by Jim Ladd
“Captain, how are we going to get back now Black-Hole Beard has pinched our shuttle?” said Legg.
“Don’t worry, your trusty captain will come up with an answer,” replied Comet.
There was a long silence in which Comet stroked his moustache and hummed and hawed a lot.
“We need to alert the Jolly Apollo,” said Sam weakly.
“Exactly! I was just about to say that,” said Comet.
“And how do we do that, Captain?” asked Barney. “The communicators won’t work down here.”
“Erm… we… err… well… you tell ’em, Sam,” said Comet.
Sam looked around and grabbed a long blue sticky vine. “Maybe we could make a message big enough for them to see from space.” He laid out the vine on the dusty floor. “Use anything we can to spell the word ‘HELP’ – the bigger the better.”
“Precisely!” said Comet. “Really, Barney, a fool could have worked that out. Right, me hearties, let’s get to work. Everyone grab some vines.”
Spelling out a simple message took a lot longer than Sam thought it would. The vines were tricky to chop and withered in the heat of the sun. It was hot and frustrating work and after half an hour they still didn’t have enough to make the letter “H”.
“This is a stupid idea!” complained Pegg.
“And I suppose you’ve got a better one?” replied Legg.
Sam slumped to the floor for a rest and watched them argue. They were still at it when Barney turned up carrying three unconscious grumigators.
“Wow, Barney – how did you knock them out?” asked Sam.
“I think it might have been the sandwiches,” Barney said sadly. “They’ve gone all floppy.”
“Hey, we could use them to spell out our message!” said Sam. “Are there any more?”
“There’s plenty of them floating in the lake,” smiled Barney.
Within five minutes Barney was back and had spelled out “HELP” in large grumigator letters. Pegg and Legg were still too busy arguing to notice, but Comet looked up from where he’d been taking a sneaky snooze.
“Arr, good work, me hearties!” he said. “An extra ration of grum for you when we get back on board! Now then, let’s hope there’s someone on the Apollo using the telescope.”
“And let’s hope they get here before these grumigators wake up,” added Sam.
Sam stared into the sky, waiting for some kind of sign that the Jolly Apollo had seen the message.
“Perhaps it’s too small,” he wondered aloud.
“Maybe it’s not spelled right,” said Pegg.
“Of course it’s spelled right,” snapped Legg, and immediately they started arguing again.
“Oh, give me strength,” sighed Comet.
“Shhhhhh!” Sam hissed, looking down at the grumigators. One of them was moving. Everyone went very quiet as the grumigator’s tail twitched. Then its mouth opened and it gave a huge, echoing burp.
“Shiver me laser beams, the beast’s awake!” whispered Comet, staring at the grumigator’s sharp purple teeth. “What is that cursed crew doing? Where is the Apollo?”
One by one the grumigators began to shuffle about, burping noisily.
“I don’t think they liked the sandwiches,” said Barney as one rolled around, groaning.
“No kidding, Beaky!” hissed Pegg.
“Who are you calling Beaky, Two Heads?” snapped Barney.
“Hey, leave me out of this!” shouted Legg.
“Someone do something,” Comet said in a panic. “Cabin Boy, any bright ideas?”
“Look!” said Sam.
“I am looking! That’s how I know they’re waking up! Can’t you do better than that?” snapped Comet.
“No, look,” said Sam, pointing upwards.
A streak of light was heading straight for them.
“It’s the Apollo!” cried Legg.
“About time too,” said Comet.
Suddenly a large basket hanging from a rope dropped down in front of them.
“We won’t all fit in that,” said Sam.
“It’s for the grum,” explained Barney.
“Typical!” sniffed Comet. “Their captain is in mortal danger and all they’re worried about is the grum!”
Just then a rope ladder unfurled in front of them.
“Good, good! Women and captains first,” said Comet, grabbing a bottle of grum and jumping on to the ladder. “Make sure all that grum gets loaded while you’re at it.”
The remaining pirates quickly chucked the grum into the basket and headed up the ladder as fast as their legs and tentacles could carry them.
Although the crew was glad everyone, and the grum, was back on board, the mood went flat when they heard that Black-Hole Beard had double-crossed them.
“So, me hearties, it looks like Black-Hole Beard will find Planet X after all. He’ll be even more famous and we’ll still be nothing,” Comet sighed.
The crew let the news sink in.
“Sorry about your mum and dad,” said Barney, laying a rubbery tentacle softly on Sam’s shoulder. “Perhaps Black-Hole Beard will rescue them – he might release them for a ransom.”
“You don’t look too upset about it, lad,” said Comet.
“Why should I,” said Sam gleefully, “when I’ve got this!” He reached inside his shirt and pulled out the grum bottle containing the map. “I gave Black-Hole Beard an empty bottle from the shuttle,” he explained.
“The old grum-bottle switcheroo!” cried Comet proudly. “Arrr, I’ll make a pirate of you yet! I think that deserves a game and a grum! Last one to the bowling alley’s a glugspawn egg!”
The crew of the Apollo cheered. But just then the large telescreen at the front of the ship crackled into life and Black-Hole Beard’s angry face filled the screen.
“Curse you, Comet! I don’t know how you did it, you snivelling planet-lubber, but no one gets away with double-crossing me! I’m coming for that map, and when I catch you I’m going to feed your guts to the space gulls; I’m going to—”
Comet switched off the telescreen.
“Oh, has he gone? We must be getting terrible reception behind this asteroid,” said Comet. “I really should get a new antenna.”
The crew laughed and cheered.
“Now, where was I?” mused Comet. “Ah yes! Thanks to our new cabin boy, we have the map that tells us how to find Planet X. Tomorrow we shall set off to rescue Sam’s parents and earn our fame and fortune! But tonight… we bowl!” Comet held up his hand until the cheers died down. “A toast. To Sam – the hero of the day!”
“To Sam,” responded the crew. “The hero of the day!”
Sam looked at his fellow crew members as they put on their bowling shoes and smiled. They might be a bit useless, he thought, but their hearts are in the right place. It hardly seemed possible that only a few days ago he was at home, waiting for his parents. When he had looked at all those different pirate ships moored up at the port, he never would have thought that he’d end up on the Jolly Apollo. But now he was on a pirate spaceship sailing through unknown galaxies full of exciting planets – and right there, right then it felt like the best place to be in the entire universe.
Tomorrow he would set off to find his parents – and who knew what else!
Sam swung his telescope to follow the spaceship. It was a huge black galleon with billowing sails. At the back of the ship, looming out over open space, was a long silver plank. Sam grinned as he saw the white skull-and-rockets flag flying from the topmost mast. Space pirates!
Copyright
With special thanks to Paul Harrison
To John Joe – the first pirate to join the crew
Space Pirates: Stowaway!
First published in the UK in 2013 by Nosy Crow Ltd
The Crow’s Nest, 10a Lant Street
London SE1 1QR, UK
This ebook edition first published in 2013
Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and / or registered trad
emarks of Nosy Crow Ltd
Text copyright © Hothouse Fiction, 2013
Cover and interior illustration © Benji Davies, 2013
The right of Hothouse Fiction and Benji Davies to be identified as author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblence to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978 0 85763 155 8
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“Full speed ahead!” Sam yelled.
The large sails of the spaceship Jolly Apollo filled with the solar winds gusting from the bright-orange sun ahead of it and tacked gracefully across the empty space of the Auroran solar system. The Jolly Apollo was no ordinary spaceship – it was a pirate ship! It was also a patched-up wreck crewed by an assorted bunch of aliens who were quite possibly the most useless space pirates the galaxy had ever seen. All apart from one: the new cabin boy, Samson Starbuck.
“That’s it! That’s Lumiere Max!” said Sam, pointing at a nearby sun.
“Batten your hatch there, shipmate. Some of us are trying to get a well-earned rest,” replied Captain Comet.
Comet was the captain of the Apollo. He was tall, thin and three-eyed (though eye patches covered two of his eyes), with a magnificent waxed moustache. Dressed in a long frock coat and tricorn hat, he looked every inch the perfect pirate. Unfortunately, Comet’s dress sense was the most pirate-like thing about him. At that precise moment he was lounging in a chair with a pair of three-lensed sunglasses perched on his nose and a foaming glass of grum in his hand.
Grum was the drink of choice for pirates – a kind of foamy lemonade that encouraged bowling and kept space scurvy away.
“But, Captain,” Sam insisted, “Lumiere Max is on my parent’s map!”
Sam’s parents had been spaceship-wrecked on the legendary Planet X, but had managed to use their ship’s homing beacon to send Sam a map, scribbled on a piece of spacesuit material.
The little planet where Sam and his parents lived was a barren rock in the middle of nowhere, with nothing on it apart from his parent’s lab and a port full of vicious space pirates. Luckily, the only thing space pirates love more than bowling is treasure, and every pirate had heard the rumours of Planet X – a lost planet made of solid gold. When Sam had shown Captain Comet the map, he’d been welcomed aboard as the newest member of the Jolly Apollo’s crew.
“Lumiere Max? Are you sure?” asked Comet, suddenly interested.
He fished around inside his coat and pulled out the scrap of silvery spacesuit material the map was drawn on. Pushing his sunglasses up on to his head he peered at it intently. He blinked, and then – making sure no one was looking – flicked up his eye patches to reveal two perfectly good eyes. He stared again at the map.
“Well, blow down me main braces, that’s right!” Comet muttered to himself. He flipped his patches back down and cleared his throat. “Well done, Sam. I wondered when you’d spot it. I’d noticed it myself ages ago, of course.”
Across the deck, Barney the ship’s cook – a huge, multi-tentacled squid-like alien – grinned and rolled his eyes at Comet’s boastful ways…