Trapped with the Alien Transporter (Ragrim Explorations #1)

Chapter 16

Had it only been a few weeks since she’d left Earth? Watching plasma skate over the windshield as green spread in every direction below, it was astounding to see how far she’d come, both physically and mentally. She’d survived a move. She’d survived a crash! Being marooned on an ice planet. Falling for… well.

Ophelia risked a glance at Hsinth, ahead of her in the pilot’s seat. He didn’t look back at her. Though she’d made it clear that she was finishing her journey with him, sorting out the Engsth ’s repairs, applying for financing, and working to help offset the cost had taken up most of his time and she hadn’t gotten a chance to speak with him at all. Sleep had been a farce when he’d drop into bed exhausted and she’d lie awake next to him, trying not to touch him before she’d inevitably open her eyes to find herself draped over him like an octopus. He’d have to peel her off to get out the door, but her feigning sleep meant that them talking still hadn’t happened.

She still wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or bad. Putting some space between them had sounded like a good idea, but then a few hours avoiding the topic when they’d gone to check the ship in at the repair docks had turned into a day, then two, then three, and now they were about to land and she still hadn’t manage to broach what was between them. And she was about to step off the ship!

“Hsinth,” she tried to start, but found her voice failing her.

Stay here. Move to Ysenys-IV-G.

Please don’t fly off and leave me here.

I want to see where this relationship thing goes when we aren’t stuck together to not die.

None of it actually left her mouth, and then the pretty red and gold colors from the atmosphere were gone and the ship was dropping towards a small spaceport at the edge of the city.

“Fuck,” she mumbled.

Hsinth turned at that. “Did you say something?”

“No,” she said, forcing out a weak smile. “Are we landing soon?”

There was something soft in his eyes that she couldn’t quite read. “Yeah, we are.”

“I can’t wait.”

A handful of people were waiting on one of the pads, and it was that one that Hsinth directed the ship to. Pale blue skin marked one of them as a half-Lukrimian.

As the ship settled down onto the landing skids with a slight groan, Hsinth started fiddling with the controls.

“You can go ahead,” he said without looking at her. “I just want to check a few things. Repaired maiden flight and all.”

Ophelia clenched her hands at her sides. This was it. Their last few seconds together.

All she wanted to do was throw herself into his arms and beg him to stay, to figure things out with her.

The cockpit door hissed open, and she could hear voices. Whoever was on the landing pad was already on the ship. Had Hsinth opened the ramp as soon as they’d landed?

But those voices were familiar.

Sekele hurtled into the cockpit as Ophelia loosened her safety harness, sweeping her into a hug that smelled like trees and clean clothing. She chattered of a journey finally ended, of the housing waiting for Ophelia and how worried she’d been when Ophelia hadn’t arrived on time. A more stately brunette woman joined them in the cockpit, and Ophelia vaguely recognized her as one of the instructors of the class. Human, unlike Sekele, and Ophelia remembered a biography that said something about managing the migrant program.

Somehow she managed to feel both special and overwhelmed as both women hustled her out of the cockpit, helped her grab her bag from the galley, and ushered her off the ship and onto the concrete launchpad. It all happened so fast that she couldn’t even say a word to Hsinth. His mouth had opened and closed a few times while they’d all been in the cockpit, but he hadn’t said a word. Maybe he really did want her to leave.

“You are going to love it here!” Sekele gushed. “And we’re going to get you fit right in ! With how late you are, you’ll be the only one in your class, but it means you’ll be able to ask whatever you want and we’ll really be able to get into your situation without getting distracted. Oh! This is Adina, she also helps run the program. I wasn’t sure how much stuff you were bringing so I wrangled her to come help me but you really don’t have much at all, do you?”

“Not really,” Ophelia said. As far as she’d been able to tell while waiting for the ship to be fixed, her grain spawn had made it through everything intact, and she’d be on track to start putting it in substrate as soon as she got her hands on the appropriate kind here. “Hi, Adina.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” the older woman said, putting her hand out for Ophelia to shake. “Sekele talks about you a lot.”

“All good things, I hope,” Ophelia said.

Sekele started walking with Ophelia’s arm looped through her own, and for all her physical forwardness, it was like things had always been between them. Sekele talked loud and fast, and Ophelia was left to smile and nod and make quiet, astute observations.

She looked around as Sekele dragged her down a gravel path, and the strangeness of all the huge, towering trees finally managed to shock her brain into some semblance of silence.

“So class first, or apartment?” Sekele asked as they came to a wooden platform that butted up to an elevated tram tube that wound around the biggest trees. Ophelia couldn’t see evidence of either an education institution or any kind of housing. She was exhausted, but part of her just wanted to get things over with. If she overwhelmed her brain, maybe she’d be tired enough to sleep tonight and forget that Hsinth wouldn’t be next to her.

Had he already left the planet?

Her smile felt brittle, but she managed to keep it on as they got onto the three-car tram and settled into seats. It was mostly empty, and the three of them were the only ones who had gotten on from the spaceport. There were no advertisements on the walls like there were on Earth; just cool gray metal that reminded her uncomfortably of the ice and rock on Porris.

The tram took off with no jolt to the passengers. Inertial dampeners? She’d known the colony was well-off, but dampeners on a tram were a luxury.

Long, wide windows let them watch the thickly branched trees pass by outside. Despite the height, they still managed to keep branches on their lower levels, unlike the trees she’d known on Earth.

“Class,” Ophelia said. “I want to get it over with.”

Adina’s eyes widened. “Are you sure? I know you had a lot of missteps in your journey here, it’s no trouble to let you rest—”

“Class,” Ophelia repeated, trying to keep the stress out of her voice. “Please.”

Adina shrugged. “Okay.”

“There are a few native species other than plants here, right?” Ophelia asked.

Please just tell me about them.

“Big rodents, mostly,” Sekele said. “Giant, um, rats? Rats came from Earth, right? These are like really big versions of those, but they can climb.”

Tree rats. Awesome.

“I know rats,” Ophelia said. “Used to eat them as a kid, before the Republic showed up.”

Sekele screwed up her nose and mouth, but Ophelia caught a flash of sympathy in Adina’s face.

“Food shortages, am I right?” the older woman asked.

Ophelia nodded. “They’d eat whatever scraps we had leftover, and if you took a break of a few days in between skinning and processing and then actually cooking and eating them, it wasn’t so bad.”

“No parasites?” Sekele asked with a look of morbid curiosity on her face.

“Not when they’re raised inside,” Adina said. “You kept yours in bins?”

Ophelia’s estimation of the woman rose a bit. “Old plastic ones, yeah. Makes it easy to make sure you know what your food’s eating and where it’s been.”

“I’m glad you don’t have to do that anymore,” Sekele said quietly.

“Me too,” Ophelia said. “How do the big ones here taste?”

Adina grinned and leaned in. “The same. Kind of juicier.”

Despite the food scarcity issues that had made Ophelia’s mom resort to keeping rats in the first place, there was something to be said about the familiarity of a childhood meal. She sighed.

“I guess I’m going to be trying tree rat,” she said.

“Oh!” Sekele exclaimed. “Here’s my favorite part!”

Ophelia pulled herself away from watching for huge furry things in the trees or the arc of a leaving spaceship in the sparsely visible skies above. “What?”

The tree line abruptly ended, giving way to a checkerboard of farms and spaced-out homes that eventually petered out as the biggest trees reasserted themselves. Everything had been cleared away in a wide ring around a central grove to make room for growing crops, but the trees in the center were where most of the housing was. Broad wooden bridges linked trees together, and deep platforms encircled the trunks in layers. On each one she could see wooden structures that housed businesses, open-air marketplaces, and even multi-storied buildings that had to be apartments.

They had been made to fit this place, she realized. The city in the trees, and the society that inhabited it was a place where Lukrimians and humans and those who shared parentage with both could come and exist at the same time. Maybe she could, too.

* * *

“So here’s where we usually start,” Sekele said. A crooked smile sat on her lips as she looked at Ophelia.

Both teachers had pulled up chairs in front of the podium at the front of the empty classroom, and Ophelia had picked a seat in the empty first row. It would have never been her choice on Earth because people in the front row always got picked to answer questions or get interacted with, but there was no getting around it here. The sixth row looked nice and quiet and in the back. How full were the classes normally? And how much were these two going out of their way for her?

“Sorry if it sounds rote,” Sekele said, “But that’s because there’s certain things we need to touch on for everyone. So here we go: We wanted to teach this class in pairs, because it isn’t just a human class to teach. This colony is made up of children from two worlds, and until there is no difference between us; it must be taught by both.”

“I realize that coming to a mixed-species world involving Lukrimians can be scary,” Adina said, stepping in. “But you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t willing to look past that, at least a little. I’ve been here since the moon was first colonized. I was one of the bride-program organizers back before Earth found out what was really happening. My husband and I moved to Lukrim with my Lukrimian spouse, and then, when things came out, we all left along with the newest group of brides that had just come over. Mike, Tahum, and I also managed to get our children out. This program here was kind of my brainchild; we had a similar acclimation program on Lukrim and I wanted to start one here, especially when we realized just how much it was needed.”

“It was a rough few years in the beginning,” Sekele picked up the story. “Most of the humans were leery about Lukrimians, even some of the older children. I was one of them, and I still remember some of the insults that were thrown at me.”

Ophelia grimaced at the reminder. Sekele had been very frank in recalling the incidents, and it was Ophelia’s own outrage and need to be better than those people that had made her first reconsider her initial suspicions towards Lukrimians.

“While we are painfully aware of the war our parents started, we cannot blame ourselves for it,” Sekele said. “We also continue to be aware that we must carry that burden. That is why this colony remains open to all who would come here and is structured the way it is.”

Ophelia remembered with no little remorse her fight with Hsinth over that very topic. Her fingers clenched on the edge of the desk, and she wondered what he would make of this class. Would he take it as an attack on him, or would he learn from it?”

Adina pointed at a hologram of Ysenys-IV-G and the brightly lit markers showing the cities. “The colony is what we make of it. We are, all of us, migrants here. This is not a Lukrimian world, nor is it a human world. It is not a Geshallan outpost or a Kishmari colony or any kind of outreach from any civilization. What we build here is something new. We are called a colony, yes, but only because we started with so many humans and so many Lukrimians, all from one place, and the first two cities were established with clear intent in mind for separation and who would live where. That has since changed and the people have with it. We aren’t a world of refugee brides and children from Lukrim, nor are we a colony of Earth.”

Ophelia swallowed. “So what does that mean for new people coming here?”

Adina laughed. “It means we take everyone. Human, Tremallin, Krengar, everyone. It means that when people come here, they are what they want to be, who they decide to be. All we ask is that you be positive.”

Ophelia couldn’t help the way her face screwed up. “Undying positivity sounds exhausting.”

Sekele snorted at Adina. “I told you that you would like her.” She turned to Ophelia. “No one can be positive twenty-six hours a day. You aren’t sleeping in positivity or eating in positivity, no matter how much you like the dish. Are you using the bathroom in positivity? No. Just don’t harm anyone else, ask for help if you need it instead of letting yourself drown, and treat people around you with a positive mindset.”

Ophelia dredged up a grin, despite feeling anything but positive. She just felt exhausted. And lonely, despite her two babysitters. “I can manage that.”

“Great! Then we’re off to a good start. Now, about the transportation bridges…”