What Kate Found in the Fringe

by Nemo West

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

part 3

Arcturus secreted watery pastels across the horizon as it rose. On their way to report for duty at the administrative tent that morning, Kate and Quince heard shouting. When they arrived, they found a ring of bystanders watching as a handful of men in Raumstrasse gray argued with the expedition officers. “You told us a month!” a red-faced Janco growled at Patricia.

“Yes,” Patricia replied wearily. “The expedition won’t break camp for a month.”

Janco waved a hand toward the wilderness. “Then why did you send people out this morning?”

“Captain Bucknam took a small party to scout the nearby terrain,” she answered. “We need to map out the best route to the ore deposit.”

“I told you not to let anyone leave camp without an escort,” Janco said.

“The team we sent has a full security escort.”

“No! Your people need to be escorted by Raumstrasse!”

Patricia’s expression soured like an overworked professor hearing one too many excuses for a delinquent assignment. “I wasn’t aware this expedition required babysitting.”

“Babysitting!” Janco spat. “You think we have time to hold your hands for long walks in the woods? Raumstrasse and Terra Novus have a contract. It’s our job to monitor your expedition, to make sure no one gets cheated.”

“No one’s cheating anyone. We’re nowhere near the ore deposit yet. My people are conducting routine topography.”

“How do I know that when my people aren’t there to make sure?”

Patricia sighed in exasperation. “Fine. Pick two of your people, and I’ll send them out on a skimmer to connect with my scouting team. Will that satisfy our contractual obligation?”

Janco offered a stiff nod. “It will.”

As Patricia and Janco hashed out the details of their agreement, the camp returned to its busy routine. Most of the expedition’s gear still needed to be unpacked, sorted, and delivered to appropriate personnel. Certain pieces of heavy equipment also required assembly now that the expedition was on the ground. Local conditions kept adding delays, such as power rationing due to the lingering overcast, and camels floundering in the greasy terrestrial mud.

* * *

Soon after she finished with Janco, Patricia tasked Kate and Quince to collate reports from the expedition officers with data outputs from various scanners and sensors. During a satellite relay window, such reports would be transmitted to both Terra Novus and Raumstrasse monitoring stations off-world. Due to the security risks of a valuable ore discovery in the Fringe, all data had to be encrypted and fragmented before upload.

“I can handle that part,” Quince said. “I’ve worked with AI cryptography before. I studied Q-Sys Programming in college.”

He and Kate maneuvered around each other in a cramped workstation near the back of the busy administrative tent. They were still working out a system to manage the nonstop tasks flooding their duty dashboard. “Q-Sys... that’s Quantum Systems, right?” Kate asked as she cross-checked geotags on a batch of soil analyses.

Quince smiled, surprised. “Right.” He spared Kate a glance. “How’d you know?”

“I knew a few Q-Sys students back in school. They were the weirdos who spent more time with tech than people.”

Quince frowned slightly at the stereotype, but nonetheless conceded, “An accurate description.”

“So, you were a Q-Sys guy, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Then you’ve really never been normal.”

“Never,” he agreed with an embellished sigh.

“What a shame,” she teased. She and Quince had developed an easy and slyly flirtatious rapport during their time together aboard the transport. To her relief, their budding camaraderie made it easier to cooperate as they now managed a flurry of duties. It also raised a prospect she’d been contemplating with growing interest.

Yet she remained cautious. Falling into new relationships had always been easy for her, but making one last ended up feeling more like a sentence than a privilege. That made her skittish about the rising simmer between her and Quince. If she gave in but then things didn’t work out, they’d still be stuck together for the rest of their year-long mission. Fortunately, they were busy enough for now that she didn’t have time to dwell on the matter.

* * *

After several hectic hours, Quince took a break and stepped outside to stretch his legs. Unfortunately, his timing proved disastrous. Non-stop traffic filled the narrow lanes between tents as laborers hauled crates and technicians assembled equipment out in the mist and muck. From her workstation, Kate heard frantic shouts right before a loud crash. At first, she didn’t recognize the subsequent yelling as Quince’s.

When she and several others rushed to the scene, she found a toppled cart behind a camel struggling to right itself. In transit to the motor pool, the aft engine block for one of the all-terrain skimmers had fallen from the cart and landed on Quince, crushing his leg. He flailed in ankle-deep mud, pinned beneath a quarter-ton of metal. Panic and pain contorted his features.

Within minutes dozens of people had descended to help. It took considerable effort, but they eventually managed to free Quince. A waiting stretcher immediately whisked him to the infirmary. Kate felt light-headed when she glimpsed his mangled leg — shin fractured, foot dangling askew, dark crimson staining his mud-soaked coveralls. Despite a wave of nausea, she dutifully followed the procession to the infirmary, anxious to stand by the closest thing she had to a friend on this world.

Their arrival and the condition of Quince’s leg visibly alarmed the expedition’s medics. They had only just begun to unpack and assemble critical gear. Nothing was ready to handle an injury like this. For more than an hour terse voices snapped. Frantic hands ripped open crates and scrambled for anesthetic, splints, and sutures. Weary and nervous, Kate stayed by Quince’s side.

At length, sufficient anesthesia delivered a sleepy calm. The medics stabilized Quince’s wound and then covered his leg with a blanket. Kate then noticed one of them toggle his Digit and dictate a quiet message. Minutes later, Patricia arrived and the medics joined her for a hushed conversation out of earshot from the gurney.

Eventually Patricia nodded, and the medics soon followed her over to Quince. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

Quince responded with an inarticulate murmur.

“How are you feeling?”

“He’s pretty out of it,” Kate said.

Patricia sighed. “I see. Well, I’m afraid I have bad news: our infirmary isn’t ready to properly treat his injury just now.”

Kate glanced at the blanket covering Quince’s leg. “Then what are we going to do?”

Patricia gestured to the medics. “We’ve discussed our options, and we don’t want to see such a young man crippled by this, so we think it will be best to void his contract and send him home while we still can.”

Kate balked. “Send him home?”

Patricia nodded. “Our transport is scheduled to hold orbit until the end of the week before heading back to the Core. We can send him up on a shuttle and get him on his way to proper care.”

“But you can’t send him home!” Kate said. “He’s an apostate to his family’s religion. There’s an execution order waiting for him on his homeworld.”

“Well, then he doesn’t have to go home, but he certainly can’t stay here. Terra Novus won’t accept that kind of liability. We have to get him someplace where he can receive the treatment he needs.”

Kate looked down at Quince. She didn’t want to see him go. Not only was there far too much work for her to handle alone, but the sudden pressure of the moment also catalyzed the attraction she’d been trying to ignore. “Wait,” she said. “There’s got to be a way he can stay.”

“I wish there was. We could certainly use the extra pair of hands. But this is what’s best for him.”

Kate thought fast. “What about Cinder Pointe?”

Patricia hunched a weary brow. “What about it?”

“The settlers have been here for twenty years. They’ve got to have some sort of medical facility, one that’s already prepared to handle something like this.”

Patricia rubbed her temple. “Have you ever been to a first-gen world before?”

Kate started to feel like she was arguing with her mother. “No.”

“It’s a precarious existence.”

Kate didn’t follow. “So?”

“On a first-gen world, survival is a daily struggle,” Patricia explained with strained patience. “The slightest shortage in a time of need can be fatal, so first-gen settlers tend to cling to every resource they’ve got. Their lives depend on it.” She sighed. “If you want, you’re more than welcome to go up to Cinder Pointe and ask them for help, but... don’t be surprised if they turn you down.”

Kate looked from Patricia down to Quince. Feeling defiant, she turned back to Patricia. “I’m going.”

For a moment, Kate could’ve sworn she glimpsed a look of tired admiration before Patricia conceded, “All right. Good luck.”

* * *

Proceed to part 4...

Copyright © 2021 by Nemo West