“I don’t think that was Earth,” said Splash, as he tried to shake a blob of honey off his flippers. It was hardening rapidly. “It was similar, but the grass was purple and the leaves on those trees were blue.”
“What’s your point?” said Rocky.
“For someone so dim, you did very well to get across those stepping stones,” said Fuzz. “How did you do that?”
Rocky shrugged. “The right stones were glowing,” he said.
“I didn’t see anything glowing,” said the Captain.
“That’s because I’m the bird god,” said Rocky with a smirk.
“See what I mean?” said Splash to Fuzz. “Unbearable.”
“And I could see where I was going,” Rocky added. My brows usually get in the way.” He looked sad. “I guess I’ll have to wear this hat forever now.”
“Never mind, Rocky,” said the Captain. “You proved to us all that you don’t need brows to be a Space Penguin.”
The huge comet had broken through Bumbl-B’s atmosphere. It was so close, the penguins could almost stretch their flippers out of the temple windows and touch it.
“We’d better get back to the Tunafish before Bumbl-B becomes an ex-planet,” said the Captain. He frowned. “I wonder what happened to Bumbl-A?”
“Maybe it was destroyed, too,” said Splash.
He exchanged a glance with Fuzz. It was time to come clean about the Tunafish.
“Captain—” he began, as they waddled out of the palace compound.
“I can’t hear a thing through this wind,” said Captain Krill. “Tell me later.”
The rushing wind flung up the dust from the ground. It stuck to their honeyed feathers, and got into their beaks and eyes.
“What were you going to tell me, Splash?” said the Captain, as the familiar fish-shaped craft came into view.
“There’s a problem with the Tunafish,” said Splash.
“We couldn’t find the tailfin,” Fuzz said.
The Captain stopped waddling. “What?”
“I swear it was lying beside the Tunafish right after we crashed,” said Splash. “But Fuzz and I looked everywhere for it.”
“We were hoping the whole portal thing would work out,” said Fuzz.
The comet was getting so close now that it was difficult to hear each other speak.
“We can still leave without the tailfin, right?” said Rocky.
“Nope,” said Splash.
“I feel bad about that,” said a voice. “I feel bad about lots of things.”
The Space Penguins goggled at the small dusty crab scuttling towards them.
“I hid your tailfin in the Lovely Loot,” Crabba said. “Please don’t hit me,” he added quickly.
“I never hit creatures smaller than myself,” the Captain said.
“My master hits me all the time and he’s bigger than you,” Crabba said. “He hits me, and he’s horrible to me, and now he’s gone to another world and left me behind!”
“Did you snip off my brows?” asked Rocky in a thunderous voice.
“My master said he’d boil me in my shell if I didn’t,” Crabba whimpered. “I’m sorry.”
“You did THIS,” Rocky roared, wrenching off his hat, “and you expect me to forgive you? The Rockmeister will never be the same!”
“You can say that again,” said Splash with a whistle.
A brand-new pair of bright orange eyebrows had appeared on Rocky’s head. They were thicker and longer and brighter than the previous pair. They were magnificent. They were awe-inspiring.
Rocky put his flippers to the sides of his head. “The brows are back!” he gasped. “The tonic worked! Fuzz, you’re a genius!”
“We don’t have time for all this chat,” Splash said anxiously. “The comet is going to strike at any minute.”
The comet was impossibly huge, stretching across the full horizon.
“How can we leave?” asked Fuzz. “The Tunafish has no tail!”
“Use the Lovely Loot,” said Crabba. He pointed with one claw. “It’s under that mound of dust.”
Not for the first time, the Space Penguins rushed to tether the damaged Tunafish to the golden spacecraft. The planet seemed to throb beneath their feet.
“I’d forgotten how much I liked this ship,” said Rocky, gazing at his new reflection in the gleaming walls of the cabin.
“Stop admiring yourself and start the engines!” Splash shouted, as Captain Krill and Fuzz waddled aboard.
“Can I come?” Crabba asked in the doorway.
“We can’t leave you here to die,” said the Captain.
“Unfortunately,” Splash agreed.
“Hop aboard,” Rocky said, preening his eyebrows. “The more the merrier.”
“You can come,” Fuzz said, scowling at the little crab. “But one false move and I’ll turn you into pâté.”
“Now get us out of here before this entire planet goes up in smoke, Rocky,” said Captain Krill, as Crabba scuttled aboard.
Rocky revved the engine, opened the thrusters, pulled on the joystick and launched skywards. The Lovely Loot shot across the sky with the kind of speed the Tunafish could only dream of. The vast comet barrelled past the windshield in a WHOOSH that almost turned the Lovely Loot and the tethered Tunafish upside down.
“We’re not moving fast enough,” said the Captain. “We need more distance or we’ll be caught up in the impact.”
“Press the hyperspace button,” Crabba shouted from beneath the control panel.
“Is it the red one?” asked Rocky.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The comet struck Bumbl-B head-on. The entire planet shattered like glass. Rocky slammed his flipper on the red button as plumes of dust and rock exploded into the air. Fire and wind and brightness – and then nothing.
“Are we dead?” asked Splash after a moment.
“On the contrary,” said Captain Krill, picking himself up off the floor and dusting down his belly. “We appear to be as alive as oysters, and in another section of the universe entirely. Good work, team.”
“Clean. Tidy. Put away,” said Marin-9, looking at Crabba.
“Leave Crabba alone, Marin-9,” said the Captain. “He is our guest. I expect this crew to treat him kindly.”
Crabba hadn’t expected kindness after everything he’d done to the Space Penguins. “Thank you, Captain,” he said in surprise.
“Where to?” asked Rocky, gazing at his reflection in the windshield. “Now we’ve lost Earth again?”
“We may not have found Earth,” the Captain told his crew, “but we discovered something more important.”
“My eyebrows,” Rocky sighed happily.
“We discovered that we are true Space Penguins,” the Captain said. “We don’t need Earth with its leopard seals and killer whales. We have the cosmos. And we have each other.”
The penguins clapped. Crabba clapped, too.
“Nice speech, Captain,” said Splash.
“But we have to face facts. The Tunafish gets cramped on long journeys. We need somewhere to settle down.”
Crabba raised his claw. “The Death Starfish is empty,” he said. “Why don’t you move in?”
The Death Starfish? Beaky Wader’s penguin paradise, with its ice slides and swimming pools and tanks full of fresh fish? Its fleet of Squid-G fighters and top-of-the-range technology? The mighty space station containing everything the penguins could ever want? From a base like that, the Space Penguins could continue their missions forever!
“Oh holy halibut,” gasped Rocky, almost falling off his pilot’s chair. “Yes, please.”
“Can we change its name, Captain?” asked Fuzz in excitement.
“Did you have something in mind?” asked the Captain.
“We should upgrade our old world, the same as the Bumbls did,” said Splash. “And rename the Death Starfish … Antarctic-B.”
“Rockhopper on!” said Rocky.
The Captain patted Crabba gratefully on the head
. “Set the coordinates for Antarctic-B, Rocky,” he said, as Crabba beamed. “All for one…”
“And one for FISH!”
Dark Wader hit the sunlit ground of the new world helmet-first. His metallic beak snapped shut with a clang.
He tried to turn his head. It didn’t move. Something was clogging up his cogs.
Those wretched Bumbls and their honey guns, he thought. I knew they were trouble.
“Crabba, open my helmet,” the pengbot ordered.
It came out as “Mmph, mmph-mmph mmph mmph”.
Where is that cursed crouton? Dark Wader wondered. There’d been no sign of him since the temple. It was typical of Crabba to get lost.
A great striped cloud of Bumbls whirred over Dark Wader’s head towards some vast, heavily scented flowers growing nearby.
“Bumbl-C!” he heard the queen buzz. “Bumbl-C at last!”
Dark Wader tried to sit up. The hardened honey clogging his circuits made it impossible. Abandoning the attempt, the pengbot stared at the huge blue leaves on the tree above his head. This wasn’t Earth at all, he realized. This was … somewhere else.
A vast hand reached down, blocking out the sunlight, and lifted Dark Wader into the air. And all at once, the pengbot realized something terrible. On this bright new planet, he was the size of a…
“Shiny dolly!” said the child, in a deep and booming voice.
Put me down, creature, or my Squid-G fighters will blow you into a million pieces! the evil mastermind thought in cold rage.
“Dolly have tea!”
Dark Wader was plonked on to a picnic rug. He stared at his fellow tea guests: a stuffed bear and a white-faced doll in a lace bonnet. His plans for Earthly domination weren’t going well.
Oh poo, he thought bitterly. Poopy poopy POO.
Lucy Courtenay has officially been writing children’s fiction since 1999, and unofficially for a lot longer than that. She has contributed to a number of series for Stripes including ANIMAL ANTICS and, most recently, SPACE PENGUINS. In her spare time she sings with the BBC Symphony Chorus and forages for mushrooms, which her husband wisely refuses to touch. If she were a penguin, she would be a rockhopper. Her eyebrows are already fairly awesome.
Copyright
STRIPES PUBLISHING
An imprint of Little Tiger Press
1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2015
Text copyright © Lucy Courtenay, 2015
Illustrations copyright © James Davies, 2015
Cover illustration copyright © Antony Evans, 2015
eISBN: 978–1–84715–594–8
The right of Lucy Courtenay and James Davies to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
www.littletiger.co.uk
Emergency! When a stricken spacecraft sends out a distress call, the penguins dive to the rescue beak-first – straight into the jaws of a mysterious space station and some rather fishy business. Will they escape? Or will the intergalactic heroes be stuck there forever?
Alert! Alert! When the penguins splash-land on a watery planet, they find themselves in the tentacles of a monstrous sea creature. Can they escape with their ship in one piece or are they well and truly sunk?
Zoom! Pilot Rocky is desperate to enter the Tunafish into the Superchase Space Race. But this is the most dangerous race in the universe. And when an old enemy turns up at the start, the penguins find themselves up to their beaks in trouble!
Action stations! The Space Penguins are attacked by a fleet of starships and escape by the skin of their flippers. But as they head on their way, Captain Krill notices his crew are acting strangely. It looks like there’s double trouble ahead in the shape of some rather shifty impostors…
Prepare for landing! When the penguins arrive on slimy Planet Splurdj, they’re impressed by the entertainment the Oozis have on offer – especially the new Space Zoo. But will the penguins find out what the slippery Oozis are really up to before it’s too late?
Full steam ahead! On a visit to a strange moon, the penguins accidentally let an egg-shaped passenger on to their spaceship. But when the egg hatches into a metal-munching monster, their journey becomes a race against time. Will the Tunafish survive the trip, or is the spaceship destined to become dinner?
Weapons at the ready! When the penguins board a luxury cruise spaceship teetering on the edge of an enormous black hole, they know it’s going to be no holiday. Rebels have taken over the ship and they’ll stop at nothing to drive it to its doom. Can the penguins keep their cool on their most dangerous mission yet?
Comet Chaos Page 4