by Cas Lester
Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgements
Cas Lester
Acknowledgements
Cas Lester
Copyright
Chapter One
Space: the great dustbin in the sky.
Galaxy 43b is the busiest part of the known universe. It’s also the muckiest. Masses of space traffic whizzes around every day and the crews just chuck all their rubbish out of their ships without a second thought. And I mean all their rubbish: broken satellites, dirty rocket fuel, pizza boxes, leftover bits of mouldy food and … Actually, I’m not even going to mention what else is floating around out there – I’ll leave that to your imagination. It’s a disgrace.
Fortunately there’s a band of modest and unsung heroes who tackle the globs of intergalactic trash every day. They’re brave, they’re smelly and they’re very grubby. They’re the Bin Men of Outer Space. It’s a dirty and downright dangerous job.
(Personally, I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want to do it. I wouldn’t.)
For a start, their intergalactic garbage spaceship, the Toxic Spew, is utterly gross.
It’s barely spaceworthy. It’s tatty and battered, the rocket boosters are rusty and the supersonic brakes are well dodgy.
The outside is plastered with oily grime that’s so thick you could write your name in it. In fact someone has written the ship’s name in it. Which is a good thing, because some of the huge metal letters that are meant to spell TOXIC SPEW on its side fell off ages ago.
Now it says: O SPEW.
And you probably would. Especially if you saw the inside – it’s unbelievably filthy.
A faint smell of rotting rubbish lingers everywhere. No, make that a strong smell. Strong as in, stomach-heaving, eye-watering, hold-your-nose-and-try-not-to-gag strong.
Actually, it’s probably pointless even bothering to tell you this, because, as this story starts (on Moonsday the 116th of Oort) the Toxic Spew was about to be smashed to smithereens.
Chaos on the command bridge
The grotty little spaceship was seconds away from being dragged into the middle of a deadly trash tornado, made up of tons and tons of swirling space junk, and swept away. Like a scab you’ve picked off your knee in the bath whirling away down the plughole.
It was chaos on the command bridge.
RED ALERT! RED ALERT!
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
Alarm bells screamed. But not as loudly as the crew.
‘AAAAAARGH!’
Panic on the command bridge
Through the ship’s vast vision screens the frantic crew could see the terrifying rubbish tornado looming closer and closer. They wrestled hopelessly with the ship’s controls.
‘Don’t panic! It’s just a junk twister,’ yelled Chief Rubbish Officer Scrummage fearlessly. ‘I’ve seen far worse. Head for the centre. We’ll blast our way out!’
‘Are you mad?’ cried Gizmo, the Senior Engineering Officer.
‘No, just brave!’ cried Scrummage boldly. And he posed with his hands on his hips trying to look heroic. ‘AHEAD!’
‘It’s far too risky! REVERSE!’ yelled Gizmo. Leaping over to the flight desk he pushed the pilot out of the way, grabbed the flight joysticks and yanked them backwards.
‘NO! AHEAD!’ bawled Scrummage, snatching the controls from Gizmo and yanking them forwards.
‘Get off my controls!’ cried Pilot Officer Maxie, shoving them both away.
‘I’m the senior officer!’ barked Gizmo. ‘So I’m in command.’
‘Nonsense! I’m much more experienced,’ said Scrummage. ‘I’ve flown ships through every kind of space storm in the galaxy.’
‘Yes, and all of them either crashed, fell to pieces or blew up!’ snorted Gizmo.
‘Oh for crying out loud!’ yelled Maxie from the flight desk, as the spinning rubbish vortex grew nearer and nearer, drawing the ship towards its horrible fate. ‘We’re about to be spun to death and whizzed round so quickly that our brains will squish to a mush and trickle down out of our noses!’
Gizmo and Scrummage exchanged startled looks.
‘That’s gross!’ they said, agreeing for once.
Suddenly an enormous plastic tank hurled straight at them from the edge of the garbage whirlpool. Maxie yanked the ship’s controls to SHIELDS UP. But sadly, just …
CRUNCH! SPLAT!
… a second too late.
The huge container burst as it hit the Toxic Spew, exploding its sludgy contents all over the ship’s front vision screen.
‘Flickering spew!’ cried Scrummage.
‘I can’t see!’ Maxie switched the giant screen washers to supersonic spray.
It wasn’t a great help. Space sludge is surprisingly difficult to shift. The giant washers just smeared it all across the screen, making it impossible to see out. But the crew didn’t need to see to know the deadly twister was looming larger and larger.
‘You’re all going to die!’
‘Computer!’ yelled Gizmo. ‘Help!’
A series of lights on the ship’s giant computer flickered on and off, and then it bleeped a couple of times before it spoke. ‘Good morning!’ it said in a cheerful digital voice. ‘Well, it looks like you’ve got a bit of a problem out there, haven’t you? I calculate that’s a force 8 garbage twister and I’m really not sure what you expect me to do to help. But I can tell you that on one hand there’s a 3% chance of surviving – and on the other there’s a 97% chance of total destruction.
‘I reckon:
a) You don’t have enough forward thrust to break through it, or
b) Enough side thrust to go round it.
c) You might have had enough reverse thrust to miss it … But
d) Now it’s probably too late.
… So I’ll wish you a cheery good luck and goodbye. You’re all going to die!’
There was silence for a nano-beat as the horrified crew took this in.
‘REVERSE!’ screamed Scrummage and Gizmo together.
Maxie yanked the joysticks backwards and pulled for all she was worth.
(Blimey, she was lucky they didn’t snap off.)
The Toxic Spew juddered, its engines screamed, but still it edged nearer and nearer to the deadly twister.
Yup, like I said, any second now the brave little rubbish ship and her crew were about to be pulverised!
Chapter Two
A planet called Earth
A zillion light years away, tucked in a quiet corner of the universe, Harvey Drew flung open his bedroom door and burst in. The draught made a dozen model spaceships hanging from the ceiling zoom around on their strings.
In one awesome move, Harvey dropped his school bag on the floor, front-flipped onto his bed, bounced sideways into the chair by his desk and switched on his computer. It was a skill he had perfected by doing it every day.
Here’s something else he did every day: he checked to see if his computer had picked up any messages from aliens.
Harvey has an Alien Alert App on his computer that scans the signals coming from outer space. Mostly it just picks up random noises like shwzz and zcherr and whhhssshh.
(Sorry, I’m not sure if I’ve spelt those properly – but if you have a go at saying them you’ll get the idea).
Harvey, like thousands of other people on your tiny little planet, believes that somewhere, far, far away in distant galaxies, there are real live aliens living on other planets.
And he believes that those real live aliens on other planets are trying to contact people who are living on other other planets. Such as, say, Earth.
(Oh, good grief, this is complicated.)
So lots of people on Earth are trying to make contact with aliens from the first lot of other planets – hang on, or was it the other lot of other planets?
(Sorry, even I’m confused now.)
SpaceMail!
Anyway, the important thing is that Harvey is convinced that one day there will be a message from real live aliens from outer space and he doesn’t want to miss it. So as soon as he gets home from school every day he checks to see if there is one.
And today, as usual, there wasn’t.
He wasn’t really surprised.
Of course the space crew of the Toxic Spew wouldn’t have been surprised to receive a message from aliens because they whizz around space all the time and they’ve actually met real live aliens from other worlds.
Interestingly though, they’d never met any humans, or been to Earth. In fact, they’d never even heard of it. But then no one on Earth had ever heard of the Toxic Spew either.
Well, not yet …
Harvey left the Alien Alert App on and settled down to play Space Quest Android Attack 4. He brushed his curly red hair off his forehead, and his green eyes narrowed and fixed on the screen. He reckoned he’d have time to complete the next level, fly his spacecraft through the meteor storm, battle an entire fleet of evil aliens trying to take over the universe, and save his ship and crew from total destruction before it was time to go to football training.
As it turned out, he didn’t.
He was just blowing up the last few battle androids when there was a soft bleep and the Alien Alert App icon flashed. Then two words appeared on the screen: INCOMING MESSAGE.
What? thought Harvey sitting bolt upright. And then again: What?!
He couldn’t believe it. It must be a mistake. But the Alien Alert App icon was definitely flashing. With trembling fingers he clicked on it …
And a message appeared on the screen:
(Actually, it was quite a long message and since you probably can’t understand it any more than Harvey could, I’ve only put some of it here.)
Harvey stared at the symbols trying to make out what they meant. No chance.
He scrolled down to the end of the message. But there were no clues there either.
He had absolutely no idea what it said.
What should he do? This must be the first message anyone on Earth had ever got from aliens. This was a mega important moment for mankind!
It was obviously far too important to ignore it. He had to reply. But what on Earth should he say?
A momentous message from mankind
He wanted to put something brilliant that people would always remember. You know, like when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon and said: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
He thought hard and then he typed:
hello? is there anybody out there?
Chapter Three
Death by garbage twister
Meanwhile, far, far away, in Galaxy 43b, the terrifying junk tornado spun closer and closer to the plucky little Toxic Spew. The tiny spaceship was being violently bumped and battered. It shuddered and shook – and so did the crew.
‘It’s no good,’ yelled Maxie, hauling on the supersonic handbrake … ‘We’re going to hit that –’
KADUMPF!
They slammed into a giant piece of yellow rubber. It was the rear bumper of a Mega Nova cargo ship. Well it had been, when it was still attached to a Mega Nova cargo ship. Now it was just huge chunk of rubber.
BOOIIINGGG!
The Toxic Spew bounced off the giant rubber bumper like a super-powered pinball, right out of the path of the rubbish whirlpool, and drifted safely off into the inky black of outer space.
The crew couldn’t believe their luck. There was silence on the bridge while this amazing fact sunk in.
‘Phew!’ said Maxie leaning back into her seat. She was filled with a lovely calm feeling – you know, the kind you get when you’ve just escaped certain, instant and total death. It didn’t last long …
A disgusting display
‘OW! GET OFF!!’
Gizmo had seized Scrummage by the throat.
‘We could have died! And it was all your fault!’ he screamed, shaking Scrummage so savagely his teeth rattled.
‘D-d-d-don’t b-b-blame m-m-m-me!’ stuttered Scrummage, giving Gizmo a hard shove so that he fell over the captain’s chair in the centre of the command bridge.
Fortunately the captain’s chair was empty.
Unfortunately it had been empty for months because the previous captain of the Toxic Spew had abandoned ship. The lingering revolting stench of rubbish had literally overwhelmed him. He almost spewed himself to death.
‘You overruled my order to reverse!’ yelled Gizmo.
‘You can’t give orders! You’re not the captain!’ Scrummage squared up to him despite being shorter and, frankly, a good deal fatter than Gizmo (who was one of those tall, thin, snooty types who look down their noses at you).
Maxie, at the flight desk, stuck her fingers in her ears and started humming to blot out the noise. She’d heard all this before and really didn’t want to hear it again … and again …
‘Since we don’t have a captain and I’m the Senior Engineering Officer, I’m in command,’ said Gizmo.
Scrummage clenched his fists and glared up into Gizmo’s face. ‘Huh! You’re just a mechanic!’
‘Yeah? Well you’re a bin man!’
‘I’m the Chief Rubbish Officer, thank-you-very-much!’ And Scrummage grabbed Gizmo and wrestled him onto the deck.
THWACK, GRAPPLE, GRAPPLE
A polite description of this would be: they battled for command of the ship. Really, it was just a disgusting scene. Partly because of the way they were behaving but mostly because the floor was littered with rubbish. So bits of leftover pizza stuck on their uniforms, sweet wrappers caught in their hair and smears of tomato ketchup smudged their faces as they fought.
Maxie shut her eyes and hummed louder. Honestly, she thought, how much more of this could she take?
‘You’ve got SpaceMail!’
Luckily, they were interrupted by the computer.
‘I hate to butt in when you’re having so much fun,’ it said. ‘First, congratulations! You didn’t all die! What a surprise! I was sure you were all going to be pulped to a pile of toxic wreckage.
‘Anyhow, secondly, and more importantly, you have SpaceMail!’
(It seems unlikely, doesn’t it, that the arrival of SpaceMail would be enough to stop an all-out, no-holds-barred, fight-to-the-death wrestling bout. Amazingly, it did.)
The crew of the Toxic Spew hardly ever received SpaceMail. They’d sent lots. Well, technically, they’d only sent one. But lots of times.
(‘Lots’ as in several times a day, for weeks and weeks. In fact it was on ‘auto send’.)
Their SpaceMail was this:
From: The Toxic Spew
To: Anyone in the entire Known Universe, and Beyond
Subject: Captain Needed
We are on a five-year rubbish mission in Galaxy 43b and we are looking for a new captain to head our lively team around and about i
n outer space.
Duties: Commanding the ship
Pay: Probably
Skills: None needed. But a weak sense of smell and a strong stomach would be helpful.
Please reply with the following by SpaceMail:
Name:
Interplanetary Postal Address:
Favourite Pizza:
But tragically – no, make that worryingly – everyone in the entire Known Universe knew what the Toxic Spew was like. And what it smelt like.
So there had never been a single solitary reply.
Until now.
Confusion on the command bridge
Amazed, Gizmo, Scrummage and Maxie clustered round the monitor.
From: (this bit was left blank)
To: The Toxic Spew
Subject: Captain Needed
Message:
‘Who’s it from?’ asked Maxie.
‘It doesn’t say,’ replied Gizmo.
‘Um, actually … what does it say?’ asked Scrummage, peering at the line of symbols.
