Trapped with the Alien Transporter (Ragrim Explorations #1)

Chapter 17

“Fee!” Sekele sang as she pushed through the door of Ophelia’s new office, towing a fifty-something human woman in her wake. “This is also Fee; I found her outside looking for you!”

“It’s Ophelia,” Ophelia protested weakly as the other woman gritted her teeth and said, “Fiona. It’s Fiona.”

Both of them gave each other exasperated looks before Ophelia turned her attention to Sekele. “Thank you, Madam Secretary, I’ll take it from here.”

Sekele saluted before going back out of the office, and Ophelia wished that Sekele would let up on getting Ophelia settled properly. She wanted to be upset and annoyed on her own, not constantly babysat.

“How can I help you?” Ophelia asked the other woman. She took the time to shut down the browser on her computer that had a list of human-friendly transporters. The Engsth was on it, but the ship’s status was offline with a note that said it wasn’t taking jobs or queries right now. Ophelia tried not to think about what that could mean.

Fiona gave her a smile that was only a little strained at the edges and smoothed down the creases in her blouse and skirt. “I’m managing some of the architecture for a new city being planned down on the south continent, and we wanted to get some figures on what the wood would be worth off-planet versus keeping it here for later use in building.”

“Sorry,” Ophelia said. “I’m new here. Why wouldn’t you just keep the wood around for later use? Everything here is wood.”

She rapped on her own desk and looked around at the pale wood that made up her office walls.

“Most of the trees we’re clearing are softwoods,” Fiona explained. “Good for interior use, not so much with long-term exterior stuff. We can always harvest what we want to keep later; there are groves for that specifically down in the coastal regions.”

Ophelia blushed. “Oh, now I feel stupid.”

“Don’t,” Fiona said. “I’ve had to learn as I go. I’ve been here twenty years and I’m still learning new stuff. You just got here.”

“Thanks,” Ophelia said. “So is this wood different than the… I want to say it was called Pale Mahog? I know some of the Tremallin colonies liked that a lot.”

She swiped through the datapad that held all of the information on current exports.

“This is new,” Fiona said. She dug in her bag and handed over a rough block of wood that was pale with a blue-purple cast to it, with veins of black running throughout. The bark left on the outside was a soft gray, ungiving beneath her fingernail.

Softwood my ass .

Ophelia peered at it. “That’s really pretty,” she said. “Is the black a fungus like spalted wood back on Earth?”

Fiona’s eyebrows lifted and she hummed approvingly. “You know your lumber.”

Ophelia grinned back at her. “I know my job, and wood is a big part of it here.”

“The veins are natural; it’s all wood,” Fiona said. “I think it has something to do with the mineral deposits down there. I’m no arborist but every couple of years the trade winds pick up dust from the small desert on the southern edge of the continent and move them up north. It has something to do with the way the magnetosphere interacts with the sun. I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s the one good theory I’ve heard so far.”

All Ophelia could do was shrug. “It’ll sell. Four hundred creds a foot, assuming the trunk diameter is over six inches?”

Fiona grinned. “Sounds good to me. I’ll start getting them processed and into the solar kilns.”

Ophelia moved to hand the sample back to her, but Fiona waved her off. “Keep it, stars know I have enough of it.”

The little wood scrap went home with her, and when she got to her boring new apartment with the boring white wood walls, the color only depressed her. Putting the wood block up on the shelf above the bed helped, but only so much. She wanted something new, something different.

Something that reminded her of—

Ophelia cut the thought off before it could mature. She hadn’t brought much with her, and while her spawn bags were just finishing up their colonization in the closet, it wasn’t anything she could really decorate with. The plas-printer she’d bought was a totally utilitarian thing and was busy printing fruiting tubs anyway.

No, for what she had in mind, she’d have to go out to the local markets. There were plenty of people selling homemade things there, and it was all a wild mix of Lukrimian-inspired and human goods along with those of a few other species who had come in and called Ysenys home. The idea of it was fun, even if the reality was a mix of sounds and smells and people that made her anxious enough to shrink.

And yet she’d brave the chaos and the noise and bring a little of it home with her to decorate with in a pleasing, even manner and make the room a little less plain. Out the door she went, hoping that the little noise-reducing earbuds would help with the random noises and let her get through with her mission.

Nudging the door closed behind her while holding a huge, light armful of the loose-woven, soft cloth felt like finally being able to breathe again. The fact that the cloth was all gold tones didn’t escape her, nor did the design that she carefully draped over the back of the couch. Angled knotwork cut across the fabric in thick, sweeping lines of black and gray. Despite the heavy stitching, it still felt like fleece.

Covering enough of the living room walls and the bedroom did a lot to make the space feel more homey. She didn’t quite want to turn the inside into a tent, but this was a good start.

She collapsed onto the small comfy couch that had come with the apartment and pulled the knotwork fabric over her.

It wasn’t heavy, it wasn’t warm, and it wasn’t the hug or the pressure she wanted.

Ophelia still wrapped it around herself as tightly as she could and let the tears come, certain that somewhere, she’d made a big mistake. She just wasn’t sure how to start fixing it.

* * *

“So now that we’re down to a part-time class with you being at work, we’ll be opening back up to our regular schedule where you might see other students come in,” Adina said. “People normally come through the classes as needed, hopping in when they get here and hopping back out when the cycle comes back around to where they came in.”

“Oh,” Ophelia said, looking around at the room. She wouldn’t have minded a few other people to take Adina and Sekele’s attention off of her, but over a couple of weeks of being in a room with just them, going through an intensive cultural crash course, and both of them helping her get even more familiarized with the planet’s economy, both women had started to feel like friends.

“Is that good or bad?” Adina asked.

“Good, I think?” Ophelia asked. “I didn’t realize we were already around to one of the quarterly transports.”

“Oh, we’re not,” Sekele said. “It won’t arrive for another week, but we just wanted to give you some warning. And we do occasionally get people coming outside of that schedule, like you did.”

Ophelia felt the ghost of a smile cross her lips. “Yeah, I guess I did. Do you get a lot of individual immigrants?”

Sekele put her hand up and waggled it from side to side. “Enough that we generally keep the class running, but when there really isn’t anyone, we’re usually working in the immigration office catching up on paperwork and making sure that job offers haven’t slipped through the cracks and that we’re responding to queries from people interested in coming here. We do get a lot of those.”

“Not as many as in the beginning,” Adina said with a fond smile. “But enough. And that’s how you guys met! It’s always nice to see people looking into coming here with an open mind. We’ve gotten a few people who want to stay in human-only cities who don’t want to see a single shade of blue.”

Ophelia frowned even as her heart twinged at the thought of someone very similar. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Sekele said. She shook her head until her earrings jingled. “Where do they think us halfies are supposed to go? It’s not like they split up the cities between women with kids and women with no kids. Especially now that we’ve got another generation started, you’ll see intermixing everywhere.”

“I’m fairly certain that at some point, the majority of Ysenys humans will have some percentage of Lukrimian blood,” Adina added. “I’m just happy that my kids haven’t seen much of that since the early days.”

“When the colony was founded?” Ophelia asked.

Adina nodded. “They were ten, eight, and seven then, but once all the human brides from Lukrim were moved here, some ships went to Earth to open things up to humans who hadn’t been in the bride program. A few thousand people came over in open migration with no holds barred until it became clear that after the blockade of Earth, some people had… call it opinions about Lukrimians, even when the people they were yelling at were half-human.”

“Ahh,” Ophelia said, feeling a little sick. “You’re talking about the riots?”

She’d done enough reading on them to know that it was one historical event she didn’t want to become an expert on. People had died, though none of them had been children. The idea of open migration had been shut down, and when people moved to Ysenys, it was no longer a free-for-all.

Well, it still sort of was, you just had to prove that you weren’t an asshole.

“Yeah, hence the class,” Sekele said. “Figure between me and Adina, if someone slipped through and is just biding their time until they can get free run around here and start something, we’ll catch them out here. This whole back-and-forth conversation hasn’t just been because it’s the three of us. We do them with all of our students because with the extensive topics covered, if someone starts asking weird questions or seems like they’re hiding something, we can start to figure out why.”

Ophelia tried and failed to squish the unpleasant clench in her stomach. So maybe they weren’t friends after all. “Oh.”

Sekele must have seen the look on her face, because she leaned forward and patted Ophelia’s knee. “We grill the shit out of everyone, but that’s not why I hang out with you outside of work,” she said gently. “Remember, we were friends for a while before you finally got off your ass and moved here.”

What if that’s why she’s friends with me? What if it was all just part of what they do to get people to move here? Like missionary dating but with migrants? We aren’t friends; why would she be friends with a weirdo like me?

Ophelia cut her brain off at the pass. Nope, nope, nope, that was not the mental rut she wanted to create in her mind. She wasn’t going to start second-guessing people who she knew liked her, no matter what her brain wanted to declare about people and their possible ill intentions.

“You’re right,” she said, smiling. “So you think that eventually Ysenys will have everyone being a light shade of blue? Will this eventually turn into a new species thing?”

Adina and Sekele cast glances at each other.

“I’m… not sure,” Sekele said thoughtfully.

“Probably more like a subspecies,” Adina offered. “Like how dogs were bred from gray wolves, once upon a time.”

“Yeah but it’s not like if you leave dogs alone for long enough they turn back into wolves,” Ophelia said. “They just turn into that generic type that kind of looks like a dingo.”

At Sekele’s confused look, Ophelia elaborated. “You know, kind of tan coat, sort of curly tail, erect ears like what shepherds have. Generic dog.”

Adina pulled up a picture on her commpad and Sekele cooed. “You didn’t tell me Mothy was one of those!”

“Mothy?” Ophelia asked.

“Our dog,” Adina said. “Well, my son’s.”

She turned the commpad around and Ophelia found herself staring at a dingo puppy. “Ohmygosh,” she gushed. “He’s adorable!”

“Do you want to meet him?” Adina asked.

“Do I?” Ophelia squealed.

“When?”

“How about tonight?” Adina asked. “Come for dinner, meet my husbands, meet the kids, meet the dog.”

Sekele snorted. “Your kids are all, like, thirty.”

“Thirty-shmirty,” Adina said. “They’ll always be my kids even when they’re sixty.”

“Can I bring anything?” Ophelia asked, suddenly nervous about going. What if she said something weird? She could say something insulting to either Adina’s human husband or her Lukrimian mate. She’d done a lot to train certain reflexes out, but what if her efforts at self-policing failed? She could insult Adina’s kids . Maybe she should just say she was sick. Faking being sick was easy, all she had to do was squeeze around her trachea just so before calling and while she was on the comm with someone, and—

No, no. She could be brave. She could be social.

“How about wine?” Adina asked, oblivious.

“Wine sounds great.”