Well, me and Thomson done finished our shift in the engine room when a motor in the hanger bay coughed like it was firing up. Weren’t no one supposed to be out there, so we took off running.
It’s awful hard to run with all the plexisteel scrap, though, and I don’t run very good on account of having got my leg caught in a turbine a few years back. So, Thomson run way on ahead. He was standing by the Fortier shuttle, and there was something on the ground between him and the shuttle. I started jogging again and my boots made a clomping sound that almost sounded spooky on the concrete.
When I got up close, I saw it was a man lying there. Thomson was holding a plexisteel pipe with just one hand. The bolt sticking out of the pipe was red, and the blood was all over his brown coveralls, too.
Thomson being strong didn’t mean he was mean. I only ever seen him get mad once. It was back when the last batch of blue men knifed his wife when she was trying to lock down the hanger bay door. When they got away, he tore the door off its hinges and near on broke down the wall, too. He never talked about it after that, and I wasn’t about to bring it up. But I still remember it same as if it was yesterday.
Well, I was awful surprised to see Thomson standing like that. The man’s face was to the ground, so I asked. “What’s going on?”
Thomson kicked him a good one and the guy rolled over on his side. There was a stream of blood running down from his head. Thomson jerked a thumb like I was supposed to recognize the body, but I never seen him before.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Blue man.”
My hand clenched a bit. “Earthers sending more? We already got rationing cycles.” Everywhere but life support was having brownouts, and we were doing maintenance as fast as we could.
“Earthers didn’t send him.” Thomson poked his toe at the man’s stomach which was covered by a fancy white shirt with long sleeves. The boot left red tread marks. “Reckon he got a shuttle.” Thomson went on toeing the man’s side. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I wasn’t going to stick up for no blue man against one of our own, so I kept it to myself.
“He’s from another dome?”
Thomson stared at me like I was an idiot. “Well, I’m pretty sure he ain’t from the outside.”
The man groaned some and then went quiet again. Thomson kicked and the body flopped over onto its back. It had red dust all over it.
“How you know he’s a blue man?”
“Recognize him from the last batch.”
“Been five years. How you know he was one of them?”
His voice got lower. “I recognize him.”
I didn’t much feel like pushing it, so I changed the subject. “So, what’s he doing here?”
“Thief.”
I snorted. “So, he come all the way here for a shuttle?”
He shrugged.
The man’s hand moved a bit, and I thought about telling Thompson to lay off him. But instead, I said, “How you know what he was doing?”
Thomson pointed at the shuttle. There was a big place on the floor beside it that didn’t have no dust. “He was taking it.”
“So, he flew his shuttle out from some other dome just to take ours?”
Thomson’s logic wasn’t adding up. “Well, maybe he’s here to get even. We run him out in the revolt, and now he come back to blast a hole through the dome.”
The blue man opened his eyes like he was trying to answer, but they weren’t focused. Thomson lifted the bar, but I held up a hand. “Hold on. He ain’t no harm like this. Let’s see what he says.”
Thomson lowered the bar slow, but he held it in both hands like the man was going to jump up any minute. I stepped over him and sat down on the shuttle’s landing claw. It wasn’t my aim, but it meant we were on both sides of him. He put his hand up to guard his head.
“We don’t take no blue men round here.” Thomson crossed his arms, still holding the pipe. “So, what were you doing?”
“I’m not a blue man. I’ve been here for five years.” His eyes went to me and stopped. “I’m working with the Vilq Dome Project.”
“Ain’t never heard of no Vilq Dome.” Thomson uncrossed his arms and crossed them back the other way.
The man still held up his hand like he could block the pipe. “The dome is new. It’s a collaborative effort among the domes in the southern hemisphere. Our goal is to keep it off the Earthers’s radar so it can handle population overflow issues.”
“We don’t got no population issues since we don’t take no blue men.” Thomson leaned onto his other leg. “Besides, where’d you get the material?”
“We’re using Dome One for scrap. We’ve also got the cargo ship that went down last year. The Earthers should assume we stripped it for the existing domes.”
I jumped up and the shuttle claw rocked back. “A cargo ship went down?”
He breathed in and flinched. “It only had a skeleton crew, and there were no survivors, but it looked like they were going to start a new dome.”
Thomson toed the man’s hip, and I shut up.
“So, what’s that got to do with you taking our shuttle?” Thomson asked.
“We came out in a two-man to ask your council to loan us your shuttles. They agreed to loan us your fortier. In exchange, Rawlings, he’s the engineer who came with me, agreed to stay here and work on diagramming a generator upgrade that should solve the problems with the brownouts you’ve been having.”
I sat back down wondering about letting an outsider upgrade our generator. “Easy enough to check his story.” I shrugged. “Ain’t far to Watkins’s place, and he should be home by now.”
Thomson’s fist was white around the pipe. “Don’t care.”
“What you mean, you don’t care?”
“Finally got me a blue man who was part of the last batch.”
My mouth opened and stayed there for a minute. “He’s the one who killed Kate?”
The man’s eyes widened, and he waved his hands like he was saying no.
“No, but he was in the same batch.”
The man waved his hands more. “You mean when we arrived? All I did was hide. I’ve got a wife of my own. I wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone. I was sent out here for fraud, nothing...”
Thomson shut him up with a kick to the chest. “You got to the shuttles, didn’t you?”
The man coughed blood.
I shrugged. “Just because he was here don’t mean he did something.”
Thomson raised a boot and stood there on one leg for a second before he looked back at me. “You’re as good a friend as I got, Peters, but don’t get in the middle of this.” He brought the boot heel down hard on the man’s stomach and the man gasped.
And there it was. I could stick by a friend or stand up for a blue man who was nothing to me.
I looked at the man, but he was coughing and gasping so much, I reckon he didn’t know we were talking anyway.
“Go on and talk to Watkins.” Thomson was holding the bar in his right hand again. “Bring him back here if you want him to know you didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“But you said he wasn’t the one who killed Kate.”
“If it wasn’t for that batch, she’d still be alive. Makes it his fault.” He raised the bar up over his head. “Get out of here,” he said to me. “Ain’t no need for you to be here if you’re going to go guilty about it.”
The bar came down, and I watched. I could have fought. Could have even talked him down, maybe. But instead, I watched. It was just a blue man anyway.
