Bless Me On My Way - English Edition by dublinertinte (each kindness read aloud txt) 📖

ago.
“I’ve heard that you Ciudad have sex all with each other, regardless of you are together with someone. Am I right?”
Rachel hesitated with the answer. It still hurt to think of her home. It was lost forever.
“We have sex with the partner we choose to”, she said, “but if we haven’t found a partner, we have sex for fun. Some of the men from the mines who came to us thought that this was a sin, but I have never understood what they meant. Sex is just appropriate to get children? Just as we eat one’s fill and we can work. But when the apples are ripe, we eat all the fried apples and make cider until we are sick. If two like each other, why should it be a sin? It is wrong if one forces the other to do it. That happened a few times. Everyone has the right to say no and it is wrong to ignore that. How are the things here?”
“We rarely have sex because we have to be ready for the next mission. There are some areas on the ship where you can do it, but usually it’s suppressed by the drugs we take.”
“I don’t want to do it anymore since I don’t get my period any longer.”
“Take off your clothes”, said Roger, “I want to see you again.”
She obeyed immediately and without hesitation. She turned her back, bent down, turned around again when he asked her to do so.
“What should I do for you to make you talk to Jack?” she asked and obeyed again when Roger let her kneel between his spread legs. Rachel did what Roger asked for, she carried out all the other exercises and lessons without asking. She knew it would be bringing Jack step by step closer to her. She did it, she felt nothing at all, but she was glad when it was over. Roger repeated these things to her, sometimes in variations and each time he bought news of Jack.
Rachel did not understand that Roger told her exactly what she wanted to hear. Jack is fine. All injuries are healed and soon he will be back at work and Roger would arrange a meeting.
Rachel had no idea how big the space station exactly was, where she was and where she would move after the training. She shared the billet with five other women, who were also privates, and they also suffered from the drill and would never had admit it. They could only survive if they were tough, even tougher than their male comrades. They never complained about their sore feet, the bruises and lacerations, and they all were silent as graves about the sexual assaults. They could have formed a sisterhood, but the women did not find a common ground and they distrusted each other. If they wanted to be in a team, the team was formed of the task force. Pilots, hyenas, mechanics. This was the only connection they wanted.
Roger risked a lot when he secretly filmed Jack with a communication camera while checking a glider, and showed the pictures to Rachel. She cried when she saw the sharp pictures and wanted it to see again and again.
“He’s looking so strange”, she said, “but he is well, bless him. He’s fine.”

Jack had spent only two weeks in rehab after release of the hospital area to get back into shape, took painkillers continuously and reported himself back for duty. Bessinger insisted on a tribunal to punish him for his escape, but no one in the higher ranks had an interest in it. They were far away in other orbits. There were a lot of pilots and hyenas like Jack. He hadn’t instigated a revolution on board, he simply just crashed and had failed to make contact to the station. This was the opinion of the general when Bessinger spoke to him by intercom.
“With all due respect, sir”, she said, “he will do it again. At some point, he will succeed to escape.”
“If he tries again, shoot him, Chief Commander. This is your decision. Shorten his wage, cut his period of rest, if you want to punish him.”
Bessinger did not do it, for she knew that Jack did not care how much money he got or how many hours of free time. Jack fought because it was the only thing he could do while he was on the ward or in a glider.

Before his first deployment, he had to see Bessinger. He was almost back to his original fighting weight, but his posture and his movements showed that he was not yet fully restored. She had seen the scars and knew that the muscle would hurt for months. She ripped his head off and reminded him on his duties. As in the old days, Jack did not show any signs of his mood, he stood stoically before Bessinger. She paced around in front of him while talking to him. Jack said nothing. It was not expected.
“You follow the instructions. My instructions. I am monitoring you during your sortie and if necessary, I intervene. But I don’t expect I have to. You still know what to do and you will not do any mistakes. You’re just the pilot, Jack, you even don’t have to talk to the hyenas. I don’t want you to be distracted by one of the guys with stupid questions. We just get the order to look at the cargo ship and to save the log. We suspect that the cargo ship has only been ransacked by pirates, but still we should be careful. For this task no more than seven hours are planned. Stay to that figure.”
“No problem”, said Jack. He did not move, because Bessinger still marched up and down, she was not finished with him.
“When we found you”, she said, “there was a girl with you. You’ve never talked about her.”
“What for?”
“Was she important to you?”
“Bessinger, this doesn’t matter anymore.”

As soon as he was strapped into the pilot’s seat and started the engines, his wounds started to hurt. He could only concentrate with difficulties on the flight, sweating and shivering at the same time. He managed the flight without problems, but he switched off the connection to the station and muted Bessinger. He could not stand her voice, especially if she tried to control him. Jack did not know any of the hyenas, but he made sure that they all returned safely to the station, including the electronic logbook and some metal boxes.
The collision came later when Jack was on his way through the quarantine station. Some of the unpleasant things he had actually forgotten while living with the Ciudad and the quarantine and cleaning were a part of it. After each visit outside the station ship, the crew was subjected to a special cleansing, as it turned out that the contact to alien life forms were not always safe, even if they had no direct enemy contact. In previous decades, many hyenas and pilots were infected with diseases that were not even recognized as such. The compliance of the hygiene guidelines was vital and hated on the station.
Jack went off, threw the clothes into the soil pit and stepped into the cylinder. There was no way getting around it, but he hated this procedure. During the purge he thought of Rachel and the hours together with her in the shallow shore waters, thought about her face and voice and deepened his memory back to it and blocked out any idea what might have become of her. He did not want to think about that. If his mad action had saved at least Rachel, then everything was fine with him. When he started the action in the dome, he did not plan to getting out of it alive.
Bless me on my way

, he had thought, but Bessinger had decided something else for him. He was a cog in the system, an important cog, because only a few of his kind were left.
Rachel

, he thought, as the foul-smelling chemicals were sprayed over him, he breathed in, panting. It burned in his eyes.
I might have tried to run away with you into the forest, but for how long could we have hidden there. I wish I could have shot them all to make you live in peace in your woods.

It came to him that Bessinger had said something about Rachel. She had been with him when they had found him. He still thought about it when he stepped out of the cylinder, fighting against the nausea, even though it was a normal procedure to puke after the cleansing. He dressed and moved over to the lounge, showing a gloomy face. The hyenas sat around bored, debating how they would spend their pay, that the last exciting deployment took place months ago and spread the usual slipslop. Jack crouched against the wall, still fighting the nausea and the stench of the chemicals and everything would have been fine, if not Morgan, whose mouth was as big and overbearing as his feature, would have made stupid questions.
“Jack”, he called across the room, “I reckon you’ve flown missions that were special. The guys here are only with us for one year, tell them about some encounter.”
“What encounter?”
“Have heard that you lead some operations where only half of the men came back alive and tell no one what happened to the others.”
“Can’t remember.” Jack kept his eyes down and Morgan should have known by the tone of his voice better to stop asking and to let him be.
“Come on, as if you don’t remember. I know that you were a has-been, but don’t tell me your brain had suffered. If so, you wouldn’t fly anymore.” Morgan chuckled and added: “You were hiding for years and we thought you would be gone forever, but you’ve lived with this little people. In a pretty good accommodation, as I have heard.”
As Jack did not answer, Morgan turned to the other men and begged for more attention.
“If I get it right, you caught yourself one of the forest girls and you had a good time with her. Heard that the girls lay down for everyone, especially if you came from the mines. Have you told her that you came from the mines that she spread for you?”
Morgan did not expect a physical attack from Jack, so he ignored the obvious signs, he was spurred on by the curious hyenas around. What made Jack explode and made Morgan almost loose his life was the fact that Jack had a notion Bessinger knew more than she had told him. She must have told someone in the crew where he had been. And he did not tell anybody about Rachel.
He pounced on Morgan, brought him to the ground and although Morgan was a heavyweight, he kept him down and beat him up. He was not thinking at all about what he did, he did not care what would happen to him and Morgan. If he would have had a weapon, he would have used it.
Morgan only survived the attack because the security force came in time. Jack was kneeling on his chest, banging his fists into his face and hit Morgan’s head on the floor until the security guy used the stun gun without warning and at the highest level.
It took almost twenty hours before Jack was able to move and speak again. He was in the holding cell, waiting for Bessinger to appear, but she did not come. It was Roger who risked to see him.
“Have you lost your mind, Jack?”
He handed over a plastic cup with turbid content. Neither the color nor the taste could