"12% contamination" is too general information. The ideal step to check for adaptors and if they are present remove them by FASTX toolkit, Trimgalore, Trimmomatics the list is long. Next, you can check for the reads' average quality; usually, 5' ends have lousy quality, so just trim them for a few bases. You can also filter reads which are bad in quality over the length. All these initial analyses could be done by any of the reads assessment tools, as I mentioned before.
Coming to your next concern, you don't have the assembled genome for mapping. You can use De novo approach: This approach does not require a reference genome to reconstruct the transcriptome, and is typically used if the genome is unknown, incomplete, or substantially altered compared to the reference. But for better quality analysis, you will need reference for the RNA-seq analyses. You can make your reference genome (initially of bad quality but would be enough for your RNA-seq) by using WGS reads or any highthrouput seq which covers the whole genome.