Sitting there, Aya let her mind wander to more pleasant things. Back to the old days when the world held such promise for a rising young cadet, before the world fell down upon her.
In her time, Saturn was the hub of EarthGov. Aside from Earth, Saturn was full of budding enterprises, one of the leading technological research facilities, as well as a highly selective university the likes of which few rivaled. A scholar Saturn cum laude was expected to go very far in the world.
Aya was born to a well to do family and grew up on one of the major pulse-points of Saturn’s greatest metropolis, Pandora. Her family was highly respected by loyalists. Aya’s own father was retired military, a former major in Saturn’s elite fighting forces, the SFA, or Saturn Fighting Alliance, which often joined forces with the militia from surrounding moons, most off all Titan. From birth, Aya was conditioned to follow in her father’s footsteps, for Old Glory, as her father called Saturn’s colors.
A child of the corps d’elite, she grew up in privileged circumstances. She went to the finest schools her father could afford. He practically bristled with pride when Aya decided to enroll in the Saturn corps school, which mirrored Earth’s own military cadet corps. The SCS not only educated Saturn’s future soldiers but also trained those cadets from the surrounding bodies orbiting Saturn’s rings.
That is where Aya met Liam, a cadet from Titan. Her father frowned upon their relationship, which made Aya all the more enamored with cadet Jacobs. Just as any young lady, she had a rebellious streak in her that got her in trouble with the instructors. But neither Liam nor Aya dreamed that they would soon be pitted against each other in Saturn-Titan civil war.
It distressed Aya when Saturn’s activists, her father included, became more aggressive regarding Saturn’s rights as an individual State and proposed seceding from EarthGov. Eventually things went sour when loyalists revolted against EarthGov. Then all Hell broke loose.
SCS cadets were pulled from the corps, and any cadet, including Liam, who were not native were expelled back to their own home-worlds. Aya was thrown into the SFA without ceremony and was forced to move with Saturn’s troops against EarthGov’s own forces.
The day came when Aya’s rag-tag platoon bled into a pocket of Titan’s troops and were forced to make one last stand. Among them were wounded troops still deemed fit for fighting, so desperate was Saturn to think that they still had a chance. She found herself looking out the barrel of her rifle at Liam’s face, whom she had not seen for months due to the movements of the SFA defensive. When given the order to fire, Aya refused. She had had enough.
She lowered her rifle and tossed it to the ground.
“Hiroshoma, what the hell are you doing? We’ve still got this!” The platoon captain screamed at her above the din, barely audible among the gunfire.
Aya only shook her head and backed away, her eyes only on Liam’s face. Standing vulnerable, a Titan took the shot. Pain unlike nothing Aya had ever felt before burst through her chest. Her view of Liam was broken as his own body rocked back from a gunshot. All of the breath was forced out of her in milliseconds when she hit the ground. She heard dim noises around her. The world burst into flames as a RPG hit the wall behind the platoon. Shrapnel rained down over them, of twisted metal and pulverized brick. Then her world went black.
Something very wet on her face brought Aya back into consciousness. She took in a deep, ragged breath that sent pain all over her body. Her bullet wound had been patched up, the ugly hole stitched up on her chest and where the bullet went out in the back. Her collapsed lung had been repaired and inflated.
What was that wetness? Her eyes lolled around looking for the source. A jailer was gleefully holding a rusty looking bucket, water dripping from it on the cold stone floor. Aya twitched a bit and felt the bite of metal on her wrists, which had become red and raw from the shackles clasped tightly around them.
“Where am I… what is all of this?” Aya’s voice trembled and she winced. It hurt to talk, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to move.
“You’re in a prison camp, my dear.” The jailer said with a leering grin.
“You lost.”“I… what?” Then it hit her. The memories flooded in on her. Her last glimpse of light had been Liam’s face. But the SFA had lost, and she was in a prisoner-of-war camp on the newly seized planet.
”You LOST, the jailer was all too happy to repeat it.
You and the rest of your pathetic resistance. Though I don’t know how you got into the mess of it, young one as you are.Aya licked her cracked lips. Her heart sunk in the midst of all the pain. Liam was most likely dead, and she should have been as well. She wished she was.
More than a year went by in that miserable compound. She and the other prisoners of war were let out into the light only once a day into a pathetic excuse of a recreational area. Her father was there too, their brief reunion was bittersweet. Except he was in an adjoining compound meant for the “traitor” loyalists like himself. She saw him for a brief moments until a guard let on. Word spread and it was not long before the two compounds ran on shift schedules and she did not see her father from then on.
About a month later, a shadow fell across the bars of her cell.
”You’re father is dead, I thought you should know that. He fell sick and his body just gave out.” No more words, no more feeling. He could have been talking about the weather for as much emotion was within that sentence.
More time passed, more shadows, but no more words. No kindness, no relief. She knew she would die in that cell. She entertained the thought of taking her own life. More than one occasion she looked for a way out, but there was nothing she could do nor any means to kill herself.
There came a day that Aya did have a visitor, a cold eyed man who watched her with interest. She shrunk from him instinctively. He would come again and again, watching her. Without warning, he finally spoke to her. It was strange, hearing the voice that was not the barking of a guard nor the grumbling of the man that doled out a pitiful excuse for food. It was a voice of culture, a voice that dripped with wealth.
”Miss Hiroshima, my name is Vincent. I’ve come with news. The remaining prisoners of war… those that are still alive, that is… are going to be moved to a new compound on Mimas. THE most inhospitable moon of your planet. Oh yes, I am afraid it is true. But… not you. No, I have plans for you, and for some of your friends as a matter of fact.””Plans?” Aya’s voice croaked in response, and for the first time she got a good look of her visitor.
”Just what-?””Oh I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, my dear. I’ll have you out of here ship shape tomorrow morning. Tatty-bye!”Sure enough, she was taken from her cell the following day. More than a year in that hateful place. But the cell she was taken to was not all that better. It was a research compound, she was told. He was something of a scientist, and what he had in store for her would restore a future to her. All she had was to cooperate. And she did.
Aya remained, at first, held in that horrid cell for a few months, and all the while she went to something he called “conditioning therapy.” She would sit and bear through the check ups, and tests, and re-tests. She didn’t remember it all, because sometimes she would go under some sort of hypnosis. But anything was tolerable compared to that nightmarish year when she had no hope, no future, no anything.
Upon cooperation for some time, Aya was moved to a room where long-term patients were held. All the while Vincent would fill her head with lectures of science and how his research would change the world and how even
she could be a scientist one day. Again, this came with her cooperation
of course.Another year, the same routine, the same therapy, the same tests. At last, without ceremony, she was released. She had only a few belongings. One, a set of drab clothing given to her to change into rather than wearing the thin hospital gown.
It took her breath away. The light, the life, the song of birds. The face of Saturn had changed. There were slums now, tattered looking housing, and everywhere she looked an EarthGov flag or EarthGov propaganda. But she had nothing here, no family, no money, no where to go.
Aya suddenly snapped out of it and blinked. A hospital room…