She could be scared as long as she was working, too. Keep moving forward. It’s fine . “So what are we doing now?”

Hsinth stared at her. “What?”

“I said ‘what are we doing now?’” she repeated. “Cleaning? Emergency beacon? Cleaning?”

“You said cleaning twice,” he said.

Ophelia held up her sore arm. She’d already checked. There was no bleeding, just a nasty bruise that was already deepening to a deep red near the center. “That’s because I got hit by about eighty bajillion boxes back there. I thought it was bad when I first got on the ship. Now it’s a million times worse.”

She unclipped her harness and stood up, refusing to let herself be even a little wobbly. The cup was carefully placed down onto the control console with only a little clamoring. She took a few careful steps on the now slightly tilted floor and watched the cabin door whoosh open in front of her to reveal pure chaos on the other side. Every box that had been “stacked” before was now on the floor, scattered every which way and then some. A few had burst open, revealing meal packets and data disks that had scattered everywhere. The sight of so many languages on the packets made her head spin, and she itched to start organizing them and putting them back where they belonged.

“You have a lot of stuff,” she noted dryly as she eyed the mess for a safe place to plant her feet. Picking through this was going to be a nightmare, but she didn’t want to feel like an elephant, crushing his things underfoot every time she needed to get anywhere. Even if it was all seemingly random garbage.

“Some of it might be helpful,” Hsinth offered as they both surveyed the room.

Ophelia picked a spot and wedged her foot in, pushing instant meal packets to the side as she fought to find the floor. There was one foot down, now for the next.

More boxes now, and there was the twinge from her ankle again from the first time the ship had lost the artificial gravity and she’d gone flying.

She sighed in disgust. “I’m not getting anywhere like this,” she said. She turned back to see Hsinth pulling himself over the wreckage entirely, using the railed ceiling of the room as a set of monkey bars. “Oh, isn’t that convenient?”

His shirt had ridden up, revealing a set of abs she was definitely not staring at. They were covered in tiny scales in a darker shade of gold, and she tore her eyes away and looked up to see that his back looked wider now with his arms up like they were. Thankfully he was facing away from her.

Damn it. Okay. She leaned down and picked up one still-sealed box, then turned back around to find somewhere stable to put it. Okay. One down. Only a thousand more to go.

Hsinth stared at her for a minute from where he’d made it to the other side of the room, and then he sighed. “Okay. If you want to clean up in here, I’m going to head to the back to see what’s going on with the engines.”

He turned away, then back. “Thank you. This is helpful.”

Ophelia hadn’t thought being left to her own thoughts would be something she needed right now, but as another door opened and shut to close him off in another part of the ship, she let out a long, shuddering sigh. Some of the tension bled away, but not nearly enough.

The thought of the dead world outside the thin walls of the ship made her shudder as she grabbed boxes and stacked them. She wasn’t even trying to parse out the writing on the sides anymore; there were too many different forms of writing for that.

It was fascinating how the different species in the Republic all used Common to communicate with each other but kept their own languages. She supposed she couldn’t blame them; though she was half-fluent in Spanish and understood enough Creole to get through a basic conversation, she wasn’t about to forgo the languages she’d grown up with for one that was only useful for communicating in the exosphere. Even Ysenys-IV-G mostly used English as a common tongue.

What language had these people used? The display in the cockpit had shown images of a sandy, mountainous planet with a dark metal city in one spot. Had it been hit full-on by the asteroid? Or had the people in it shivered and starved as dark ash rose to block out the sun and the planet froze?

It made her think of uncomfortably hot and hungry days from her childhood, after the Lukrimians had come but before she had any hope of escaping through the bridal program. No one had quite starved after the blue aliens had installed themselves as Earth’s protectors, but food hadn’t been plentiful, either.

She’d never considered that the handful of occupation years had really bothered her, but thinking of the war here was bringing up memories of the creepy picket fleet that had surrounded Earth during the “negotiations” with the Republic fleet. Sure, the Republic had eventually freed the humans, but there had been rumors of the Lukrimians letting the Ralothians hunt for human brides in the less populated areas. Twenty years of the bridal program and “peaceful” guardianship followed by riots and a shattered sense of trust during the occupation probably hadn’t really helped her put down a solid foundation of trust towards aliens. Coming to work with the half-Lukrimian colony made her certain that she’d put it all behind her, but now uncomfortable feelings were welling up with no one to really discuss them with.

Hsinth was so far away from being an option as a friendly ear that it wasn’t even funny.

With enough boxes stacked along the walls again, she finally had enough space to start sorting through what had spilled.

Three… five… nine… sixteen—gods. There were more than thirty spilled boxes in this room alone. Ophelia shuddered to think of what was strewn around the guest room, where she would no doubt be sleeping tonight. It wasn’t quite chilly here in the middle of the ship, but she couldn’t completely push down the worry that the ice outside would somehow thread to the heart of the ship and she’d wake up frozen. Or worse, that she wouldn’t wake up at all.

As she began to shovel packets back into the boxes that matched some of the writing, she began to study the ship around her to keep her mind off of just how bad this could get. After all, they clearly had food. Now… How many people could Hsinth’s ship transport?

The extra bedroom she’d been in before had a few fold-down bunks on the walls, and she remembered counting four there. So four for hops that took more than a day, but if he had to do emergency transports… probably twenty people without overloading the air cyclers. Going by the table bolted to the wall here in the galley, at least the four on what she decided were standard transports would have somewhere to sit, unless he had more seating hidden around here somewhere.

So he could be transporting more humans at once, but at this point Ophelia was glad that she was the only one. Being in a space this small with extra people would be hell if things were going to plan. Add in actual ice hell? She’d probably be losing her mind more than she already was.

The floor was at least clear enough to walk across now. She picked herself up from where she’d been hovering over the last box and went over to the guest room. There was no bracing herself for a repeat of the galley’s chaos. The door opened and though a little pile fell out, her bag wasn’t in it.

Gods damn it.

Small tasks. She had to break it down into small tasks. Haul out what she could so she had space to move, then start stacking again. Then she could find her bag and check on her grain spawn bags and make sure they hadn’t burst open.

Despite the anxiety threatening to overwhelm her, Ophelia forced herself to focus. First, this little pile here at her feet. She pulled the pile of hand-sized boxes out and shoved them all into a pile next to the door. Next, that bigger gray container there .

She moved that too. It was huge and heavy, and her only relief was that it skidded easily along the floor. Alien tech. It was warm to the touch, and though she abruptly wanted to keep her hands against the soothing heat of the metal, she knew she had to keep working. She put the box on the bed now so she wouldn’t forget it later. Out of everything in the ship, it was the one thing that absolutely needed to be in the bed when she was.

The hours seemed to drag as she piled boxes back into place and hunted for her bag. She finally found it buried beneath a pile of scented throw-cloths that had spilled from a metal shipping container. The varied scents made her sneeze, and she hurriedly packed them back into the box they’d come from. That box could go out into the galley; there was no way she’d be able to sleep with the buffet of smells emanating from it. As it was, she was going to have to wash her hands until she stopped constantly sniffing them to make sure her cuticles were clean.

“Time for a break,” she muttered to herself, well-aware that she was rapidly approaching her overload point.

She sat down on the bed and winced. It wasn’t hard , but it was a far cry from what she was used to, and Ophelia knew the only way she’d be getting to sleep would be if she was utterly exhausted. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem tonight, but what about tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that?

How many days would they be here, waiting for rescue?

She hauled her bag between her knees and started to rifle through it. Nothing seemed to be broken, though she had precious few things that even could be. Most of what she’d brought had been her eminently packable clothing. There was no telltale grain scent saying anything had broken, so she risked pulling the bags out.

She’d inoculated them just before she’d left, so only smooth rye was visible. White mycelium wouldn’t begin to turn the bags into bricks of filaments and fuzzy grain for a while now. Maybe less, if the temperature dropped. The bags were still pliable, and she checked the tough plastic for tears. Anything allowing contaminants in would ruin the bag, and though she would do her best to salvage one if it was damaged, it would no doubt be a day-ruining event. She put them down on the bed next to her and reached back into the bag.

Ophelia fished out the jar of powdered caplets along with the one of whole, dried mushrooms. There was no point in taking anything now; though she wasn’t above microdosing, she had to be in the right mindset for it, and being stuck in a small ship on a frozen wasteland was not that.

The door hissed open, and before she could put the jars away, a grease-covered Hsinth stepped through the door, eyes fixed on what she was holding.