Astrosaurs 17

by Steve Cole

  “I think we get the idea!” Teggs snapped. “Now, what did you mean, ‘Guardian of the Time-Water’? Are you saying that the monster in that lake stops anyone from stealing the stuff?”

  Frentos nodded. “It seems unaffected by the time-water. And it squashes anyone who comes too close. Or rather it did, until you defeated it.”

  “But what good is that water to you?” asked Arx. “Anything that touches it will be twisted back through time.”

  “We have discovered one substance that is not affected,” Frentos revealed. “Mega-metal. Its atoms are so old and solid that even time-water can’t change them.”

  My armour’s made of mega-metal, Teggs remembered. If only I had fallen in the time-water and not Arx.

  “Oh. Hang on,” said Frentos. “Sorry to interrupt the gloating, but I just need to bark some orders in a loud and unpleasant fashion. Won’t be a jiff.” He turned to his troops. “Right, you revolting lot! Drop your guns and get busy with the buckets! That water’s not going to collect itself. MOVE IT!”

  Cringing, the carnivore troops yanked pails from out of their backpacks, rushed down to the lake’s glittering edge, and started scooping up the time-water.

  “Lucky we allosaurs store our special spaceship fuel in mega-metal buckets, eh?” Frentos sneered. “They make the perfect pails for time-water!”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Gipsy. “We found the baby allosaurs in the remains of your spaceship. How come you and your troops didn’t get wet and turn young?”

  “Simple – that wasn’t MY spaceship.” Frentos grinned, showing his terrible teeth. “This is such a good part of space for testing top-secret inventions, isn’t it? Far from anywhere, quiet and deserted . . .” He sniggered. “We allosaurs have been testing brand-new spaceships that can turn invisible.” He pulled out a remote and pressed a button – and Teggs gasped as an allosaur ship swam into sight in the next valley, towering over the hill. Scorch marks from the dung torpedoes marked its sides.

  Iggy slapped a claw to his forehead. “No wonder we couldn’t spot their ship from the shuttle. They’d turned invisible.”

  “And that’s how Frentos seemed to vanish when we chased after him,” Gipsy realized. “He ran inside his see-through spaceship, while we ran straight into the Guardian.”

  Teggs glared at the allosaur. “How did you find out about the time-water in the first place?”

  “By total accident,” Frentos admitted. “We were testing two invisible spaceships here a few days ago to see if they could be seen in super-bright sunlight. Our second ship landed too close to the lake . . .”

  Iggy raised an eyebrow. “And the Guardian attacked, right?”

  “Yes,” Frentos agreed. “The crew were splashed as they escaped and so was their ship. No sooner had they taken off than the ship fell apart – and the crew began to get younger . . .”

  “How terrible,” said Gipsy sadly.

  “Terrible?” Frentos spluttered. “It was brilliant! I knew straight away that I, Vice-Marshal Frentos, had chanced upon the most incredible weapon in the universe!”

  “But to get it, you had to beat the Guardian,” Teggs realized. “And since you and your troops weren’t tough enough, you got us to do it for you.”

  “When we scanned the area and found you foolish astrosaurs were close by, we couldn’t believe our luck!” Frentos smirked.

  “I made the time-twisted crew wring out their wet clothes into a mega-metal bucket so I had just enough time-water to get your attention.”

  Iggy nodded gravely. “You trashed our robots to make us come after you. Since they were brand-new, they vanished in a flash.”

  “And now you’ve so kindly dealt with the Guardian, the time-water’s all ours!” Frentos threw back his brutish head and laughed. “Think what I can do with it! Some good-sized squirts could unravel a fleet of spaceships . . . A cupful in a planet’s water supply could turn the entire population into helpless babes, allowing us to invade without firing a single shot . . .”

  “Thinking of it is all you’ll do, ugly-nose!” said Arx hotly. “’Cos we’re going to stop you. Right, Captain?”

  Teggs turned to him, and got a shock. Already, Arx had grown much younger. He looked smaller, darker green and had shorter horns.

  “Tell him, sir,” Arx went on impatiently. “Tell these carnivore creeps to flush their teeth down the toilet and push off!”

  “Oh, dear.” Gipsy’s head-crest was turning the bluest Teggs had ever seen it. “Captain, Arx is turning into a hot-headed teenager!”

  “You think you’re so tough.” Arx marched up to Vice-Marshal Frentos.

  “Allosaur? Marshmallow-saur, more like!”

  Frentos gave a angry roar. “No one speaks to me like that when I’m gloating and lives.” He pulled his death-laser from his belt holster and pointed it at Arx. “You won’t have to worry about growing any younger, triceratops. It is time you died NOW!”

  Chapter Seven

  CAVE OF DANGER

  “It’s time you shut up, you mean,” cried Arx – and butted Frentos in the stomach! The allosaur leader doubled over and dropped the gun. Then Arx swatted him with his tail and shoved him over backwards. “Take that, burger-breath!”

  “Good work, Arx,” Teggs cried.

  But the other allosaur troops were already setting down their heavy buckets and grabbing for their guns. Teggs checked his leg-lasers – one was chewed and bent but there was just a little energy left in the other. He fired at the nearest buckets, knocking them over and sending time-water pouring everywhere. The allosaur troops jumped about like street-dancers in a panic, desperate not to get their feet wet. A few more laser-blasts and the allosaurs were running for cover over the hill.

  Arx blew a raspberry at them. “And don’t come back!”

  “I’m afraid they will,’ said Teggs. “And we’ve got no way to call the Sauropod to get reinforcements.”

  “We’d better head for the shuttle,” said Iggy.

  “And ask Admiral Rosso to send a space doctor for poor Arx,” Gipsy added.

  “You’ll ALL need a doctor by the time I’m through with you,” Frentos roared. He picked up his death-laser and started firing wildly.

  “Look out!” Teggs jumped in front of his friends as searing death rays started zinging about. His damaged armour took the brunt of the gunfire until he cocked his leg and opened fire again, driving the angry allosaur back into cover.

  “This leg-laser’s almost had it,” Teggs muttered, noting the smoking nozzle. “Get ready to run, guys. I’ll shield you all as best I can.”

  “If I shrink much smaller,” moaned Arx, “you’ll be able to carry me in your helmet!”

  “Don’t worry, Arx,” said Teggs. “Somehow we’ll get you back to normal again.” He let loose one last laser bolt – but it barely sizzled. “OK, it’s time to go. Everybody – RUN!”

  The astrosaurs raced up the hillside towards Frentos and his men. “Shoot them down,” the carnivore yelled. Soon, a barrage of beams from the allosaur troops started zinging all around them. Teggs gasped as his ragged armour shook and rattled, but didn’t slow down. He barged Frentos aside with a resounding CLANG! Then he and his friends were over the hilltop and racing back towards the shuttle in the blazing heat.

  But the allosaur army were soon on their tails.

  “I’ll give them a real target,” Arx volunteered. “Look at me go – wheeeeeeeee!” Before anyone could argue, he galloped away like a prehistoric pony, zigzagging wildly across the plain as explosions went off all around him. But then more allosaurs swarmed out of their spaceship, and as the gunfire grew greater, Arx was forced back to join the others.

  “We’ll never make it to the shuttle at this rate,” Iggy panted.

  “Perhaps we can hide in the baby raptors’ cave and give Frentos the slip?” Gipsy suggested.

  “It’s worth a try,” Teggs said.

  “Caves! Brilliant!” Young Arx beamed, hardly out of breath. “I love
caves, Captain. Let’s explore now! Can we?” Then he frowned. “Er . . . what were we looking for again?”

  Teggs looked helplessly at Gipsy and Iggy. “Arx was right – as his body grows younger, his mind gets younger too. He’s not thinking like an astrosaur any more. He’s more like a keen little kid!”

  The astrosaurs climbed the second hill and tumbled down the other side. The scraps of the first carnivore craft lay scattered all around – and there was the hole in the hillside.

  “It’s too small for us to get through,” Gipsy wailed.

  “But not for me,” said Arx. He dashed inside and started bashing away at bits of the entrance with his horns, making it wider and wider until Teggs, Gipsy and Iggy were able to squeeze through into the gloomy cave.

  “Try not to wake the allo-tykes,” Teggs whispered.

  But then Iggy gasped. “There’s . . . there’s no one to wake.”

  As Teggs’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw that in some impossible time-twisting way the baby carnivores had all turned into eggs!

  “The ‘growing younger’ effect must speed up as time goes by,” said Iggy grimly.

  As he spoke, Gipsy caught sight of movement at the back of the cave. “Hey!” she hissed. “Who’s there?”

  “Er . . . no one,” came the deep, husky reply.

  “We mean no harm,” warbled a female voice, croaky with age. “We have given food and water to the little toothy ones, since their Vice-Marshal abandoned them.”

  “Aha,” said Gipsy nervously. “So you’re the ‘monsters’ the little beasts mentioned before.”

  “Yes.” The female sighed. “But now, I’m afraid, they need us no longer.”

  “Captain, can you put the lights on?” Arx’s voice was high and shrill like a child’s. “I’m scared of the dark!”

  “Very well,” said the first voice. “One moment . . .”

  A green lantern switched on, lighting the cave with a queasy glow. The astrosaurs gaped in amazement at the two alien creatures before them. Young Arx leaped into Gipsy’s arms, stammering and sucking his thumb. “W-w-what are they?”

  The creatures were greyish-blue, with small, shrunken bodies and big, domed heads. Their skinny arms ended in strange shovel-like hands. One had an enormous white beard that almost covered his three spindly legs. The other had long white hair that hung down all the way to her extraordinarily long toenails.

  “We are astrosaurs,” said Teggs calmly. “Who are you?”

  “I am Humm,” said the bearded stranger. “This is Jingal. We are part of a planet-survey team from the next galaxy. I am a scientist . . .”

  “And I am an explorer,” Jingal added. “Our scanners detected an ultra-rare substance here, so we decided to investigate . . .”

  Teggs nodded. “Let me guess – you wandered too near the lake and a big monster came out?”

  “Almost,” said Humm. “While burying our spaceship beneath the planet’s surface as usual – we don’t like to draw attention to ourselves – the vibrations woke the monster. He wormed his way down here and attacked us.”

  “And as he did so, time-water leaked out from the bottom of the lake,” Jingal explained. “We managed to escape the Guardian, but the water splashed all over us.”

  “Very chilly it was too.” Humm shivered. “You feel the cold at our age.”

  Iggy seemed puzzled. “I don’t want to be rude, but surely YOU can’t be getting any younger? You look so old.”

  “Cheek,” Jingal huffed.

  “The time-water has affected us differently,” Humm explained. “It has twisted our timelines to make us terribly old – thousands of years older than we were!”

  “Wow!” Teggs boggled. “You live for ages.”

  “But we can’t last much longer,” sighed Jingal. “We have been working on a cure for the time-twisting in our underground spaceship. But it is not easy. The water destroys our equipment.”

  Humm nodded sadly. “So we potter about and wait for our end . . .”

  “You mustn’t give up!” Gipsy urged them. “The time-water has turned you two older but it’s made poor Arx turn younger. If we knew why, perhaps we could get all of you back to normal?”

  “Yes, my armour is made from megametal,” Teggs told them. “You can use the helmet as a bucket – it should contain the time-water for as many tests as you need.”

  Humm chewed on the end of his beard. “Well . . . I suppose we could try again.”

  But just then, there was a scraping noise outside the cave mouth. “All right, astro-scum!” Frentos’s vile voice echoed around the cave. “We know you’re in there – your tracks lead inside.”

  “Oh, no!” Gipsy whispered. “Now what do we do?”

  “I will give you to the count of five to come out and let me finish gloating over you,” Frentos went on. “Otherwise, we shall fire our weapons into this cave and destroy you all.” He cleared his throat. “One . . . two . . .”

  Young Arx buried his head in Gipsy’s shoulder, while the other astrosaurs swapped hopeless looks. “He’s got us trapped,” said Teggs. “And we can’t risk Humm and Jingal getting hurt. I hate to say it, but we’ll just have to surrender.”

  Iggy nodded bitterly. “Surrender – or die!”

  Chapter Eight

  TIME RUNNING OUT

  Outside the cave, Frentos was still counting. “Three!” he growled. “Um . . . what comes after three again?”

  “Astrosaurs,” whispered Humm. “There is another way out of this cave. We built a tunnel here from our spaceship so the monster couldn’t see us come and go.”

  Teggs grinned. “Perfect!”

  “Four,” called Frentos. “Yes, that comes after three. And after four . . .”

  “Quickly!” Waving her spade-like hands, Jingal ushered them towards a large crack in the rear of the cave. “This is the way.”

  “But Frentos and his allosaur troops will come straight after us,” Iggy realized as he squeezed through the gap. “It won’t take them long to work out where we’ve gone.”

  “If only we could hold them off somehow . . .” said Gipsy.

  “Arx go plop-plop!” came a squeaky voice.

  “He’s turned younger still,” Teggs groaned. “Now he’s just a baby.”

  “Plop-plop,” baby Arx insisted. Gipsy quickly held him away from her as his little green bum got busy, producing quite a pile of dung.

  “Ugh!” Iggy choked. “I’d forgotten how toxic baby dino-dung can be.”

  Another dozen dollops flopped out, and Teggs’s eyes started streaming. “His bottom’s unstoppable!”

  Baby Arx giggled naughtily.

  “FIVE!” roared Frentos, as his forces marched right up to the cave mouth. Teggs bundled the others towards Humm and Jingal’s exit, but knew they could never get away in time. “Stand by to fire, lads . . . URGH! What is that whiff? Ooof, my nose . . .”

  The sound of carnivores coughing and spluttering and dropping their guns carried from outside as the disgusting dung-pong blew from the cave.

  “Get going,” Teggs told Gipsy.

  She patted Arx on the head as she went. “Even as a baby, he’s still getting us out of trouble.”

  Baby Arx grinned up at Teggs. “Mama?”

  Teggs frowned. “It’s definitely time to leave!”

  The astrosaurs followed the aliens through a rough tunnel lit by luminous mushrooms. Teggs shivered – it was freezing cold down here, away from the fierce sunlight. In the distance he could hear groans and wheezes as Frentos forced his soldiers into the cave. Quickly, Teggs struggled out of his broken armour and used everything but the helmet to build a barricade, blocking the tunnel to slow down the allosaurs. Then he caught up with the others beside a pair of large white doors – the entrance to Humm and Jingal’s underground spaceship.

  “Please excuse the mess,” said Humm, tottering inside on his three grey-blue legs. “We weren’t expecting visitors.”

  Teggs frowned at the state of
the spaceship. From floor to ceiling it was a jumbled mess of scientific bric-a-brac. Every available surface was smothered in tools and gadgets Teggs had never seen before, together with jars and beakers almost overflowing with smelly chemical stews.

  “It looks like you’ve been working hard to find a cure,” Iggy observed.

  “Yes, indeed,” Humm agreed. “Although actually, a lot of this mess comes from my experiments to find the perfect warm drink.”

  Jingal nodded. “At our age you like a nice warm drink.”

  “Ooh, you do, Jingal, you do,” Humm agreed.

  Teggs looked anxiously at baby Arx, who was staring about with interest. How long did they have before he became an egg? “Er, do you have any samples of the time-water?”

  “There’s a drip coming through the roof over here,” said Humm, walking stiffly over to another door. He opened it to reveal a short passage, where the water was trickling down from the ceiling to the sandy ground. “We’re under the lake, of course. The leak started soon after we started digging, so we switched to the other tunnel instead.”

  Teggs passed Humm his crumpled helmet. “Where do you think the time-water and its Guardian came from?”

  “Who knows?” said the shrivelled-up alien, carefully collecting the mysterious liquid in the helmet.

  “Perhaps a mighty space pirate hid the time-water here and left a savage pet to guard it,” Jingal suggested.

  Humm nodded. “Or, perhaps time-water forms when a pool of rare chemicals cooks in solar radiation for billions of years – and the Guardian grew there over the centuries. On the other hand, maybe the time-water is—”

  “Wee-wee,” said baby Arx suddenly.

  Humm shook his head. “No, I don’t think it’s wee-wee.”

  “Arx go wee-wee,” chirped the little triceratops.

  “Oh no!” Iggy groaned.

  “Get something to catch it in, quickly!” said Gipsy. The next moment, baby Arx started weeing like a water fountain straight into the air. Iggy grabbed an old bucket and ran around trying to catch the torrent as best he could.

  “Don’t let that widdle spoil our sample of time-water!” Teggs grabbed the half-full helmet and shielded it with his chest. “We must work out the differences between your species and ours, Humm. Maybe then we’ll understand why you and Jingal have got older while Arx and the allosaur crew have got younger.”