From The Ashes

[Moberg]

Snap. Pain went through the body of Michael as another sharp hit with the whip sets his back on fire.
"Eighty-nine." Snap. The warmth on his back spreads further with each hit.
"Ninety." Snap. The drops of blood start to gather at his feet, becoming a small red puddle below him.
The pain goes on and on. How did it come to this? Everything in his body screams to stop this madness, to make him return to his old life.
The great Kapitän Michael Schmidt of the Rheinland Militär Hauptflotte. The thought seems so distant. Now he is just a slave, on the same level as everyone else.

"Get up, dog!"
A kick disrupts his thoughts and sends him straight to the ground. As he turns around, one of the guards looks him straight into the eye, a rifle in his hands. He points towards the refinery to his right where other slaves are working at.
With a sigh, Michael gets up onto his legs and rushes to his place at the production chain.

"How did it come to this?", he asks mutters to himself again.
It was a few months ago. He can not remember the exact date, but it hasn't been to long.
It was a nice pretty evening on a weekend. A routine mission. They have recovered artifacts from a fugitive transport within the Omegas. He was onboard the primary fleet ransport 'Gigant', a heavily armoured and small transport of the 'Behemoth' class, along with a few escorts of the Omega Defense Flotilla and the primary fleet. The mission went on as usual, when they arrived at Stuttgart. Halfway through the lane though their convoy was interrupted by Bundschuh. Thinking back, it was probably a bad situation to choose such a noticable group. The convoy was not hard to miss at all, and so they were surrounded by just a few fighters and bombers.
The Gigants escort was not able to stop the Bundschuh in time before the shield gave in. The heavily armoured and enhanced hull managed to stand firm against the enemy fire for a while, but the inevitable happened.
He remembered fire on many decks as an engine was hit and fuel leaked into the reactor room. The back half of the ship was entirely ripped off, and few did managed to get the escape pods. During the heat of the battle, though, nobody was able to retrieve his escape pod and eventually, he drifted further away from Stuttgart. He eventually ended up in the hands of junkers within the eastern nebula of the warmer Rheinland system. Those politically not very dense examples of junkers didn't realize who he was and sold him to the next slaver, who was not informed a lot either. Maybe he didn't care. It does not matter now.
And as such, Michael ended up here.