Up a creek…
"C'mon you piece of crap!" Lance yelled as he slapped the transponder once again with his gloved hand. He knew he was going to have to get it up and going again. If he didn't, he wouldn't see the next day as he would slowly freeze to death on this frozen ice world.
Can't believe I have traveled half way across the galaxy looking for a stupid relic, only to crash on this damn place with a busted ship transponder, Lance thought to himself despairingly. Standing up next to the unit he took a good look around. Ice as far as the eye could see, which wasn't very far in the ever present twilight. The system's star was too far away to provide much light or warmth at all. Hard to believe anyone would try to inhabit this place, Lance thought. Shaking his head he decided it was better to come back to the present to try to figure a way out of this mess. The extreme cold had made everything he touched very brittle and hard to work with. The big gloves didn't help either, but his hands would freeze in seconds if he didn't have them on he knew. "The signal is just not getting out! I've got power, the couplers are energized, but the transponder circuit is not transmitting! Hell, I'd use some aluminum foil if I thought it would do any good." Lance yelled at himself. Realizing that he had done all he could outside, he decided to go back into the ship and try to bypass the circuit and send an emergency signal using the ships onboard high frequency beacon. Slumping down at the command console, he shook his head, letting the snow fall across the console like salt from an oversize shaker.
Watching it slowly melt, he started to formulate the plan to get his message out. Turning on the vid screen he took a look at the distant star. The picture outside looked washed and faded like you would see in the ancient Polaroid pictures of an era long since passed. Suddenly it came to him. Use the emergency beacon to bounce the signal off the magnetic field produced by the star! Using the star to boost the frequency just might give it enough range to reach the other ship, giving them his position. It was a long shot, but the only one he had. There was no way in hell he was going to let a second rate transponder skunk his chances of getting off this rock. As the distant star began to slip lower in the alien sky, Lance started to input the frequency codes into the emergency beacon. Maybe, just maybe they'll still be there….listening. Damn its getting cold in here!
This short story was written from a 5-word prompt. The 5 words are brittle, aluminum foil, salt, Polaroid, and skunk.
