by ToClark
He looked over them, his eyes flintily stern. “What atonement do you require of him?”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed, a voice spoke up quietly from somewhere near the front. “Let him fast for one week.”
Matthias lifted his eyes and overlooked them. “Is that the wish of you all? So be it then. Dane will be confined to his room to drink only God’s pure water for one standard week! God be with you. Amen!”
After three days Dane went to Matthias to beg for mercy and allow him some food. He had to point out that it was not for him, Matthias, to interfere with an atonement required by his fellow colonists and that the matter was really in their hands, not his. But he understood how Dane must feel and he wondered how truly contrite he was. Maybe if Dane took today’s bible class and gained full marks from Com1’s onscreen test, then he would have a case to take to the flock and intercede on his behalf.
It was a difficult test and Dane had to have several goes at it before he fully succeeded after which Matthias assembled the males, had Com1 rig a conference link via Martha to the females in H3 and then called Dane to the podium.
“My children,” he began. “I have brought Dane before you at his own request to beg you to release him from his fast. I have suggested to him that if he studies his bible class diligently and satisfies Com1 then you might be willing to grant his wish. Did you want to say anything in support of your supplication, Dane?”
Dane couldn’t look up but he mumbled that he was sorry he had done wrong and promised to be good in future. After hearing his rather pathetic recantation, Matthias led them in deciding that he could have his ration as long as he gained full marks in his bible study test each day and that otherwise, that would be the end of the matter.
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Amelie was besotted with Moses and he, in turn was besotted with her. They turned the medical centre into a honeymoon suite as best they could. They reorganised the sleeping arrangements from the abandoned endeavours of the earlier female shuttle crew, creating a very satisfactory double bed out of them in what presumably was intended to be the medical staffroom.
The others were told that Amelie was being kept in indefinite isolation because she was suspected of having caught an extraterrestrial infection from when she had gone out on to the glacier on P2. Other than herself, only Manny and Desmond had been exposed and now, with Manny gone, the hibernated Desmond was the only other crewmember who might have been at risk.
The sexual attraction between them was fantastic. Their bodies had only to touch to light the fire that would then consume them until they exhausted each other. It was the same for both, they simply didn’t seem able to get enough of each other, the passion never seemed to dim down, however often they made love.
Amelie snuggled up against his muscular body, her breasts, tender from his stroking hands and the suction of his lips on her nipples, nuzzling against his torso, her swollen pudenda gently throbbing from his most recent and very protracted penetration, her hand gently stroking his relaxed but still more than generous penis. “Moses” she murmured sleepily, “if you ever tired of me, I would die.”
He slipped his arm around her shoulders and hugged her protectively. “Amelie, I will never tire of you. My body is yours as much as your body is mine. We are one.”
She kissed him and drifted to sleep, warm and happy within his encircling embrace. He lay there with her for a long time, drowsy and contented, knowing that she would be his forever and that he would always want her, that he had been right to overpower Desmond and force him into the hibernation cubicle.
His lips twitched faintly in amusement at the memory and then he began the slow drift into sated sleep. The last dreamy image to float through his consciousness was a tall, willowy body and animated face, sensuous mouth and almost liquid brown eyes, framed in shoulder length black hair. Gitangali.
Hack had made himself a computer room in the instruments laboratory in the observatory and spent his waking hours keeping tabs on what everybody was doing. He spent an inordinate amount of time organising the surveillance equipment in H3 so that he could watch the females in their naked glory. He especially liked it when they swam in the pond or lay about on the grassy banks surrounding it. His camera kit was so good that he could focus down to bring a single breast up to full screen size and once he had caught one of them masturbating herself - he had kept the video clip and played it over sometimes when there was nothing else much happening.
He had also watched Amelie and Moses in their abandoned lovemaking but found himself becoming jealous and frustrated and unable to enjoy it. There was no doubt in his mind that she was the prettiest and most attractive of the females on the ship and he harboured a secret, and increasingly powerful desire to possess her. So much so that he was beginning to find himself unable to sleep because of it. If Moses ever realised how he felt, he realised grimly, he would probably try to kill him.
Chapter 10
Moses had completed his discussion with Matthias. The animosity between them had been barely disguised, Matthias was not happy that he had gone to live in the medical centre with Amelie. So Moses had found it necessary to remind him that the price of his policing action with the males of the expedition was that he should have her and, that being so, just where was the ‘having’ supposed to take place? Her quarantine status had been a stroke of genius, actually dreamed up by Hack, and Matthias should be glad that there was such an honest and convincing reason for her removal from the women’s quarters in H3.
No, he hadn’t actually made himself available in the observatory for several days in order to take part in and supervise the daily prayers because he was very occupied on other aspects of surveillance. Was Matthias aware that the females were every bit as liable to the fomentation of lewd and lustful thoughts about their counterparts in the observatory as the males had been towards them? Actually, Matthias had not, preferring to leave management of them to Martha in her role of Mother Superior and he had seen evidence enough of her competent performance as such in terms of their bible study scores and lack of any other rumblings of discontent from that direction.
Moses’ innuendo had disturbed his mental tranquility and he had been forced to accept that he needed to consider infiltrating them in order to get the full picture of what evil might be being concocted from that direction. He had to agree to allow Moses to find a way of ascertaining what, if anything was going on. He had no idea of the extent to which Hack had been snooping on them since he had set up his own centre and he would have been horrified if he had. So he gave Moses his qualified blessing.
Hack had kept his door locked so Moses had to knock and wait. “Why so secretive, Hack?” he said, pushing open the door.
“Close it behind you and come and look at this, brother!”
Projected onscreen was the clip of the girl masturbating. Moses watched in amazement.
“Hey, I didn’t know they did that!”
“They aren’t any different to us then, are they. Just that they haven’t got what we’ve got to play with!” He sniggered.
Which one do you want to see most?”
Moses’ answer was without hesitation. She had been on his mind ever since that dream. “Gitangali”
Hack smiled lopsidedly. “I knew you’d say that!” Gitangali had appeared onscreen. She was walking naked towards him, the wiggle of her hips speaking directly to his manhood. She had stopped a few steps away and was looking down at herself, absently stroking the inside of her thigh with her hand. Then she walked off to one side and sat down under a tree on a little patch of lushly green grass. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sat gazing into the middle distance as if thinking about something serious.
“She often goes there. She seems to have a need to get away from the others from time to time. She’ll sit there for hours sometimes. The others seem to know that she doe
sn’t want them to disturb her, so they don’t.”
Moses sat down in a spare chair and watched her thoughtfully. “She sure is a beauty, Hack!”
“You fancy her, then? What about Amelie?”
Moses met his slightly mocking eyes. “Leave Amelie out of this.”
“Sure thing, boss!” The picture faded and then he found himself looking at his own naked body straddled across Amelie’s, her legs wrapped around the back of his thighs, his bottom rising and falling in time to her cries and gasps as he serviced her. He turned on Hack, instantly seething with fury. “You dirty little swine” he snarled. “Does this mean that you’ve been spying on us? Watching what we do? I swear I’ll kill you!”
“Uh, huh! Take it easy brother of mine.” Hack lifted his hand, he was holding the scalpel.
Moses paused and the moment was lost. “Put that away! Don’t be stupid, Hack. Put it down.”
“How do I know you won’t attack me?”
“I won’t attack you. If that’s how you get your kicks, I pity you. Funny enough” the words came out almost of their own volition, “I need a bit of a break from her actually. It’s a relief to come down here for a while. She’s like a bitch on heat, wants it all the time.”
Hack had switched back to Gitangali “Well you won’t have any to spare for her, then!”
Moses stared at the screen. “Is that in real time. Is she sitting there right now?”
“Right now, brother. Maybe she’s even thinking about you. Right now, Moses!”
“Then maybe I just ought to do something about it!”
Hack grinned his lopsided grin again. “I can open up the airlock door for you, if you want!”
Moses stared at him thoughtfully. “Then maybe you should do just that, little brother. Give me ten minutes to get over there, open it up, wait ten minutes and then lock it again.”
Moses stood up. “Do me a favour, Hack. Don’t spy on me again because if I ever find out, that blade you’ve got won’t save you!”
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Gitangali looked up, startled, then shocked, then incredulous. All these emotions passed over her face in quick succession. She had been lost in her own thoughts when Moses had found her and now he was standing only two metres away, as naked as she was and every bit a man.
“How did you get here?” She managed to project calmness into her voice despite the flux of inner turmoil inside her.
“All doors on this ship are open to me, Gitangali.” Moses smiled disarmingly. “What were you thinking about? You looked so serious for one so beautiful.”
“Oh, Moses!” she sighed. “I was thinking about Manny. I think about him a lot. He would have been my partner one day when it was right.”
“And now he’s ….gone!”
“And I am still alive because of it, along with Mother and the others who were on the shuttle.”
“How can you say he would have been for you?”
Gitangali looked up at him sadly, her eyes growing liquid with tears. “I just knew. I think that he knew, too. Only there was no time and now there never will be!”
“So you come and sit here and brood away your days. Gitangali, you’re turning him into a saint!”
“Well, that’s exactly what he is, isn’t it. That’s what Mother said at the time. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Moses was right, she was intoning the words, they had already become ritual.
He sank down on to his haunches, just in front of her, so that their eyes were on a level. He put out a hand and rested it on her arm, she didn’t seem to notice it. ‘If this was Amelie’, he thought ‘she’d be all over me by now! This one’s surely different.’
“Gitangali! Such a lovely name for such a lovely girl. Woman” he corrected himself. “Manny wouldn’t have wanted you to be so sad about him. He would have wanted you to cry and then get up and move on. You have the rest of your life in front of you.”
“Moses. I think you mean well. Perhaps you haven’t suffered grief in your life so you don’t know how it is. I am still grieving for him, there is an ache inside me. Maybe one day it will go away, I don’t know. But that’s how I feel now.”
He had become uncomfortable squatting down, so he rolled over into a sitting position just beside her so that he shared the tree trunk as a backrest with her. “Gitangali, I’m going to sit here and talk to you. I’m going to share the pain with you and when we have finished, maybe you will be happier again. So tell me how it was with Manny and you.”
And so Gitangali did. The story of her love for Manny, almost all of it fabricated in the sadness of her mind, going over and over it as she sat there alone underneath the tree. She talked and talked until after a while, he realised that she had been saying the same things over and over, like an incantation.
“Gitangali, you’ve got to pull yourself out of this” he said eventually, interrupting her. “You’ve got to move forward. Manny wouldn’t have wanted to see you like this.”
She was wringing her hands as she sat beside him. Suddenly she sat up straight. “I have to go now. We all eat together. Then we sing hymns, after which I do my bible study. They pray for me specially, you know. Because they know that I’m not well.”
“Gitangali, you are sad for him. But you will get well. Your grief will pass. I promise you!”
She looked at him quizzically, then stood up. “Will you come again?”
It became a routine. Each afternoon he made his way to the tree and found her there. Each day he let her talk and talk, gradually trying to steer her away from the central theme of her lost love for Manny. In the hours that they conversed, she began to relax in his company and then began to listen to him as he told her about other things until he was rewarded by a smile in response to a joke. He could see that she was changing gradually, her face becoming more animated, her eyes engaging his. She was relaxing from the trauma that had engulfed her. When she said “Will you come again tomorrow?” that his answer mattered to her.
He touched her arm and felt a physical response in turn. It was time for her to go. He put an arm around her shoulders, fought off the craving to touch her breasts and kissed her gently on the lips.
“I will come again, tomorrow, Gitangali. And I will not leave. When you have eaten with your sisters and when you have completed your bible study, will you come back to me, here?”
She stood up and looked down at him. There was a smile on her face. She simply nodded and then was gone.
Chapter 11
Moses told Amelie that he was needed by Matthias. It was God’s will, apparently. He would not be back for the night so she was to relax and catch up on her sleep.
He went down for his daily conference with Hack who was, as usual, tuned in to the females in H3. For some reason, he had Martha in view. Moses had to admit that her body, whilst no longer young, was still shapely and she had ‘interesting’ breasts.
“Ho, Brother! What do you think of Mother Superior, then?” He had changed to a general view of Martha leading the group of young women in singing a hymn. Moses watched, entranced at their proud young bosoms rising and falling as they invoked the Word of the Lord. “Wow!” was all he could find by way of response.
“Hack. You’re going to have to see a bit of action, brother! You can’t just go on like this, ogling them onscreen. You’re going to lose your mind. Listen, when I’ve sorted out Gitangali, I’ll get her to help me sort out one of her friends for you. That’s a promise! I’m staying in H3 tonight. The time has come!”
“What about Amelie, then, oh my stud brother?”
“Amelie knows that I’m otherwise occupied with God’s good work. She gave me her blessing. It’s a chance for her to catch up on her bible study and keep Matthias quiet, if nothing else. So do the honours in ten minutes from now, it’s time I went!”
&n
bsp; *********************************************************
He was there first, sitting under the tree. Her face lit up at finding him there. She came at once to sit beside him, her hand reaching out to him. “I’m so glad you came, Moses!”
He turned to her and kissed her gently on the mouth. “I’m so glad that you want me to be here.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and let her snuggle up against him. “Are you OK today, Gitangali?”
She nodded, looked into his eyes and there was happiness there. “No pain, today Gitangali?”
“No pain, Moses. I prayed to Manny last night and he answered me. He said that I should find another to love. I love you, Moses!”
He pulled her into close contact with him. She had a faint, yet heady body perfume. He didn’t have to look to confirm the surging erection swelling between his legs, only that she hadn’t yet realised how far along the sexual road they had already travelled until she looked down. She looked up again into his eyes. “When we go to bed tonight, will you come to my tent?”
He kissed her again, this time with the full power of his sexuality. His hands moved by themselves to touch and caress her beautiful, brown breasts, a desire that he had fought against with increasing difficulty ever since the first time he had shared with her the bower beneath their tree. She pressed against him, a moan coming from her lips as he stroked her, touched her nipples with his fingertips, then bent forward to take one in his mouth and suckle her up to a hard, taught point of desire. Her back arched, thrusting herself forward to him, he held her there with a powerful arm supporting her, just below her shoulder blades, let his mouth rove over her shining, swelling bosom, first one, then the other breast until she was drooling with want for him.