Rad was breathing heavily, leaning against the wall of the cave, cursing his bad luck during this expedition. He was one of the crazy few explorers to take the dangerous 5 star ranked missions ‘cause he badly needed the money to repay the bank for his loans on the Carrack. Indentured servitude, that’s what this was. To make matters worse, crew members were scarce and poorly trained so most of the time he ended up doing a lot of the missions by himself.
But this was no time for moping, he needed to focus. He’d broken his leg during a fall in the cave having missed a ledge, so his oxygen and med pens were running out fast. The irony was that he was out here, on Arial’s North Pole to search for a missing explorer in a cave. They rarely turned out alive… and he was about to become one of them.
Hope was not in the cards but Rad sent a distress signal anyway. However, due to magnetic interference at the Poles there was no certainty the message had reached his ship, or even relayed further. If only he could crawl back to the med bay and recover, he thought to himself.
Slowly, using any nooks and crevices in the walls he inched upwards, but progress was slow. The low gravity on Arial had saved his life so far, but climbing back with a broken leg after a huge drop looked like an impossible feat. He looked up, assessing that one more push would help him get to a higher ledge where he’d have better visibility. After that, another break. The environmental suit he was wearing was bulky and didn’t allow him to tend to his wound.
He reached up and perched his good leg in a nook, making a huge effort to push on it alone and lift himself using his arms. For a split-second, which seemed like a lifetime, he thought he’d really made it, but the cruel reality was that he’d just missed the ledge and fell back, landing on the bad leg and banging his helmet on a rock. Passed out and sprawled on a lower ledge, the survival chances looked slim.
He woke up with a bright light in his eyes. “Am I dead?”, he muttered.
“You’re not so lucky kid”, came a voice from beyond the light, chuckling. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. What are you doing out here anyway, are you alone in that big ship outside? You crazy?”
Rad was just coming about and could barely connect a thought to the other. “Uh… I’m an explorer… trying to find another one who got lost or died here… perhaps recover his data pad. Who…. are you?… I fell and broke my leg.”
“Yeah I can see that. Story time later, let’s get you back to safety. Name’s Grim, I was mining here in another part of the cave”, he said and extended his hand.