Astrosaurs 3

by Steve Cole

  Mira’s mouth swung open, revealing rows of lethal teeth, as he lunged towards them . . .

  Chapter Six

  HIDE FIND SEEK

  Teggs and Gipsy dived out of the way – just in time. Mira’s razor-sharp teeth scratched the side of Gipsy’s glass helmet.

  “Let me wear it, please!” she begged Mira.

  “What a lot of fuss you’re making!” Mira tutted. “The silly thing doesn’t even suit you!”

  He opened his mouth again to pluck off Gipsy’s diving helmet. This time, he couldn’t miss . . .

  Teggs flexed his armoured tail, ready to whack Mira right on the flipper. But as his tail swung back it struck some rotten squid floating in the water. The power in his armour sparked through them – and made them glow a spooky electric blue!

  Mira moaned in horror. “Ghosts!” he cried. “My breakfast has come back to haunt me!” A cloud of bubbles burst from his behind. “Aaaaagh!”

  With that, the terrified giant sped from the cave.

  “What a brilliant plan, Captain!” said Gipsy admiringly. “But how did you know that using your electro-tail underwater would light up anything it touched?”

  Teggs stared at the glowing squid. He was almost as surprised as Mira. Then he grinned. “You know me, Gipsy,” he said. “I may have a brain the size of an acorn, but I’ve always been a bright spark! Come on, let’s get out of here before Mira comes back!”

  They quickly left the cave. The water was dark and gloomy as they tried to retrace their steps across the sea bed. But it was hard to tell which way they should go. At the bottom of the sea, everything looked the same – dark and spooky.

  Soon, Teggs and Gipsy realized they were totally lost.

  “We’re running out of air, Captain,” said Gipsy.

  “Someone will find us soon!” Teggs said confidently.

  “Yoo-hoo!” came Mira’s voice.

  “Oh no,” groaned Teggs. “I didn’t mean him!”

  “Hello?” The liopleurodon was getting closer. “Where are you?”

  The two astrosaurs ducked down behind some clumps of seaweed.

  “The ghosts have gone!” he shouted. “You can come back now!” Then his mouth opened in a big smile. “Oh, I see! It’s a game! Hide and seek! Can’t we play hunt the spaceship instead? I know it’s round here somewhere . . .”

  Mira swam closer, his massive head searching this way and that. Soon he would find them.

  “Run for it!” hissed Teggs.

  Together, the two astrosaurs sprinted through the murky water. They slipped on slimy seaweed. Coral scraped their legs. Their sides ached with effort.

  “Found you!” cried Mira, behind them. “You can’t hide from me!”

  “We have to keep going,” gasped Teggs.

  There was a big patch of slimy seaweed ahead. They slipped and skidded over it. Then, with a shout, Teggs fell through the seaweed!

  Gipsy grabbed hold of his vanishing tail. She tried to pull him back up, but he was too heavy.

  With a cry, Gipsy was dragged down through the slimy seaweed after him, into the blackness beyond.

  The fall lasted only a few seconds. Teggs went tumbling through the water until he landed on his bottom with a bump. Gipsy landed beside him a second later. They were in a wide tunnel. Although the walls were thick with limpets and seaweed, something shiny was glinting through underneath.

  Teggs took a closer look. “This isn’t rock. It’s metal!” he cried.

  “A metal tunnel under the seabed?” Gipsy frowned. “What could it be?”

  “Let’s find out,” he said. The astrosaurs walked cautiously along the tunnel, straining to see through the murky water. Then they came to a doorway. A sign glowed eerily above them:

  CONTROL ROOM.

  Teggs nodded gravely. “I think we’re inside a spaceship!”

  “Mira’s spaceship!” gasped Gipsy. “The one he’s trying to find! But what’s it doing here?”

  “He didn’t park it under the water,” Teggs realized. “He must have crashed it into the ocean and right through the sea bed! I think we fell in through a big hole in the roof, hidden by the seaweed.”

  “But how do we get back out?” wondered Gipsy. “There’s no way we can climb out of that hole again! And a search party would never think of looking for us down here. They don’t even know this place exists!”

  “And on top of all that, our air is running out fast,” said Teggs. “Come on, Gipsy. Let’s try to find another way back to the sea bed. . .”

  Cautiously, they crept on into the gloomy spaceship’s control room.

  Chapter Seven

  A TOOTHY RIDDLE

  The sunken spaceship’s control room was large and wide with a low ceiling. It was clearly designed for giant sea creatures. The controls were built into the floor, so the crew could work them with their tails and flippers.

  Gipsy looked at a plastic newspaper floating in the water “The Liopleurodon Times. It’s six years old!” she said. “This ship has been down here for six whole years at the very least!”

  “So the ship crashed here a year before the cryptoclidus first arrived,” Teggs realized. “And the trouble only started when they started building factories around this area.”

  “Maybe they disturbed something,” said Gipsy. “Something dangerous!” Teggs nodded. Then he noticed a metal box on the floor with an aerial on top, half covered by the water. “Hey, Gipsy! This looks familiar . . .”

  “It’s for sending distress calls!” cried Gipsy. “We’ve got something like it on the Sauropod.” She looked closely at the box. “It’s broken. But maybe I can fix it!”

  “Try!” Teggs urged her. “If we could only send an SOS to Sea Station One . . .”

  He waited anxiously while Gipsy went to work with her delicate claws. Finally she gave a small hoot of success. “I think I’ve got it working,” she said. “But there’s not much power. The signal is very weak.”

  “Someone will hear it,” said Teggs quietly. “They must.”

  With nothing to do but wait, the astrosaurs moved on into the cold shadows of the creepy ship. Meanwhile, back on Sea Station One, Iggy and Arx were hard at work down in the storeroom. The two of them had been waiting ages for news of Teggs and Gipsy. They were worried sick.

  Arx was still checking over the chewed-up wreckage. He was patiently comparing sections of sub, fragments of floating factory and bits of the diving bell.

  Iggy had talked some cryptoclidus sailors into helping him fix one of the broken subs. They were busy in the room next door, hammering out dents in the sub’s metal body and fixing all the instruments. Iggy himself had taken tiny pieces from all the subs and was using them to build a brand new engine. Now it was ready for testing, so he switched it on.

  With a gentle hum, the engine started up first time.

  “I’ve done it!” cried Iggy. “This new engine is ten times better and fifty times quieter than the old ones!”

  Then the door to the storeroom flew open as Cripes splashed inside. Arx and Iggy spoke together. “Well?”

  “The search party can’t find a thing down there,” said Cripes. “But every radio in the place is picking up some kind of weird SOS call! It seems to be coming from somewhere beneath the sea bed!”

  “It might be Teggs and Gipsy,” cried Arx.

  “If they are down there, I’ll find them!” vowed Iggy. “My new super-sub is almost ready to go. And it’s fitted with all kinds of extra gadgets!”

  “But we know that the liopleurodon has a taste for subs,” Cripes reminded him. “It chomped all the old ones to pieces!”

  Arx cleared his throat. “Actually, that’s not true.”

  Cripes and Iggy stared at him.

  “It was not a liopleurodon who chomped up the subs,” he went on. “And it was not a liopleurodon who wrecked those floating factories.”

  “Come on!” Cripes scoffed. “You’ll be telling us next that a liopleurodon didn’t chew up that diving bell.�
��

  “Oh, no,” said Arx. “A liopleurodon definitely did that.” He nodded. “That’s how I know it didn’t do anything else!”

  “How?” asked Cripes.

  “Tooth marks!” cried Arx. “Look at that diving bell. It was ripped apart by long, sharp teeth. You can see the marks from here.”

  “So?” said Iggy.

  “So, I haven’t found tooth marks like that anywhere else,” Arx said.

  “Not on any of this wreckage.”

  “What did you find?” asked Cripes.

  “Tiny marks,” Arx told him. “Hundreds of thousands of tiny little marks – made by tiny little teeth!”

  “But that’s impossible,” protested Iggy. “You and Captain Teggs both saw a huge shadow in the sea. That has to be the liopleurodon, right?”

  “Maybe not,” said Arx. “Maybe the liopleurodon is working with something else. Something just as big . . . or maybe even bigger!”

  Cripes took off his hat and scratched his head with a flipper. “Strange for something so big to have such teeny-weeny teeth.”

  “Never mind all that,” said Iggy. “Let’s get going!” He patted his shiny new engine. “We’ll find Captain Teggs and Gipsy. And we’ll find whatever else is hiding down there in the deeps, too-whatever it takes!”

  Chapter Eight

  THE FISH FACTOR

  Back beneath the sea bed, Teggs and Gipsy were still exploring the liopleurodon ship. It was cold, dark and scary. And both of them knew that their precious air supply was running out with every breath they took. As they walked along one dark corridor, the dirty water grew chillier. Slowly it was becoming a thick, icy slush.

  “Shall we turn back?” asked Gipsy nervously. “We don’t want to wind up as dinosaur ice-pops!”

  “Just a little further,” said Teggs.

  The chilly passage ended in what seemed to be a giant freezer. Lying in the middle of the room were four big caskets made of solid ice. Teggs could see the huge dark shape of a liopleurodon lying inside three of them. But the fourth was damaged. Part of the ceiling had collapsed on top of it, and the casket had cracked right open.

  “This must be Mira’s crew,” Gipsy gasped. “Are they dead?”

  “Just sleeping, I think,” breathed Teggs. “A deep, frozen sleep to keep them fresh while they wait to be rescued. But Mira’s woken up ahead of time!”

  Gipsy pointed to some blue scraps in the water beside the broken casket. “What are they?”

  “Bits of Mira’s uniform I think. There’s writing on them.” Teggs took a closer look. “A and D on this bit An L on the other. What does that mean?”

  “Admiral!” cried Gipsy.

  Teggs frowned. “I’m only a captain at the moment!”

  “No, I’m talking about Mira!” Gipsy’s crest flushed red with excitement, and made her helmet steam up. “He thought his name was Mira because it’s written on that scrap of uniform he wears. But that’s only part of the word. Really it spells AD—MIRA—L!”

  “Of course!” breathed Teggs. “Then this really is his ship. But the ceiling fell in on his head before he could get into the deep freeze. That must be how he lost his memory!”

  “Poor Mira,” sighed Gipsy. “He must’ve slipped out into the sea in a daze, and forgotten how to get back!”

  “Yes – and something else may have slipped out with him,” said Teggs quietly. “Let’s keep looking.”

  “I wonder how much longer our air will last,” said Gipsy quietly. “We can’t have much left by now.”

  “I know,” said Teggs. “But we mustn’t give up. An astrosaur fights on to the last breath!” He paused. “Sorry, that wasn’t a very clever thing to say, was it?”

  They left the chilly chamber and took a side-tunnel. Soon they came to another room. It was marked LARDER – DO NOT DISTURB. A huge aquarium stretched along one wall for hundreds of metres. Nothing moved in the eerie, dark water.

  “This must be where their food lived,” said Gipsy.

  Teggs was puzzled. “Strange to have an aquarium in a ship that’s already full of water.”

  “I suppose the fish would swim all over the ship otherwise, trying to escape being eaten,” Gipsy guessed. Then she noticed a big hole in the back of the tank. “Captain! The fish did escape! Look, they must have swum away into the sea!”

  “Good for them,” smiled Teggs. “I’m glad they got out.” A thought struck him. “And if they did, maybe so can we! If we could find our way back out to the sea bed, a search party might spot us!”

  “Brilliant!” cried Gipsy.

  “All we have to do is break the glass . . .” He struck the side of the tank with his tail. The glass glowed a brilliant blue and a crack appeared in its centre.

  But suddenly an alarm went off at ear-splitting volume. Steel bars slammed down to block the doorway. They were trapped inside the larder.

  “What did I do?” cried Teggs.

  The siren stopped as a helpful computer voice chimed in from a speaker in the ceiling: “You tried to open the fish tank without a password. You are an intruder and a fish-pincher.”

  Teggs stared up at the speaker. “What would I do with a fish? I’m a vegetarian!”

  “A likely story!” snarled the computer. The siren switched on again, only this time it was even louder.

  “But there aren’t even any fish in the tank!” yelled Teggs.

  “Oh yes, there are,” said Gipsy. A few deep blue fish had swum inside through the big hole. They came up to the front of the tank, as if to see what was happening. A few others came to join them. Then more. And more. Soon there were hundreds of fish staring at Gipsy through the glass.

  They didn’t seem very happy.

  “Turn that siren off!” yelled Teggs. He tried to bang his tail against the speaker – but it was just out of reach.

  “No way!” snapped the computer. “I’m going to turn it up!” Sure enough, the siren grew louder still.

  “My ears are going to burst!” groaned Teggs. He bashed the steel bars with his tail. They sparked, but held firm. “We can’t get out!”

  “Never mind us getting out,” said Gipsy fearfully. “Let’s just hope those fish can’t get in!”

  “Fish? Why are you bothered about a few fish . . .?”

  But Teggs trailed off when he looked at the aquarium.

  There were thousands of the tiny creatures now. They had banded together into one enormous group – a huge huddle of angry blue fish, moving and acting as one.

  Floating all together, they made Mira seem like a minnow.

  “That’s the same shape I saw back at the floating factory,” Teggs cried over the ear-splitting noise. “It wasn’t a giant monster who sank the subs and chewed up the factories after all. It was these little fish – working together to act like a giant monster!”

  Suddenly the dark, seething shape swept forwards and smashed into the glass like a living battering ram.

  “And now they want to get in here!” cried Gipsy.

  “But why?” wondered Teggs. “What have we done?”

  The thousands of fish opened their little mouths and gnashed at the glass. The crack in the side of the tank grew wider.

  “Their teeth are as sharp as sharks’!” gasped Gipsy. “I think they’re going to eat us!”

  Chapter Nine

  FIN-ISHED?

  The great mass of the little blue fish attacked the side of the tank again. The crack spread into a pattern of crazy zigzags, stretching from floor to ceiling.

  “Look out, Gipsy!” shouted Teggs. “They’re coming through!”

  The fish hurled themselves at the glass, and the tank burst open. Teggs and Gipsy watched helplessly as the tiny creatures swarmed inside the larder . . .

  . . . and ignored them completely.

  Instead, the fish headed for the speaker in the ceiling, attacking it and tearing it open with their vicious teeth. The sound of the siren faded.

  “Under attack!” gasped the computer voice. “
The whisperfish have escaped the larder! Assistance needed—”

  Then with a flash of sparks and an electronic cough, the voice and the siren shut off all together.

  Teggs’ and Gipsy’s ears rang in the sudden silence.

  And, the next second, the “monster” vanished as all the fish swam swiftly away in different directions. A few of them hung about in the larder, their little mouths opening and closing. But the rest were already swimming back out to sea as if nothing had ever happened.

  “Of course!” yelled Teggs at the top of his voice. But some of the fish gave him a nasty look, so he quickly shut up. “They weren’t after us. They were after whatever was making the noise!”

  “I don’t get it,” frowned Gipsy.

  “You were right,” he went on. “The cryptoclidus did disturb something when they built their factories here in the south – those whisperfish! Whisperfish must hate noise!”

  Gipsy nodded slowly “Well, the glass in that tank was very thick,” she said. “I’ll bet it made things ever so quiet in there.”

  “And once the ship crashed and they escaped, the ocean must have been quiet too,” Teggs went on. “Until the cryptoclidus started building in whisperfish waters!” “Of course!” cried Gipsy. “Ever since then, these whisperfish have been joining together to chew up anything that makes a loud noise – floating factories . . . submarines . . . that silly siren . . . And once they’ve stopped the racket, they split up again.”

  “And so the ‘monster’ seems to vanish!” Teggs nodded. “That’s why the whisperfish left us alone in our nice quiet shuttle and the silent diving bell. We weren’t disturbing them!”

  “Well, now we know what’s been going on,” said Gipsy. “But what good does it do us? We’re almost out of air.”

  Teggs nodded. He felt a bit dizzy. “If we’re not rescued soon . . .”

  As he spoke, a massive, dark shape swam up to them through the shattered tank.

  “Oh no,” groaned Teggs.

  It was Mira!

  “Coo-eee!” he said, waving a flipper. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you two! Now, it’s my turn to hide . . .” he tailed off. “Wait a moment. This is my spaceship! What are you doing inside my spaceship?”

  “Trying to get out!” cried Gipsy.