The rest of the trip passed by mostly without incident. Reya remained confined to her bed, still too weak to move. The others kept her company as often as they could, not wanting her to be alone with her thoughts. Reya appreciated the gesture but knew that she couldn’t escape her nightmares. Every night, without fail, she relived the horrors that had been inflicted upon her.
She often woke up screaming, but the only person around to hear was Kell, who would check in on her occasionally. She hardly slept at all, afraid to close her eyes and experience her torture all over again. Her dreams had become warped, her captors replaced by Tassie, Rann, Jyn and the others. Knowing it wasn’t real didn’t make the dreams any easier.
Kell worried over her increasing tiredness, in spite of all the rest she was getting. He ended up prescribing sleeping medication to help her stay asleep. Her dreamless nights were a godsend. She asked for more, but Kell was hesitant to give it to her, lest she become addicted. He started her on a small dose and carefully monitored her intake, denying her the medication when he felt she was becoming too dependent on it.
Reya grew upset, not understanding why Kell wouldn’t let her sleep. She was exhausted and sleep was what she needed. She didn’t see her increasing demands for the medication as a bad thing, unlike Kell. Ultimately, she was forced to abide by his decisions, much to her displeasure.
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After three weeks of travel, the ship dropped out of hyperspace, their home planet in sight. Verilia was a large, lush planet with pale purple skies and twin moons. Reya was left alone while the others prepared for their arrival on the military base.
Tassie sat at her station on the bridge, hailing ground control to clear them for entry into the atmosphere and landing on the base. She contacted Irric first, letting him know that they had returned. She also informed him that Reya was going to need medical assistance when they landed. Irric reassured her that he would see to it.
He delivered. Their ship was cleared for landing in record time. Tassie brought the ship down to land and parked it in the hangar. A medical team was already waiting on the side to help the moment the doors opened.
Jyn went down to meet them and guide them to the med bay. The medical crew gently loaded Reya onto a stretcher and brought her to the hospital that was on base. Rann and Kell followed them, explaining the situation while they walked. Rann was forced to wait outside the room while the doctors reassessed Reya’s condition.
In the meantime, Jyn made an emergency report to Commander Cyrix, who was very much interested in hearing an in-person debrief on what had occurred.
Cyrix attempted to extract as much information as he could from Jyn. With a calculating gaze, he pressed Jyn for every last detail he could wring out of him. It was only when Jyn finally admitted that the only person who knew more would be Reya herself that the Commander dismissed him. Once the door was shut, the Commander walked over to it and locked it. He lowered his blinds and picked up the phone.
“Nessah, we need to talk.”
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Cyrix and Nessah came to visit Reya in her hospital room. The General arrived with a retinue of guards and cleared out the staff, securing the room and leaving only her and the commander alone with Reya. Cyrix closed the heavily guarded door and faced his ailing soldier.
“Corporal,” he said, “we’ve heard your captain’s report about the mission. We sincerely apologize about the events that transpired. Your team was not well enough equipped for the mission, an oversight on our part.” Both he and Nessah sat in the empty seats beside Reya’s bed, coming eye-level with her.
“It’s fine, Commander. There was no way of knowing that the mission would turn out the way it did,” Reya replied.
“Can you tell us what happened while you were held prisoner?” Cyrix asked as gently as he could. Sometimes he loved his job; this was not one of those times, he thought as he watched Reya immediately tense in her bed at the question.
“Reya,” Nessah spoke up, “we need to know what happened in that facility. It’s with a heavy heart that we ask you for details so soon after your arrival. But we need to know so that we can decide what to do about it.”
“Is that an order, General?” Reya asked stiffly. She fixed a weary, reluctant gaze towards Nessah as she spoke.
Nessah closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes, it is,” she said in a pained voice. “I don’t like asking soldiers about this kind of stuff, but we need to know. As detailed as possible. We need a proper record of the events that transpired.” Nessah winced internally when she saw the forlorn expression on Reya’s face. A flurry of emotions flashed by on her face too fast for Nessah to decipher. Nessah thought that more than anything she looked disappointed but didn’t have time to analyze further as Reya closed off her expression.
“Very well,” Reya said in a harsh voice that didn’t match the blank look on her carefully schooled face. She told them everything in a hollow, monotonous voice, sparing no detail. She recounted her capture and her experience being drugged, telling them how they brought her inside the facility and restrained her.
Her expression faltered as she recounted their questioning sessions, showing anger, pain, guilt and shame. She told them of how they kept her prisoner and what they did to her in an attempt to break her, showing them the scars on her arm and miming a slow, cutting motion. She told them of how they healed her only to start again. Of how they starved her and fed her food that brought excruciating pain. Of how they dripped a horribly painful substance into her each of her wounds.
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Her gaze was distant as she told her tale, as if she wasn’t really there while she spoke. She was stuck, trapped inside her own mind as the words spilled out of her mouth. They were careless, she explained, to have left her alone and let her contact the base. She was lucky, she laughed despondently.
Reya arrived at her final questioning session and stopped. She shrunk back into herself and began trembling. Nessah sensed that Reya was fast approaching her limit and offered to end it there. She had collected enough information from her.
“No,” Reya said in a shaking voice. “You’ve heard this much, I’m going to tell you the rest.” Slowly, piece by piece, she described the moments leading up to her rescue. Recounting the harrowing experience was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, short of actually living it. By the end she was a sobbing, shivering mess. Rocking back and forth, she finished describing what the final moment had felt like through punctured sobs. The comparisons she made to describe her pain deeply disturbed the two military officers.
Reya’s state worried Nessah greatly. Seeing her soldier reduced to such a mess at the mere memory of whatever had been used on her spoke volumes as to the amount of pain it caused. She wanted to question Reya further, but one look at her disabused her of that notion. She couldn’t, in good conscience, ask Reya for more details when she clearly knew nothing else about the final substance used on her.
Reya apologized for not having much memory of what occurred next. Her rescue was a blur to her. Cyrix smiled gently. “That’s quite alright,” he said. He looked over towards Nessah. “I think we’re just about done here,” he announced.
“Yes,” Nessah agreed. “Thank you for your service,” she said respectfully as she stood up from her chair. Both she and Cyrix saluted Reya, taking her by surprise. “We’ll leave you to recover, soldier. Rest well.” The two senior officers left the room, leaving Reya alone until the hospital staff flittered back in, checking on her. They had enough sense not to ask about any details regarding the meeting that just transpired, for which Reya was grateful.
After a while, Rann and Tassie were allowed back in. Rann immediately asked Reya for details, noting the streak marks on Reya’s face. “What happened while we were gone, Reya?” she asked carelessly. Reya watched as the staff all turned their heads slightly to listen better. She shook her head and motioned for them to sit down.
“I’m glad you’re back,” she said, ignoring Rann’s question.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Rann continued.
Reya cast a furtive glance around her. By the gods, if only she had some awareness, Reya thought. I love her to bits but sometimes she just doesn’t think. “Rann, we’ll talk about this later.”
Rann finally noticed her friend’s reluctance to talk about the subject and clued in that this might not be the best place to discuss the matter. “Oh, sorry,” she said sheepishly.
The two of them took a seat and continued chatting with Reya. They avoided mentioning her meeting with the General while they spoke, much to the disappointment of the staff.
“Have the doctors mentioned how long you’ll be in the hospital for?” Tassie asked.
“No, just that I’ll be here until I’m recovered. Whatever that means. They’ve also mentioned the possibility of physiotherapy to help improve my muscle strength again. It’s been almost two months since I last walked, and I’ve lost a lot of muscle mass.”
“That sucks,” Rann said. “We’ll have to get back to training soon now that the mission is over, so we won’t have as much time to come visit.” Reya looked put out at the thought of not seeing her friends anymore while she recovered. “Don’t worry,” Rann quickly added after she saw her friend’s expression. “We’ll still come and visit you as often as we can. It just might be a bit more sporadic than when we were on the ship.”
Relief flooded her that she would see the others again. “I guess I won’t be joining you guys for a while in training,” she laughed lightly, motioning to herself. Her stomach let out a sound of protest at being neglected for so long. Reya flushed slightly at the loud noise.
“Try not to eat everything in sight while we’re gone,” Tassie teased.
“The IV is helping with that, but it doesn’t replace real food.” Reya sighed wistfully as her stomach grumbled again.
Rann grinned. “I’ll see what I can do.”
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Nessah and Cyrix retreated to the General’s office, neither of them saying a word while they walked. They each pondered Reya’s disturbing recounting of the traumatising events that befell her.
Nessah sat in her chair and sighed. “That was difficult,” she said, rubbing her temples.
Cyrix pulled up a chair and sat down in front of her desk. “It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another entirely to see it.”
“I agree. Did you see the scars? She had so many of them.”
“I did. And to think, those are only the ones she showed us. That’s only a fraction of all of them.”
“Poor her,” Nessah said sadly.
“How should we play this out?”
Their military had a tribunal that governed all acts of war. While Nessah was granted a great amount of authority over the military, not even she could casually order actions that could instigate a full-blown war between factions or species. The most important decisions for their military were determined by the Tribunal, a gathering of seven of their faction’s most important officials, four of which were ex-military.
Their response to the rogue research facility was to be determined by this tribunal. While Nessah did not control the final decision, she did control how it would play out once a course of action was decided.
She would also have to include Reya’s recounting of her capture, to put on record. Unbeknownst to her, their entire conversation had been recorded. It was strictly classified information that the Tribunal needed to help make a decision.
Nessah hummed. “I say we put in a gag order and hand it off the Tribunal to decide. One camp is going to be that we focus our resources here and simply keep an eye out for more activity. The other will most likely be that we should capture that facility and learn what was so important. Either way, we have to prepare our troops for the coming storm. This is going to have an impact on how we operate for a long time.
“I personally vote for the latter,” she continued. “They’re technically in our territory and tortured one of our citizens, who just so happens to be military, to keep it a secret. The only problem is that capturing their facility could constitute an act of war. I’ll write up my report to the Tribunal and have it sent off as soon as it’s finished.”
“I think we should include a commendation for Corporal Reya Ayala, on account of her trials and tribulations in the name of our faction,” Cyrix said.
Nessah nodded. “My thoughts exactly. I’m worried about her state of health and that she may not recover from this. Let’s ensure her bravery and suffering weren’t in vain.”
“I’ll debrief Irric on the situation.”
“Away from prying ears,” Nessah warned.
“Of course.”