Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow

by Nathan Bransford

  “Great goose’s gold!” Praiseworthy said. “Master Wonderbar, I could not be more excited that you have chosen to embark on this voyage, I dare say a good gentlemanly camaraderie makes every adventure—”

  “Ahem,” Sarah said. “Gentlemanly?”

  “Oh dear me, Mistress Daisy, I didn’t mean to exclude you, all I meant to say was that—”

  “You don’t think girls make good thieves?”

  “The best thieves, Mistress Daisy, the best thieves,” Praiseworthy said quickly. “It’s just that—”

  “Well, well, well,” Mick interrupted, putting a finishing flourish on a stick figure making a rude gesture. “So the Dragon’s Eye slays another. I knew you would come around.”

  “Where is it?” Jacob asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I know where it is. I would just like to savor this moment.” Mick took a deep breath and smiled with his eyes closed. “Ahh. There. It’s so fun hatching a plan. Especially when even your rival sees the genius in it.”

  “It doesn’t take a genius to chase after a diamond,” Jacob said.

  “No? Maybe you would like to lead us to the diamond that you had never heard of until five minutes ago, and that you still at this moment have no idea where to find?”

  Mick let the long pause stretch on.

  “I thought not. Looks like I’m the leader. Reluctantly. It’s not easy being the one with a vision, but it’s a burden I choose to accept. After all, who was the one who stole seven out of the eight moons from Orion’s belt?”

  Dexter shrugged his shoulders.

  “It was me,” Mick said.

  Jacob couldn’t wait to shut Mick up. “I really didn’t want to have to do this.” He walked over to Dexter and showed him the photograph of Mick dressed up in his top hat.

  Dexter spasmed with sharp laughter. He pointed at the picture in disbelief. “Oh man. You are so busted.”

  Mick’s face turned red and he started to walk toward Dexter, but Praiseworthy chimed in, “Master Cracken, I have some urgent news. The royal fleet is approaching, and there are a great many of them. I fear they are trying to encircle us.”

  Mick ran out of the room. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

  Jacob, Sarah, and Dexter followed him into the cockpit, which was filled with video screens that provided a view in every direction of space. The ship’s instruments were plated in gold, something even Mick didn’t seem to have the heart to deface. Mick typed furiously into the interface and stared at the monitors, which were filled with ominous X’s.

  “They’re everywhere. This is not good.”

  Jacob looked out into space and saw red ships spaced at regular intervals, all of them bearing down quickly.

  “Praiseworthy, evasive action Beta. Step on it!” Mick shouted.

  Praiseworthy yelled a still-proper-sounding “Yee-haw!” and space seemed to blur a little as they accelerated. The ships quickly grew in size as they drew near but then flew harmlessly by as Praiseworthy easily left them behind, even though he still had the extra burden of towing Lucy.

  “Wow,” Sarah said. “Praiseworthy, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “Oh Mistress Daisy, how it pleases me to hear you say that. Did I mention my rocket boosters? There really is nothing like them in the universe, and Master Cracken—”

  “What can we do to help?” Jacob asked.

  Mick pounded a few more instruments and kept his eye on the monitors. “Now that you mention it, you and Dexter could go into the rear gunner room. It has a red door. Go in there and fire some warning shots to keep them off our tail.”

  Jacob nodded and they ran into the rear of the ship. They found the red door, which opened with a hiss. Jacob and Dexter stepped inside the small room, which had a small porthole for a window. The door closed with another hiss and they held on as the ship began to shake violently.

  Dexter looked around. “The gun has to be here somewhere.”

  Jacob grabbed Dexter and placed a finger to his lips. “Praiseworthy?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  Praiseworthy didn’t say anything, and Jacob thought that he might be too busy escaping the fleet.

  “I’d really like to hear more about your rocket boosters.”

  Praiseworthy still didn’t say anything. He was safely occupied. Jacob didn’t have much time if he wanted to accomplish the plan he had just concocted.

  “Dexter, listen. If Mick Cracken is the scariest buccaneer in the galaxy, who do you think those ships are?”

  Dexter frowned. “Uh, the royal fleet?”

  “Exactly. If Mick’s the bad guy, they’re the good guys! They might be able to get us out of this!”

  Dexter paused to think about it. “I don’t know about that. Mick may be a buccaneer and all, and between you and me I think he might have some mental issues, but he doesn’t seem like that bad of a guy.”

  “I don’t trust him! You and I can take Mick. We can take control of this situation. Let’s steal Mick’s spaceship, turn him in, and go figure out what happened to Earth!”

  Jacob was waiting for a rousing agreement, but instead Dexter was staring out the window into space.

  “Dexter?”

  Dexter leaned back and pointed at the window, his face suddenly pale.

  Jacob looked out into space and saw Mick’s ship and Lucy, still tied up with rope, receding into the distance.

  “Is that ... Praiseworthy? Why would we be moving away from Praiseworthy? What’s happening?”

  In a flash, Jacob realized they weren’t in a gunner room at all. They were slowly drifting through outer space, away from Praiseworthy and Mick and Lucy and Sarah and any hope they had of finding their way back home to Earth.

  They were in an emergency pod. Mick had fired them off into the great unknown.

  “I think we’ve been jettisoned,” Dexter said.

  CHAPTER 15

  You did what?!” Sarah shouted.

  “I knew you’d be pleased,” Mick said, relaxing back into his captain’s chair with a wide grin.

  “Pleased?! Why would I be pleased?”

  Mick frowned and held up a finger to signal for time. After a moment he said, “Wait. Let me get this straight. You actually like those people?”

  “Yes, you imbecile!”

  Mick scratched his chin as if he were trying to solve a complex mathematical problem. “Huh. I hardly even remember their names. Are they important people on your planet? I don’t trust the guy named Wonder-something, he didn’t like the plan. You can’t steal something with people you don’t trust. That’s practically rule number one of being a buccaneer.”

  Sarah felt her face flush and she suddenly wished that her mom had let her take martial arts instead of ballet, because she would have loved to use Mick Cracken’s thick head as target practice. She balled her hands into fists and hit her chair, pounding the soft cushion again and again until her knuckles stung. She heard her mom’s voice in her head lecturing her that proper ladies don’t throw temper tantrums, and she hit the cushion one more time for good measure.

  “I am not a lady!” Sarah yelled at Mick.

  Mick had a scared smile locked on his face.

  “I can’t believe this!” Sarah said. “I can’t believe you left my friends behind. Turn this ship around, Praiseworthy. We’re going back to get them.”

  Mick swallowed, and he tapped his cheek with his finger. “Um. Well. We can’t. We left the royal fleet behind, but if we turned back we’d definitely be captured.”

  “You’d be captured,” Sarah said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Praiseworthy!”

  “Well, you see Mistress Daisy, I must be commanded by Master Cracken, and since he doesn’t wish to go back, I shan’t disobey his orders, but all the same I do wish you would reconsider, as I was so looking forward to embarking upon adventures with you. And if I may be perfectly honest, I am not ready to return to life as a pleasure cruiser. There is always a great deal of shrieking and talking about boys. It’s simpl
y dreadful.”

  Mick cleared his throat. “It’s just you and me, Sarah. Well. And Praiseworthy.”

  Sarah gave Mick a fierce gaze that she hoped would burn his eyebrows off.

  Mick put on what Sarah assumed was his best roguish grin, which simply irritated her further. “I thought you wanted to go find the Dragon’s Eye with me,” he said.

  Sarah jumped up and stared Mick Cracken right in the face. “You thought wrong.”

  Sarah stomped out of the cockpit and marched around the ship until she found a stateroom with a large four-post bed. She jumped up onto the bed, grabbed a headless stuffed animal, and threw it against the wall, where it collided with a soft thud.

  “Ouch!” Praiseworthy said.

  “Sorry, Praiseworthy.”

  “Actually, I can’t feel pain. That was a joke. Was it funny? Oh, how I hope it was funny. I just can’t bear to think that you’re unhappy.”

  Sarah sighed and tried to still be mad, although a bit less successfully than before. She imagined Jake and Dexter, trapped in some small escape pod, pressing buttons and arguing with each other, and the thought of her two best friends fighting it out made her a bit less angry as well. If she knew Jacob Wonderbar, he’d have a plan in no time, and not even a trip into the middle of Nowheresville, Outer Space, would scare him. Then she had an image of Jake finding his way back and freeing her from Mick’s ship and giving Mick a good punch in the nose and saving the day . . .

  Sarah sat straight up in bed. She was actually daydreaming about a boy saving her? Sarah shook her head violently. What in the world was happening to her? Her hero Betty Friedan would be so ashamed. Sarah looked up at the ceiling.

  “Sorry, Betty. I promise that I do not need a boy to save me, nor do I want such a thing to happen, because women are perfectly able to save themselves, and they most certainly do not need a boy to help them.”

  Sarah remembered all the times boys had slighted her in the past few hours. Jacob hadn’t even let her look for the spaceship and then he took the captain’s seat himself and created a horrible space mess, and worst of all, the miscreant Mick Cracken had taken it upon himself to ditch her friends without even considering that she might be upset about it. She clutched her hands into fists at the mere thought of that pretend pirate, who had actually believed she would be impressed by his silly antics and who had the nerve to fire her friends into space. He had actually thought she would like to be stuck on a spaceship with him, so typical of boys, who are all so conceited they can hardly see anything beyond their pointy noses. Soon enough she was punching her pillow and had roused herself into a spirited sense of indignation.

  “That’s it! ” she shouted to no one in particular. She jumped out of bed, stomped through the room, and flung open the door, which smacked right into the face of Mick Cracken.

  “Ow,” he said, rubbing his forehead.

  “You were spying on me?”

  “No! Well, yes.”

  “Ugh!” Sarah marched toward the rear of the ship and Mick tried to keep up.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sarah knew perfectly well what she was doing. She was going to put on her space helmet, cut Lucy loose, and fly back to find Jacob Wonderbar and Dexter Goldstein. She wasn’t going to wait for a boy to save her. She would set things right and get them all back home safely to Earth, or at least . . . Her breath caught when she thought of her sister, The Brat, and her parents and her piano and her cat, Susan B. Anthony, and she hoped they were all safe. She needed to get back and she wouldn’t let a stupid space pirate stop her.

  “You’re not trying to escape, are you?”

  Sarah turned around and pushed on Mick’s forehead with her finger.

  “Bingo.”

  She whirled back around and kept walking until she reached the rear door of the ship. All she needed was her helmet and she would be ready to leave.

  “Cracken!” she shouted. “Where’s my—”

  When she looked behind her she saw Mick holding her helmet. He offered it to her.

  “Here,” he said.

  Sarah played it very cool as she tried to make sense of Mick’s sudden helpfulness. She eyed him suspiciously and snatched back her helmet even though Mick didn’t try to keep it from her. All she had to do was open the cargo door and she would be on her way back to Jacob and Dexter.

  “You’re not going to try and stop me?” she asked.

  Mick stared down at his space boots. “I don’t want to keep anyone here against their will. Especially not a friend.”

  “I’m not your friend,” Sarah said, although she hesitated in front of the cargo door. She stared at the large red button and wondered if there was a force field around it that was preventing her from doing the sensible thing and pushing it. It was as if the Dragon’s Eye was using its magical powers to hold her back.

  Mick still had a mournful expression on his face, but Sarah thought she saw a new glint in his eye. “You know, the Dragon’s Eye is still out there, just waiting to be stolen ...”

  Sarah’s hand hovered over the red button even longer. It seemed like he was reading her mind. Even if she did escape with Lucy, she had no way of knowing how to get around the space kapow. The Dragon’s Eye might be her ticket home. She imagined herself placing her hands on the diamond and wishing them all back to Earth, and if they found out Earth was gone she could use the Dragon’s Eye to save the entire world. She knew full well what a strong and determined girl could accomplish on her own. All she needed was the opportunity to show them all.

  “And why should I believe you’ll help me?” Sarah asked.

  “You think I’d risk breaking a promise I made to you?” “You’d better not.” “I wouldn’t.”

  “Because I would break you into a million pieces and they’d never even find the pieces because I’d scatter them around the galaxy in a thousand different places so you could never, ever be put back together.”

  Mick cleared his throat. “Buccaneer’s honor.”

  She had to try to save her family back on Earth. Jacob and Dexter had each other. They would be fine.

  Sarah slammed her hand on the big red button on the cargo door control panel and looked out the window. The ropes that were holding Lucy slipped away. She was free.

  Sarah wouldn’t be joining her. She had a big wishgranting diamond to steal. She would show Jacob and Dexter who should be in charge.

  “Let’s go get it,” Sarah said.

  CHAPTER 16

  Mayday! Mayday!” Dexter shouted. “Maaaydaaay!!”

  “No one can hear us. You don’t have to yell.”

  “They invented that word for a reason! It means, ‘Please please please for the love of God someone rescue me!’ Maaydaay!!”

  Jacob and Dexter had been floating aimlessly in space for just a few moments when the pod’s rocket boosters flared and began propelling them at a rapid speed through the galaxy. They had taken turns staring out the window at the stars and planets racing by, but the pod showed no signs of stopping.

  The escape pod was only about eight feet in diameter, and was sparsely furnished, with only a few cabinets full of meager supplies, including water and some pastries, a couple of flashlights, a makeup kit, and a portable pink porcelain tea set. Jacob stared at the instrument panel, which didn’t seem to have buttons or anything he could control. All he could see was their speed, trajectory, and the destination, which was listed as “Numonia.”

  “Have you heard of a planet called Numonia?”

  Dexter’s jaw quivered. “I knew it. We’re definitely going to die.”

  “We’re not going to die!”

  “We’re heading toward a planet named after an infectious disease! Of course we’re going to die!”

  “It’s spelled differently! I’m pretty sure there’s a p in pneumonia.”

  Dexter leaned against the wall of the pod. He stared at the ceiling and his foot began to fidget uncontrollably. “We need to think.”

  “Good idea
. Let’s think.”

  Jacob placed fingers to his temples. He had once read an article that said that the part of the brain responsible for inspiration activated when you stopped thinking of anything and let your brain relax. Jacob took a deep breath and quieted his mind. He felt the cool air-conditioning on his skin. He heard the whirring of the gears of the pod and the strange whoosh as it passed through the vacuum of space. He heard his heart beating in his ears. He heard Dexter hyperventilating.

  What he didn’t hear was his brain thinking of any good ideas.

  “Mayday!!” Jacob yelled.

  “Mayday!!” Dexter started laughing uncontrollably. “Mayday!!! Ha-ha-ha! Wow. Now I’m so scared I don’t even care what happens anymore.” He reached over and patted Jacob on the shoulder. “Thanks, Wonderbar. I needed a laugh.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Although he didn’t know where in the universe they were headed, Jacob at least was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that Sarah surely had discovered what Mick had done to them. He smiled to think of the horrific tantrum Mick Cracken must have been witnessing at that very moment and how much Mick must be regretting discovering the explosive side of Sarah Daisy.

  Jacob and Dexter were in a tough spot, but if he knew Sarah, nothing could stop her from turning Praiseworthy around and rescuing them the second she found out they were missing.

  “Um. Wonderbar?” Dexter was staring out of the window and shaking his head. “I think you might want to take a look at this.”

  Jacob stepped over to the window, and suddenly red lights and a loud horn started blaring.

  “Ah! Ah! I knew it was bad!” Dexter shouted.

  Jacob watched a tiny gray planet growing larger and larger.

  “Wonderbar!”

  “I see it!”

  The planet grew closer and closer as the pod rocketed toward it.

  “We’re going too fast!” Dexter yelled.

  The planet couldn’t have been more than a few miles across, but they were on a head-on course at an incredible speed. Jacob grasped the walls of the pod as tightly as he could.

  “Hold on!” he yelled.