Meteor Madness
Page 4
“Nearly there, Rocky,” said Captain Krill. “One more burst of speed should do it.”
“I’m the King of the Cosmos!” Rocky shouted, as the Tunafish jetted free from Kroesus’s fiery meteors, the X-jets and the Squid-Gs in a fish-shaped blur. “Warp speed … away!”
And BOOM. They were gone.
P.S.
“Where did they go?” gasped Dark Wader.
He peered out of the Squid-G windscreen. The sky was full of burning meteors, but no fish-shaped spaceship could be seen. Squid-Gs and X-jets were flying around like mosquitoes with no one left to bite.
“The Tunafish was right there,” squealed Anadin Skyporker down the intercom. “I was about to swill it out of the sky!”
“I think they warped out of here,” said Crabba.
“Impossible!” shouted Dark Wader. “The jelly-cam said they were ill! You can’t fly a spaceship like that when you’re ill!”
Crabba clicked his claws nervously. “I told you ‘bird flu’ was spelled wrong, boss. The penguins must have found the jelly-cam and sent us a fake message. They tricked us. Again! I’m off to hide somewhere so you can’t barbecue me.”
“NO!” Dark Wader yelled, as Crabba scuttled away. “Skyporker, do something!”
“YOU do something!” Anadin Skyporker screamed back.
“How about I blow YOU up instead?” Dark Wader growled.
“Not if I blow YOU up first!”
The Sossij emperor swivelled his guns to point at Dark Wader. Dark Wader swivelled his guns to point at the Sossij emperor.
“I knew this was going to end badly,” said Crabba, clambering back on to Dark Wader’s shoulder to get a better look.
“Ready,” hissed Skyporker.
“Aim,” snarled Dark Wader.
There was a pause.
“Hey, you there!” The Sossij emperor suddenly sounded shocked. “Weird smoky guy! What are you doing on my ship? Why is it so cold in here?”
“I was about to ask the same thing,” said the pengbot, his laser eyes brightening with surprise at the dog-shaped visitor who had silently appeared in the Squid-G cabin.
“Oh, poo…”
“Destination: planet Kroesus,” said the Dogmutt Dark Wader, settling into the controls. “Estimated duration of flight: eight minutes. Estimated time of arrival: twenty-five hundred hours, Kroesus time.”
The intercom crackled.
“Check,” the Dogmutt Anadin Skyporker replied.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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
Text copyright © Lucy Courtenay, 2013
Illustrations copyright © James Davies, 2013
Cover illustration copyright © Antony Evans, 2013
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2017
eISBN: 978–1–84715–494–1
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
Welcome aboard the spaceship Tunafish. This is your Intergalactic Computer Engine speaking. You can call me ICEcube for short.
I’m here to guide the Tunafish through the universe, scan the galaxy for meteor storms and spot any black holes. My penguin crew would have flapped their last flap years ago if it wasn’t for me.
Penguin crew? Yup! Penguins are perfect for space missions. They’re good at swimming (being in space is a lot like swimming), cheap to train, and untroubled by temperatures of near zero.
But why are these penguins in space? You’ll have to ask NASA about that. Their finest scientists started a top-secret mission to send penguins further and faster than any creature had gone before. They designed the spaceship Tunafish for all their needs. But the spaceship disappeared. Everyone thought that the mission had simply been a failure. Little did they know that the Tunafish and its penguin crew had just been sucked through a wormhole into Deep Space.
My database suggests that the best word for this is: whoops!
So now these penguins are travelling in search of a nice planet to call home. In the course of their quest, they’ve become intergalactic heroes. They’ve saved the cat race of Miaow from certain death on the planet Woofbark. They’ve even destroyed a large pair of frozen pants that was endangering space traffic on the tiny planet of Bum. This is mostly down to me, of course. Impressed?
There were five penguins to begin with, but the first mate, Beaky Wader, disappeared from the Tunafish three years ago after a nasty argument about who was going to be Captain. The words, “You haven’t seen the last of me,” echoed around the spaceship for days. Good riddance, I say. Beaky Wader was Trouble with a capital Fish.
And now – well, now they’re still looking for the perfect penguin planet. We’ll probably be rescuing things as we go along, so I know you’re as excited as I am to be here. Fasten your seat belt and have a sardine. I would say that you are in safe hands, but penguins only have flippers.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One…
“HELP!” bawled Bobby Cheese, commander of intergalactic pizza-delivery spaceship, the Doughball, as he zoomed towards certain death.
A crazy-looking spacecraft had appeared out of nowhere, driving him off-course in a blaze of gunfire.
“Awaiting instruction,” said the Doughball’s computer.
“I AM instructing you!” yelled Bobby Cheese. “HELP me!”
He thumped all the buttons on the Doughball’s juddering control panel in a panic. Bobby Cheese was a six-armed alien from the planet Bo-Ki, but even so, two thousand buttons took a long time to thump.
“Awaiting instruction,” said the computer again. “Chill out, Cheese,” it added.
“Don’t tell me to chill out!” Bobby Cheese wailed. “We’re hopelessly out of control!”
Stars shot past the Doughball’s windows at weird angles. Bobby Cheese moaned. He didn’t know if he was upside down or the right way up.
“Awaiting instruction,” said the computer for the third time.
“You’re useless!” cried Bobby Cheese. “We’ve got nearly a thousand pizzas flying around in the back. They’ll be ruined.
We’ll be picking mozzarella out of the fuselage for weeks unless we get this craft back under control!”
“We’ll be picking you out of the fuselage as well,” the computer said helpfully.
“Quit the small talk and get me out here. Have you any idea who’s attacking us?” Bobby Cheese yelled.
The computer was quiet for a second. “The attack is by Squid-G fighters,” it said at last.
“Squidgy what?”
“Squid-G fighters. Spacecrafts with considerable firepower and a strong smell of fish.”
“But why are they attacking me?” shrieked Bobby Cheese.
“For fun?” suggested the computer.
The Doughball spun faster. Its nose dipped further. The stars outside grew wonkier. Bobby Cheese glanced a
t a tattered poster stuck on the wall. The poster showed four penguins posing beside a fish-shaped spacecraft.
“Only the heroic astronauts of the Tunafish can help me now,” he gasped. “We have to contact them!”
“But they’re just penguins,” said the computer. “Are you sure you want to put your life into the flippers of four flightless birds?”
“They’re not just penguins!” cried Bobby Cheese. “They’re space-fighting heroes! If I haven’t died by the time they get here, remind me to get their autographs!”
The wonky stars suddenly disappeared from view altogether as the spinning Doughball plunged into a bank of mist. Bobby Cheese typed a shaky distress call to the spaceship Tunafish and pressed SEND. Squinting desperately through the windscreen, his eyes widened at the sight of a gigantic five-pointed star looming ahead of him.
“What’s that? Is it a planet?”
“Planets don’t have pointy bits. That’s a space station,” reported the computer.
The air filled with a humming sound. Bobby Cheese groaned and pressed his hands to as many of his ears as he could reach. It was over. The Doughball was stuffed.
Where was the Tunafish in his hour of greatest need?