by Steve Cole
“Yes, sir,” said Arx. “At least we know what we’re looking for this time!”
Teggs nodded. “And, Gipsy, you and I must find Papa Claws and warn him. Rudolph the Red-nosed Raptor here is solid proof – carnivores have come to spoil Christmas!”
Teggs and Gipsy carried the sleeping raptor between them as they rushed along the red-and-white striped corridors, following signs for Papa Claws’s private workshop. At last they found it, at the most northerly point of the grotto. Fairy lights winked and twinkled all around the frosted windows, and statues of candy canes and snowsaurs stood either side of the big bronze entrance.
“What if Papa Claws is asleep?” whispered Gipsy. “After all, he’s got a long day ahead of him tomorrow.”
“Let’s find out,” said Teggs. He knocked on the door. There was no reply. So he tried the door handle – but that wouldn’t budge. “The door’s locked,” he remarked. “Perhaps he’s popped out.”
Gipsy looked at him. “Or maybe that’s what the raptors want us to think! Papa Claws said he was coming here. What if the raptors are holding him prisoner?”
“You’re right, Gipsy. We had better find out,” Teggs muttered.
Together, Teggs and Gipsy kicked open the door, rushed inside and jumped into battle poses.
But the workshop was quiet and empty. There was no sign that Papa Claws had been working on anything at all.
“I don’t understand,” said Teggs. “Papa Claws said he had so much to do—”
“Shh!” said Gipsy. “Listen!”
Loud, scuffling footsteps were drawing closer to the workshop.
“Quick!” said Teggs. “Hide behind this workbench . . .”
He and Gipsy ducked out of sight with their sleeping prisoner, just as Papa Claws came in – flanked by five nasty-looking green raptors!
“The gifts from conveyor-belt six have been shrunk and loaded onto your space-sleigh,” said the tallest raptor. “All is now prepared . . .”
“What can we do?” hissed Gipsy. “We must save Papa Claws!”
But Teggs’s jaw had dropped open. “Wait,” he whispered, peeping round the side of the bench. “Look at his hand!”
Gipsy looked, and gasped. One of the claws on Papa’s left hand was broken! She thought back to the piece of claw she had found in the wrapping robot’s head . . .
“Where has that useless Ranpak got to?” Papa Claws complained, offering the raptors a seat. “All I asked him to do was to squish that stupid iguanodon before he found out I sabotaged that wrapping robot . . . What’s keeping him?”
“The raptors have turned Papa Claws space-crazy!” said Teggs. “They’ve made him as nasty as they are!”
Gipsy gulped and nodded. “In more ways than one. Look!”
The astrosaurs stared in horror as Papa Claws put his hands to his beard and pulled. His scaly face stretched like rubber – then pinged off! Underneath his disguise, “Papa Claws” looked very different – he was a large, horrid-looking raptor! His whole head was scuffed and scraped. One eye was hidden by a black patch, but the other gleamed with sly cunning.
“It can’t be . . .” croaked Gipsy.
“But it is!” Teggs gulped. “It’s our oldest enemy, the rottenest raptor of the lot – General Loki!”
Chapter Seven
THE PLAN OF EVIL
“That’s better!” snarled General Loki, scratching his ugly face. “How I hate pretending to be Papa Claws. Having to act sweet and nice and kind all day – it makes me sick!” “But it is worth it,” said one of the raptors. “Thanks to your brilliant plan, General, we shall sssoon take over the entire Vegetarian Sssector!”
“Not if the astrosaurs can help it!” cried Teggs, leaping out from hiding.
“And we can!” added Gipsy. She jumped through the air and took out two raptors with a well-placed tail-swipe.
Loki snarled with surprise and tried to bite Gipsy. Teggs shoulder-charged him and knocked him reeling across the workshop. The other three raptors dived at Teggs, their jaws snapping. But Teggs twirled his tail around so fast he actually took off into the air! Unable to stop, the raptors knocked into each other and collapsed in a heap on the floor – so Teggs stopped spinning his tail and landed with a SPLAT on top of all three.
“That about wraps it up for you raptors,” Teggs snarled.
“Are you ssso ssssure?” rasped another raptor – the one they had left behind the desk. Now it had woken up and had Gipsy in a hooflock!“Ssssurrender,” it hissed. “Or I will turn your friend into hadrosaur hamburgers!”
“Sorry, Captain!” exclaimed Gipsy. “He crept up behind me.”
“Sneaky work, Ranpak,” said General Loki approvingly. “And to make doubly sure, Teggs – if you give me any trouble, I shall give my prisoner a claw sandwich!”
Teggs climbed off the dazed raptors and whirled round – to find Loki was now holding the real Papa Claws at tooth-point.
“Papa Claws!” Teggs gasped. “Are you all right?”
“No!” The Santasaurus looked bewildered and cross. “This brute has had me locked up in a cupboard here for days! Asking me this, asking me that, making me teach him everyone’s names . . .”
Teggs scowled at Loki. “So no one here would suspect you weren’t the real Papa.”
“I even used a voice changer to sound exactly like your sappy Santasaurus!” Loki agreed. “A perfect impersonation!”
Loki’s raptor bodyguards got back up and surrounded Teggs, clicking their claws threateningly. But Teggs ignored them. “How did you even get here, Loki?” he demanded. “Last I heard, you were in a maximum-security space prison.”
“I escaped!” cried Loki. “Do you seriously think there is a jail in the universe that can hold me? Me, Commander of the Seven Fleets of Death? Ruler of the meat mines of Raptos? Tamer of T. rex, destroyer of diplodocus—?”
“And the biggest dino-bore in space,” Teggs interrupted, yawning noisily. But for all his joking, he was secretly very worried. Twice before he had tangled with Loki – once at the Great Dinosaur Games, and once on the eerie planet Creepus – and both times, he had barely survived. “I suppose you’re planning to spoil Christmas for everyone and then conquer the entire Vegetarian Sector,” he went on. “You are so predictable, Loki.”
Loki frowned. “I am not!”
“I just knew you were going to say that,” said Teggs.
“Your pathetic jokes don’t fool me, Captain,” said Loki. “You’re dying to know what I’ve been up to, aren’t you? I bet you’d love to find out the juicy details of my entire plan!”
“Go on then,” said Teggs. “I like a good bedtime story.”
“When you hear this, you will never sleep again!” Loki hissed. “First, I landed on the surface of Exmus in a ship disguised as a lump of space junk. There was room inside for just seven of us, all squashed up together.”
Gipsy turned up her nose. “What a stinky ship that must have been!”
Loki ignored her and tightened his grip on Papa Claws. “My raptors sneaked inside and stole twenty thousand presents. They loaded them on a space-sleigh and dumped them out in deep space . . .”
“Where we found them,” Teggs realized. “And while your raptors were away, you snuck in, locked up Papa Claws and took his place, right?”
Loki nodded. “And the first thing I did as ‘Papa Claws’ was order replacements for the missing presents – from my home planet, Raptos!”
“But we saw the receipt,” said Gipsy. “You bought them from the Rose Star Spaceport.”
“Ha! Astro-fool! That was my little joke – there’s no such place. But I had to forge a receipt to keep that numbskull Nickel happy.”
“Of course,” groaned Papa Claws. “If you scramble up the letters in Rose Star Spaceport you get RAPTOR SPACE STORES!”
Teggs blinked. “However did you work that out?”
Papa Claws shrugged. “I spend eight months of the year in bed recovering after Christmas,” he said. “I get thr
ough a lot of cryptic crosswords.”
Gipsy smiled. “You are very clever!”
“Shut up!” snarled Loki furiously. “I’m the clever one, not him! I built perfect replicas of plant-eater cargo ships to fool the security satellites into letting them land. Like Nickel, they thought the ships were bringing replacement presents – but those ships were also bringing in an army of twenty thousand raptor troops!”
Gipsy gasped. “Where did you hide so many raptors?”
“They were camping out on the surface of Exmus,” Papa Claws piped up. “Waiting until Loki was ready for the practice-run of his miserable master plan.”
Loki’s good eye glinted in the light. “First, I used Papa Claws’s shrinking ray to reduce my raptors to a tiny size. Then I hid each of them inside a present. At my signal, each of the raptors returned to normal size—”
“And so they burst out of the wrapping paper!” Gipsy realized.
Teggs nodded. “That explains all the mess we found in storeroom one, and why our so-called ‘intruder’ didn’t take anything.”
“That’s right.” Loki smiled nastily. “Then, in my Papa Claws disguise, I took my troops straight back to the Shrinking Ray Chamber. When you asked me later if I’d seen anything unusual, I almost laughed my beard off!”
“So it was you who hit me on the head before I could look inside the Shrinking Ray Chamber,” Gipsy said. “You had to stop me from finding them!”
“Whacking you was a real pleasure,” Loki told her.
“So now we know . . .” Teggs glared at Loki. “You’re planning to shrink down your raptors and package them up with Christmas gifts, ready to be delivered all around the Vegetarian Sector!”
“There will be widespread panic and chaos,” Loki agreed. “And while it rages on, I shall lead my fleets of death in a glorious invasion . . .” The general threw back his head and laughed, and Ranpak and his raptor mates all joined in. “This is going to be a Christmas that no one will ever forget!”
Chapter Eight
DOWN THE CHUTE!
As Loki laughed on, Teggs looked helplessly between Gipsy and Papa Claws, both stuck tight in the grip of the raptors. He had to do something – but what? Even if he managed to save one of them, the other would surely be squished.
“And now, my dear Captain, it is time I dealt with you and your friends once and for all,” snarled General Loki, snapping his jaws. “I know it’s only Christmas Eve – but I fancy a bit of Christmas dinner . . .”
Then, suddenly, the workshop window smashed into a million pieces – as Iggy burst through it!
“If you’re hungry, Loki, chew on this!” the iguanodon roared, socking the general in the jaw. Loki let go of Papa Claws as he was sent staggering backwards.
It was all the distraction Gipsy needed. She elbowed Ranpak in the stomach and stamped on his foot. Then she ducked down as Teggs swung his spiky tail and knocked the raptor flying. The other five raptors hissed and screeched and advanced on Teggs . . .
But a moment later, Arx burst inside, bellowing a battle cry as he charged. He squashed two raptors into the floor before butting Loki in the bottom. The general yelled in anger as he went crashing into the wall.
That left Teggs facing three angry raptors. “Since it’s Christmas, I’ll give you some mistletoe,” he said. “Or do I mean – MISSILE-TOE?!” With that, he kicked one of the raptors so hard its head went through the ceiling!
The other two raptors pounced towards him. Gipsy grabbed one and hurled it over to Arx and Iggy, who whacked it with their tails at the same time. Then Nickel and Hans rushed into the workshop and dealt with the last raptor standing. Hans swatted it senseless with his big hand, and Nickel nutted it. It fell with a crash into the workbench.
“We did it!” cried Gipsy.
“Well done, all of you!” said Papa Claws, mopping his scaly brow. “Phew!”
“Hans, tie up these raptors,” said Nickel, helping Papa Claws sit down in a chair. “Looks like you’ll have to make an extra Christmas delivery tomorrow – to the nearest space prison!”
Teggs grinned as Hans started tying the raptors’ claws together with extra-strong tinsel, then turned to Arx. “Did you hear Loki’s plan?”
“Most of it, Captain,” said Arx. “We were right outside, waiting for the best moment to burst in.”
“But why did you follow us here?” Gipsy wondered. “I thought you were searching the base.”
“Well, I was still bothered by the fact I had never heard of the Rose Star Spaceport,” said Arx eagerly, “even though ‘Papa Claws’ said he had used it many times before. Then I realized that if you unscramble the letters you get—”
“Raptor Space Stores?” asked Teggs brightly.
“Oh.” Arx’s horns crumpled. “You already know.”
“Well done for working it out, my boy,” said the real Papa Claws kindly.
“Once clever-clogs Arx worked that out, we thought something funny must be going on,” Iggy added, tying up Ranpak with some fallen fairy lights. “And it certainly explains where that raptor in my room came from – he zoomed up to full size when I opened my present.”
“Right!” snarled General Loki from the back of the workshop. Unnoticed by all, he had sneaked over to a hatch in the wall and pulled it open. “And tomorrow, the same thing will happen on a thousand worlds! You may have beaten a handful of raptors – but you will never stop twenty thousand!”
Teggs frowned. “You’re bluffing, Loki.”
But Loki shook his head. “When I stopped conveyor-belt six, I didn’t just sabotage the wrapping robot – I hid my troops inside the presents there!”
“Conveyor-belt six?” gasped Papa Claws. “But that handles gifts for the most important dinosaurs on every plant-eating planet!”
“Oh, no!” Gipsy groaned. “We even helped to wrap up those presents!”
“Ha, ha, ha!” Loki cackled. “Tomorrow morning, the Vegetarian Sector’s leaders will be breakfast for my ravenous raptor army!”
“Get him!” Teggs cried.
But Loki had already wriggled away down the hatch.
“Papa Claws, where does that lead?” asked Arx.
“It’s my private-jet chute – a short cut to the parking bay,” the Santasaurus explained. “I simply jump in there and slide down straight into the pilot’s seat of my space-sleigh.”
Gipsy’s head-crest flushed blue with alarm. “But Loki’s raptor parcels have been shrunk and loaded onto that sleigh. He’s all set to put his plan into action!”
“Quick, crew,” cried Teggs. “We can’t let Loki get away!”
He squeezed inside the chute and went whizzing down a slippery metal slide, faster and faster, like something out of a funfair. Then he shot out into the parking bay and skidded along the ground on his bottom. Iggy popped out a moment later and landed on Teggs’s back with a gasp – just before Gipsy and Arx flew out of the chute and fell on them both – “OOF!”
“Loki’s getting away,” groaned Teggs, struggling to his feet. “Look!”
The roof doors of the parking bay had slid open, ready for launch. The astrosaurs gazed up at the snowy mountains all around, at the endless starry night, at the red-and-green glow of the security satellites – and at the sleek space-sleigh rising up into space, towing a massive carriage filled with deadly presents behind it.
Loki’s voice echoed out over the space-sleigh’s loudspeakers as he steered close to a mountain. “Before I go,” he called, “I’ve got one final Christmas present that will stop you coming after me . . .”
“We’ll never stop coming after you!” shouted Teggs.
But suddenly, fierce flames shot out from the sleigh’s rocket jets and engulfed the top of the mountain. The astrosaurs felt the ground shake – as an avalanche of snow came roaring down the mountainside, heading their way!
“Loki’s trying to bury us beneath tons of snow,” yelled Arx. “We’ll all be squashed!”
“We have to get those roof doors
closed!” cried Teggs.
“It’s no good,” said Iggy, who had already run to the controls. “Loki has smashed them – those doors are jammed open!”
The ground was shaking more and more. Gipsy shrieked, as the giant, jagged wave of snow and sleet came crashing down towards them . . .
Chapter Nine
DANGER AT THE EDGE OF SPACE
“Quick! Back inside the grotto!” Teggs ordered, and the astrosaurs ran for their lives. Already the first icy rocks and pebbles were pouring between the roof doors . . .
They jumped through the main entrance and slammed the doors behind them – just as half the mountainside came down on the parking bay, burying all the other space-sleighs along with the Sauropod’s shuttles.
“Loki’s right,” groaned Iggy. “We can’t go after him now. He’s beaten us!”
Just then, Nickel and Hans came running down the corridor with dozens of angry elfosaurs.
“We’ve told everyone what’s been going on, and we all want to help you stop Loki,” said Nickel.
“Yeah!” cried Hans. “What are we waiting for?”
“Spring, by the looks of it!” said Iggy sadly. He opened the doors to reveal solid snow and ice from floor to ceiling. “An early thaw is about our only chance!”
“Well, I’m a thaw loser,” Teggs declared. “We can’t give up. There must be a way to stop Loki.”
“We could send a message into space,” Gipsy suggested. “Warning people not to open any presents tomorrow.”
“I had the same idea,” said Papa Claws, padding sadly towards them. “I went to the signals room to send a distress call – but Loki has smashed all the radios.”
“I’ll try my communicator and warn the Sauropod,” said Teggs. But he got nothing but static. “All that ice on top of us must be blocking the signal!”
“Looks like Loki’s thought of everything,” said Iggy.
“Not quite,” said Nickel. He turned to Papa Claws. “I’m sorry about this, sir, but . . . I’m going to have to ask you to open a present before Christmas Day.”
Papa Claws was so shocked, his beard stood up in the air. “How can you suggest such a thing, Nickel?” he spluttered.
“Because us elfosaurs have all chipped in to buy you a brand-new Mega-Turbo Dungstar Five space-sleigh for Christmas, that’s why!” Nickel unlocked a door in the wall to reveal a sleek, glittering, red-and-silver dream machine.