Untitled Sci-fi story intro

  This was a little piece I was toying around with over the last few days and I decided to post it here just because. It was part of a quick-ish writing prompt thing to write a story themed around someone being stuck. I think I sorta unintentionally wrote one of the most generic sounding sci-fi pieces I’ve ever read myself. That may be a little too critical, but that has sorta been why I stopped working on it. I’m not sure what exactly it is, but I guess putting it out here like this is sorta me asking how people feel about a piece like this. The actual writing part of this wasn’t that long, I probably spent no more than an hour and a half putting it together so it is most certainly open for revisions. Thanks for checking it out if you and tomorrow will definitely contain another post!

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It was dark, dusty, and very hot. I was laying beneath a pile of rubble, probably from the floor that just came out below me. With a grunt, I shoved a large chunk off of me and stood up. I was in a room, nothing seemed to jump out at me. I brought up my floating HUD and ran a quick diagnostic on my suit. The most relieving part was seeing that my life support was still going, at least I wasn’t on a timer. Unfortunately, both my suit’s scanners and thruster pack were dead, something that would’ve been very helpful in getting out. Looks like I was gonna have to be getting out the old fashioned way.

“Let’s see what we have here…” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I was hoping that I would be able to find some kind of doorway.

“Xela, status report?” The crackly voice barely came through on my transmitter.

“I’m alright…” I limped around to the next wall, using it as support,

“Thank god, thought we lost you there for a second.” There was still a lot of dust obscuring my view of the top, if only I still had a working flashlight.

“Yeah, it’s definitely going to take more than that to kill me.” I was beginning to think that this room wasn’t going to have an obvious exit, “What about you guys, everyone still safe up there

“The rest of us are up here, how far did you fall?” I could see a speck of light piercing the dust, but that was it.

As the dust cleared, it became very apparent that the fall was a lot deeper than I initially thought, “Uh… I don’t think we’ll be back to base in time for dinner…”

“Quit the jokes, can you use your thruster pack?”

“The fall knocked them out, unless you got a rope I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”

“I think we have some rope back at base, is your life support still functional?

“Yeah, though I would suggest hurrying back to base, canned air just doesn’t taste like the real thing.”

I heard a suppressed groan on the other end, “Alright, I’ll leave Castro here while the rest of us head back to base, putting him on the line.”

“Sure thing.” I was glad that they couldn’t see the frown on my face, I wasn’t going to enjoy this.

“Comms check, sound off?” His almost too calm sounding voice came through the line.

Castro was the newest person on our crew, fresh from the academy with basically zero field experience. He still hadn’t realized that protocol was just an option when you’re in the field.

“I repeat, comms check, sound off?”

“Comms are green, good to have you for company.” I put on my most sarcastically serious tone and sat down against the wall.

“Is there anything I can do for you up here sir?”

I was about to ask for radio silence, but an idea came to mind, “Could you toss me down your flashlight? Mine seems to have broken during my fall.”

“Is that good idea sir? What if the fall breaks mine as well?”

I really wished he would stop calling me sir, but he did have a point, “that… is true. Guess I’ll be stuck down here in the dark then.”

I stared back up into the dark dust that clouded my view of the over world. Our base wasn’t that far away, but that didn’t help the fact that I would basically be alone for the first time in a while.

“Sir, permission to speak freely?” Well, I guess I did have Castro.

“Permission granted.” Beggars can't be choosers in this situation, “For the future, you never need to ask in this unit.”

“Of course sir, I just noticed that you never really told us how you ended up here.”

“Is this really the best time to be asking this?”

“Well… what else were you planning on doing? My CO at the academy told me it was important to get to know your unit for the sake of cohesion on the battlefield.”

I tried to come up with a clever response, but decided my current situation didn’t warrant it. I was kind of hoping to avoid a situation like this when joining the unit, but I kinda expected that it would happen one way or another. With Castro… well he definitely wasn’t the person who first came to mind.

“You… have a point,” I resigned, “I’ve been part of the fleet for a long time now, though joining the fleet was far from my first choice in life…”