Captain Keith and the Frost Beast of Yalor

Chapter 12: Alone on the Ice

Captain Keith pried the hyper-goggles from his eyes to get a better look at the damage to his knee. It was worse than he'd thought. He looked on the ground a yard away and realized that what he'd mistaken for a rock was actually his patella. Fortunately, the Galactic Monks of Cyrius with whom he'd studied had taught him a method for controlling his blood-flow, so he was able to close off the arteries around the wound. A lesser man would have bled out by now.

The major problem he faced was more challenging than mere blood loss. The Frost Beast had dragged him far away from Ice Base Zero. The creature had destroyed his OmniCom, so there was no way to summon a transport. A ten-mile run would normally be something Captain Keith could do while his Martian L'k'thok tea was steeping. At this moment, though, he was in the middle of a mega-blizzard with a leg wound that would have any other mortal sobbing and yelling for his nanny-bot.

It was good, then, that Captain Keith was no mere mortal. His intellect, sharper than an Andromedan dagger, formulated a survival plan. He used the nuclear adhesive he kept in his space pack to glue his patella back in place. He blasted a perfect circle in the ice with his laser. Then he lowered his fractured leg into the hole. The cold was more intense than a night of passion with a pair of Venusian twins, but Captain Keith was more than accomplished at willing himself to ignore pain. 

He pulled his leg out of the sub-ice ocean and the layer of water which clung to his leg instantaneously froze. Captain Keith immediately plunged his leg back into the frigid sea. When he once again raised his lower appendage from the icy depths, another layer of ice formed on top of the first. Again and again, Captain Keith stuck his leg into the hole, each time emerging with a slightly thicker layer of ice, until, finally, his leg was encased in a two-inch-thick, crystalline sheath.

Captain Keith took a few tentative steps on his injured limb. The ice-cast did little to ease the pain caused by each step, but it held his weight. 

"Yes," thought the Space Explorer, "that ought to hold out for about ten miles. I'll be back at Ice Base Zero in time to watch the Intergalactic Space News." And with that, he set off at a leisurely fifteen miles-per-hour pace.