Astrosaurs 15

by Steve Cole

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Warning! Think you know about dinosaurs?

  Talking Dinosaur!

  The Crew of the DSS Sauropod

  Jurassic Quadrant Map

  Chapter One: Meteor Menace

  Chapter Two: The Sudden Sleep

  Chapter Three: Where Have all the Pterosaurs Gone?

  Chapter Four: The Nightmare Chase

  Chapter Five: Bananas of Doom

  Chapter Six: Horrors of the Mind

  Chapter Seven: Raptor Reality

  Chapter Eight: Out of Dreams

  Chapter Nine: The Chaos and the Crystal

  Chapter Ten: Dream On!

  About the Author

  Also by Steve Cole

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Teggs is no ordinary dinosaur – he’s an ASTROSAUR! Captain of the amazing spaceship DSS Sauropod, he goes on dangerous missions and fights evil – along with his faithful crew, Gipsy, Arx and Iggy.

  Teggs and the gang find themselves trapped in a deadly dream-world! Here they are forced to face the revolting raptors, dangerous dung-demons and scary sabre-toothed bananas of their nightmares. Can they escape back to reality, or will the dreams of dread keep them prisoners for all time . . . ?

  For Hector Crosbie – an astro-sir

  WARNING!

  THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT DINOSAURS?

  THINK AGAIN!

  The dinosaurs . . .

  Big, stupid, lumbering reptiles. Right?

  All they did was eat, sleep and roar a bit. Right?

  Died out millions of years ago when a big meteor struck the Earth. Right?

  Wrong!

  The dinosaurs weren’t stupid. They may have had small brains, but they used them well. They had big thoughts and big dreams.

  By the time the meteor hit, the last dinosaurs had already left Earth for ever. Some breeds had discovered how to travel through space as early as the Triassic period, and were already enjoying a new life among the stars. No one has found evidence of dinosaur technology yet. But the first fossil bones were only unearthed in 1822, and new finds are being made all the time.

  The proof is out there, buried in the ground.

  And the dinosaurs live on, way out in space, even now. They’ve settled down in a place they call the Jurassic Quadrant and over the last sixty-five million years they’ve gone on evolving.

  The dinosaurs we’ll be meeting are part of a special group called the Dinosaur Space Service.

  Their job is to explore space, to go on exciting missions and to fight evil and protect the innocent!

  These heroic herbivores are not just dinosaurs.

  They are astrosaurs!

  NOTE: The following story has been translated from secret Dinosaur Space Service records. Earthling dinosaur names are used throughout, although some changes have been made for easy reading. There’s even a guide to help you pronounce the dinosaur names on the next page.

  Talking Dinosaur!

  How to say the prehistoric names in this book

  STEGOSAURUS – STEG-oh-SORE-us

  RAPTOR – RAP-tor

  PTEROSAUR – teh-roh-SORE

  DIMORPHODON – die-MORF-oh-don

  TRICERATOPS – try-SERRA-tops

  HADROSAUR – HAD-roh-SORE

  IGUANODON – ig-WHA-noh-don

  ANKYLOSAUR – an-KILE-oh-SORE

  Chapter One

  METEOR MENACE

  Captain Teggs Stegosaur couldn’t sleep.

  The orange-brown stegosaurus lay in his leafy bed on board the DSS Sauropod – finest craft in the Dinosaur Space Service – and sighed. For the last thirty-six hours, he had been leading his astrosaur crew through deep space on a desperate mission to hunt down the cruellest carnivore in the universe.

  General Loki had escaped from space prison!

  Loki was Teggs’s deadliest enemy. They had tangled together three times before. On each occasion it had almost ended in disaster for the peaceful plant-eating dinosaurs of the Vegetarian Sector – and each time, Teggs had barely survived . . .

  “How did Loki get out of jail?” Teggs wondered again. No raptor spaceships had been spotted in the area around the prison. And yet something had burned a hole through the super-secure steel walls and snatched Loki away. Experts from DSS HQ had detected a small object in the area heading for the outer reaches of the Jurassic Quadrant, and the Sauropod had been sent on its trail.

  So far, the crew had found nothing.

  “But we can’t stop searching. Astrosaurs never give up!” Teggs yawned. “Although they do get slightly sleepy sometimes . . .”

  His eyes closed and soon he was dreaming.

  The dream began nicely. He was lying on a sunny hillside, chewing on some leafy bushes – Teggs loved eating almost as much as he loved having adventures. But suddenly, the sky darkened and the bushes grew teeth! They snapped at him and rolled closer and closer . . .

  Then, an extra-loud explosion made Teggs jump out of bed and bruise his bottom on the floor!

  “Meteor strike!” The alarm pterosaur’s shrill cry echoed over the Sauropod’s speakers. “More meteors ahead. Stand by for bumps and thumps. SQUAWWK!”

  Teggs gasped. Meteors were lumps of rock floating in space, a danger to any passing spaceship. If one of them was to knock a hole in the ship’s hull it could be disastrous . . .

  “So much for sleep,” he muttered.

  Teggs charged through his ship, still wearing his pyjamas, and jumped into the lift that led up to the control room. But as the doors slid open . . . “Whoa!” He had to duck down as his pterosaur flight crew – fifty dazzling dimorphodon – flapped about, working the ship’s controls with their beaks and claws.

  Through the flurry of dino-birds, Teggs saw the Sauropod’s scanner screen. It showed the rich blackness of space, peppered with eerie red sparkles of light.

  “Captain!” A green triceratops looked over from his space radar. This was Arx, Teggs’s brainy second-in-command. “Sorry to have spoiled your rest.”

  “That meteor was quite an alarm call!” said Teggs, jumping into his control pit.

  Gipsy nodded. She was a stripy hadrosaur who handled the ship’s communications, and much more besides. “It put a dent in level seven, even with our shields up.”

  “Is everyone OK?” Teggs asked anxiously. Not counting the dimorphodon, the Sauropod had a crew of fifty dinosaurs on board.

  “They’re all fine,” Arx assured him. “For now, at least!”

  “Let’s keep them that way,” said Teggs. “Reduce our speed to emergency levels.” Gipsy whistled to the dimorphodon and they flapped off to obey. Then Teggs turned to Arx. “Can we reverse out of the meteor storm before we’re in too deep?”

  “We already are in too deep, Captain,” said Arx gravely. “The storm was all around us in seconds. Hundreds of rocks like bees swarming about a hive.”

  Gipsy shivered. “Almost as if they were drawn to us.”

  “Perhaps they’re magnetic,” Teggs suggested.

  “No, Captain,” said Arx. “I’ve scanned these space rocks. They are made of a kind of crystal I’ve never seen before. They seem to contain a strange energy beyond the range of our sensors . . .”

  Gipsy gulped. “General Loki might have known about these meteors and lured us here.”

  Arx nodded. “Or perhaps he’s run into trouble with them too.”

  A tense silence settled on the Sauropod’s flight deck as the dimorphodon shifted the ship this way and that, trying to avoid the hurtling meteors. Teggs chomped on some vines and braced himself for another bone-shaking collision at any moment. But instead, a strange series of soft clangs and ru
mbles echoed through the ship.

  “What’s happening?” demanded Teggs.

  “I’m not sure,” said Gipsy as a loud bleep came from her controls. “But Iggy’s just sent a code-two warning signal!”

  “That means engine trouble!” Teggs reared up in his pit. “Put him on screen.”

  Iggy was the Sauropod’s Chief Engineer. A stocky iguanodon, he was handy in a fight – and right now he looked ready for one. “Some of those meteors brushed against our jet-thrusters, Captain,” he said crossly. “And they’re sticking there.”

  “Sticking?” Teggs frowned. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Arx admitted. “But it could be something to do with that strange energy they each contain . . .”

  “Let’s try to shake them off,” said Teggs. “Increase speed by ten per cent.”

  Gipsy whistled again and the dimorphodon flocked into action. But the clatter of wings could not disguise more of the curious clangs, coming thick and fast now.

  “Meteors are sticking all over the Sauropod,” Arx reported.

  “They’re even blocking our exhaust pipes,” groaned Iggy. “If the fuel gases can’t get out, they’ll keep building up until the engines explode!”

  Gipsy’s head-crest flushed blue with alarm. “We’ll be completely helpless!”

  “Arx!” said Teggs urgently, “if we increase our speed, can we blow the meteors out again?”

  Arx nodded. “I think it’s our only chance.”

  “Set speed to maximum!” Teggs shouted.

  Gipsy whistled, the dimorphodon screeched and the hum of the engines rose in pitch.

  “It’s working,” cried Iggy, and Gipsy cheered. “The meteors are being blasted back into space!”

  “They’re falling off the rest of the ship too,” said Arx excitedly. “But travelling this fast, there’s a danger we might—”

  CRASSSSSHHHHH!

  A massive meteor struck the Sauropod like a spoon striking the top of a boiled egg – and with much the same result. Gipsy screamed as the roof caved in. Wreckage rained down over Teggs’s control pit, and the dimorphodon were knocked to the ground. Arx was sent staggering into the safety rails.

  Teggs looked up through the debris and saw the huge meteor poking through the crumpled roof, smooth as glass and glowing eerily like a massive, crimson night-light. Then a wild wind started up inside the flight deck.

  Gipsy gripped her seat. “What’s happening?”

  “That hole in the roof,” Arx gasped, clinging to the safety rail. “Our air’s being sucked out into the vacuum of space!”

  “Keep holding on!” Teggs shouted. “Or we’ll all go with it!”

  Chapter Two

  THE SUDDEN SLEEP

  The air was howling through the hole in the roof. Teggs saw Sprite, the dimorphodon’s team leader, flapping for his life as he was dragged remorselessly towards the freezing, deadly blackness beyond.

  “Grab hold!” Teggs called, stretching out his spiky tail.

  The brave little pterosaur clamped his beak around one of Teggs’s spikes. As he did so, he grabbed hold of two of his flapping friends’ wings with his talons. Then each of those friends held on to two more friends with their talons.

  Soon it looked as though Teggs’s tail hole was flying a living kite of dimorphodon!

  Clinging onto her chair with one hoof, Gipsy bashed buttons with the other. “It’s no good,” she groaned. “Our shields are broken. All the air will drain away.”

  Arx gulped. “Pretty soon, we won’t be able to breathe!”

  “Order the rest of the crew to evacuate!” shouted Teggs in desperation. “Perhaps they can escape in the shuttles . . .”

  But suddenly, the doors to the flight deck opened – and an iguanodon in a space helmet came somersaulting inside, carrying a large red canister.

  “Iggy!” cried Teggs. “Get out of here, it’s too dangerous!”

  “Just the way I like it,” Iggy grinned. He leaped into the air and fired sticky grey foam from his canister all around the weird meteor. As the thick foam filled the cracks in the roof, the howling wind began to hush.

  “Emergency super-sealing spray!” Arx cheered.

  “We’re airtight again!” Teggs beamed as Iggy finished filling the holes and the dimorphodon dropped to the ground from Teggs’s tail in a panting, scaly heap. “Way to go, Ig!”

  Iggy pulled off his helmet and wiped his brow – just in time for Gipsy to plant a big kiss on his snout. “You were brilliant!” she said.

  “We’re not safe yet.” Teggs looked up at the meteor, which looked ready to squash them at any moment. “The Sauropod can’t survive another crash in this condition. We must make an emergency landing – and start repairing.”

  Arx checked his space radar. “The only planet in range is a tiny speck in space called Mallakar. No one lives there.”

  “Then, what are we waiting for?” said Teggs, as Sprite urged the dimorphodon back to their perches. “Let’s go there now – very, very carefully!” The astrosaurs breathed more easily once the Sauropod was out of the meteor storm. No more of the strange, glassy rocks tried to stick to them. Teggs glanced up at the huge crystal meteor lodged in the battered roof and wondered why . . . What was that weird energy, inside the rocks, for?

  “There’s no sign of life on Mallakar,” Arx announced. “Our sensors show that no other spaceship has been here for years.”

  Iggy listened to the whoosh of the landing jets with great relief. “Wa-hey!” he cried. “We’re safely down. For a while there, I thought we were goners!” Teggs crossed to a porthole and looked outside. The landscape was flat and grey. The only thing of interest was the dark, rocky mouth of a cave, yawning on the barren horizon.

  “This is all Loki’s fault,” said Gipsy, rubbing her eyes. “If he hadn’t escaped, we wouldn’t be out here looking for him.”

  “Well, at least we can make sure that the weird meteor storm is added to the DSS star charts,” said Teggs. “Then, all other astrosaurs can avoid it.”

  Arx gazed up at the big red crystal. “I can’t wait to study that thing.” He yawned noisily. “But maybe first . . . a little rest. I’m feeling really tired – and you must be exhausted, Captain.”

  Teggs nodded sleepily. “It’s been a tiring day for us all. Gipsy, broadcast a message to the whole crew – they may take a sleep break.”

  But Gipsy had already fallen asleep at her controls! So Teggs told everyone over the loudspeakers instead.

  Sprite perched on Iggy’s head and looked at Teggs. “Eep!” he said, his eyes bright and alert.

  “Yes,” said Teggs, “of course you and your team can start making repairs. But aren’t you tired?”

  Sprite shook his head. “Fneep.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know that. N’night!” Teggs smiled as he left the flight deck with Iggy and Arx. “I’m glad I took that How-to-Speak-Dimorphodon course!”

  It was Iggy’s turn to yawn as they climbed into the lift. “What did Sprite say?”

  “He said he and his friends weren’t feeling sleepy, and he wished us all sweet dreams – but that, actually, flying reptiles don’t ever have dreams so he doesn’t quite know what ‘sweet dreams’ means.”

  Iggy frowned. “He said all that with one ‘fneep’?”

  “It was all in the way he said it,” Teggs explained with a smile. Then he heard snoring below him – Arx had fallen asleep on the floor of the lift! “I guess our trusty triceratops was more worn out than he realized.”

  “I am too.” Iggy staggered off down the corridor. “Good night, Captain.”

  Teggs reached his room and collapsed on the bed. Within moments he was fast asleep as well, and dreaming.

  He was back on the sunny hillside from his last dream. But this time, it was cold and frosty, despite the sunshine. The belligerent bushes were huddled around him, baring their thorn-like teeth, snapping their jaws like hungry animals . . .

  “No!” gasped Teggs, jerking awake from his ni
ghtmare.

  But as his eyes opened, he saw a swirl of crimson smoke had appeared in his darkened room. A sinister, scaly figure was sitting at its centre – a velociraptor with orange and black skin and pointed jaws that were scuffed and scraped. His right eye was covered by a patch, but the other gleamed with cunning.

  Teggs stared in horror. “General Loki! Here?”

  “Greetings, you stego-simpleton! I have come to haunt you from the realm of nightmares . . .” Slowly, magically, Loki rose into the smoky air. “Soon you and your crew will enter my deadly dream world,” he snarled. “And when you do, you shall never get out again. You are doomed, Teggs.

  DOOMED!”

  Chapter Three

  WHERE HAVE ALL THE PTEROSAURS GONE?

  Teggs glared at the figure floating before him. “Either I’m still dreaming, or this is a trick.” He raised the club-like tip of his tail. “And I don’t like being tricked – especially by rotten raptors!”

  Loki just threw back his head and laughed. Teggs swung his tail through the air to strike him, but the bony spikes sliced through thin air. Loki had vanished.

  Then, suddenly, the whole ship shook – and it started raining in Teggs’s cabin!

  “What the . . .?” Cold water poured down on Teggs, jolting him properly awake. He looked up to find the sprinklers in the ceiling had come on. “It must have been a dream. But it seemed so real . . .” He frowned, shaking his head as the water droplets fell on him. “Hang on – there’s no fire in here, and the alarm pterosaur isn’t squawking. So what set off the sprinklers?” He looked at his clock. “Great galaxies, I’ve been asleep for five hours! Funny how time passes in a dream . . .”

  Quickly changing into his slightly soggy red uniform, Teggs went into the corridor. The sprinklers were squirting out here too. In fact, water rained down on him all the way to the Sauropod’s main lift. Several of the crew were scrambling up sleepily from the wet floor.

  Teggs raised his eyebrows. “When I offered everyone a rest break, I thought they might go to their rooms first!”

  The lift doors opened – and there was Arx, blinking as if he had just woken up. “Hello, Captain,” he said, rising stiffly to his feet. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I certainly slept,” Teggs agreed, entering the lift. “But I had odd dreams.

  One about bushes that bit back, and then one about General Loki. I felt like I could actually reach out and touch him . . .”