Cakes in Space Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Philip Reeve

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2014 by Sarah McIntyre

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover by Oxford University Press, Oxford, in 2014.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reeve, Philip, author.

  Cakes in space / by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published by Oxford University Press in 2014”—Copyright page.

  Summary: “When ten-year-old Astra and her family move to a new planet, she must save the spaceship and its crew from man-eating cakes, aliens, and more.”—Provided by publisher

  ISBN 978-0-385-38792-7 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-385-38795-8 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-385-38794-1 (ebook)

  [1. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. 2. Space ships—Fiction. 3. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. McIntyre, Sarah, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.R25576Cak 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014000428

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  a

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  The trouble with space is, there’s so much of it.

  An ocean of blackness without any shore.

  A never-ending nothing.

  And here, all alone in the million billion miles of midnight, is one solitary moving speck. A fragile parcel filled with sleeping people and their dreams.

  A ship.

  To travel from the Earth to the moon takes a few days. From Earth to Mars, a few months. To Jupiter, a few years, and to Neptune and Pluto a few years more. But Astra was traveling farther still. Much, much farther. The world called Nova Mundi, where Astra and her family were going to live, was so far from Earth that it would take them 199 years to get there.

  yelled Astra when her mother first told her. “We can’t sit in a spaceship for one hundred and ninety-nine years! It’ll be so boring! There won’t even be anything to look at out of the window, even if spaceships have windows…which they probably don’t! And I’ll be old by the time we arrive! I’ll be…” She counted on her fingers. “I’ll be two hundred and nine years old! I’ll be all wrinkly!”

  But Astra’s mother just laughed, bouncing Astra’s baby brother, Alf, up and down on her knee until he laughed, too. “Don’t worry, Astra. We won’t be awake. When we go aboard the spaceship, we’ll get into special sleeping pods….”

  “Like beds?” asked Astra.

  “A little like beds,” agreed her father. “And a little like freezers.”

  “Won’t we be cold?” asked Astra with a shiver. She imagined herself snuggling down among the frozen peas and Popsicles, an ice cream cake for a pillow.

  “We won’t feel cold,” said her mother. “We won’t feel anything. We’ll be fast asleep. The machines that run the ship will cool us right down so that we don’t age. Then the ship will steer itself to Nova Mundi while we sleep, and when we get there it will wake us, and we’ll feel as if only a single night has passed. And we’ll be at our new home!”

  “A whole new world!” said Dad.

  “Nova Mundi!” said Astra.

  She was excited to be going to Nova Mundi. She had seen videos and pictures of it. She and Mom and Dad and Alf were going to live in a big house there, between the wide green ocean and the fern forests, with a garden of blue grass. They would work at making the new planet ready for other people from Earth.

  But she still didn’t like the sound of this long, cold journey, even if she was going to be asleep.

  “Will there be dreams?” she asked.

  “Only nice ones,” her mom promised.

  And that’s how it was. They took a shuttle from the spaceport.

  Straight up it went, slicing through the clouds, through the sunlit air above, right up into orbit. As it rose, the clutch of Earth’s gravity grew weaker and weaker, until it slipped away entirely and Astra felt herself grow weightless. Her hands floated up off her lap; her feet kept lifting from the floor. If it hadn’t been for the harness that held her in her seat, she would have drifted up and bounced off the ceiling. A few objects that the other passengers had forgotten to secure did just that. Pens and cameras and cuddly toys went tumbling through the cabin, and the shuttle crew flew after them, graceful as swimmers in clear water, catching the lost things and returning them to their owners.

  Everybody’s hair started to misbehave.

  “I feel sick!” complained a girl in a nearby seat, and her mother quickly passed her a bag. Astra’s dad looked a little bit green, too. “It feels like falling,” he said, taking a space-sickness pill.

  But Astra didn’t mind the feeling. She liked it! Falling felt good, as long as she didn’t have to worry about hitting the ground. She liked the thought that they were going to fall all the way to Nova Mundi.

  The shuttle sped past the space stations that hung like chandeliers above the bright curve of the Earth, with little transport ships flitting between them.

  And among all the streams and swirls of shipping was the ship that was going to carry Astra and her family to Nova Mundi.

  “It’s huge!” said Astra, eyes wide, nose pressed to the diamond glass of the porthole by her seat.

  Astra had thought the shuttle she was in was big, but as it drew close to the ship, it began to seem tiny, like a little fish swimming beside a whale. It settled against the big ship’s side, and there were dull, dim clangs and thuds and shudderings as it docked.

  Around Astra, people began to undo their harnesses. Astra undid hers and fell straight up, rebounding off the ceiling. All around her, people were doing the same, tumbling and twirling in midair like acrobats. Children laughed and shoved themselves off the cabin’s padded walls, bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls, while their parents called out to them to be careful.

  By the time they had all funneled out of the shuttle and into the waiting ship, Astra was starting to get used to the idea of zero gravity. It was not like falling—more like floating in water, only without the feeling of the water around you. Her dad was still green, though.

  “I thought you said we wouldn’t meet any little green men,” Mom said.

  “Oh, very funny!” said Dad.

  “What are little green men?” asked Astra.

  “Aliens,” Dad replied.

  “Oh,” said Astra, losing interest, because everyone knows there aren’t any aliens.

  Besides, they were inside the ship now, and there were much more interesting things to look at than green dads.

  The robots who would operate the ship while everybody was alseep hurried to and fro, some floating, some stomping along the corridor walls on flat magnetic feet. A floating one gath
ered together all the people who had just arrived and led them to a part of the ship called Hibernation Section C, where they were to spend the journey.

  After that, there was a wait. A LONG wait. There were three hundred pods lining the walls of Section C—three hundred people for the fussy hibernation robots to sort out and get comfortable, which wasn’t easy, with everybody floating about and children still doing Ping-Pong-ball impressions. Soon Astra started to grow hungry. She had eaten a big meal before the shuttle took off, but now an awful thought occurred to her.

  It was 199 years until breakfast.

  A HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE YEARS!

  Her tummy gave a hopeless gurgle. She tugged at Dad’s sleeve. “Are there any cookies?”

  “Just get ready for bed,” said her dad.

  She got ready for bed, but her tummy still felt empty. It felt as empty as all the miles and miles of space that lay between Earth and Nova Mundi—between Astra and her breakfast.

  Alf was fussing, and Mom and Dad were both busy trying to cheer him up. Astra looked around. There were important-looking cupboards on the walls of Hibernation Section C, stenciled with words like AIR and WATER, but none of them said COOKIES. She noticed a small, roundish sort of robot pottering nearby and went over to him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, tapping him on his plastic back.

  The robot was so startled that he whirled right around and ended up facing away from her again. Then his head swiveled around, and his camera-lens eyes peered at her.

  “I am PILBEAM, at your service,” he said.

  “Is there anything to eat?” asked Astra. “I’m definitely peckish.” (“Definitely peckish” was something that Astra’s mom said sometimes. Astra thought it sounded more polite than “hungry.”)

  Lights flashed and flickered all over Pilbeam’s spherical body. “Accessing ship’s data banks,” he said. And then: “There is a Nom-O-Tron 9000 Food Synthesizer located in the dining hall. Upon arrival at Nova Mundi, tasty and nutritious snacks will be provided for all passengers.”

  Astra didn’t much like the sound of “nutritious.” “Nutritious” meant “good for you,” and “good for you” usually meant “vegetables.” But “tasty” sounded okay, so she said, “Can I see?”

  The little robot went whirring ahead of her, through a little corridor that whooshed open at the end of the big chamber and down another corridor that opened into a sort of dining hall, where clean white surfaces shone coldly in the dim light, like icebergs on an Arctic night. The lights were not turned on, because no one was expected to come in for breakfast for 199 years.

  One whole wall of the big room was taken up by a huge machine, with dials and screens and lights and hatches. That seemed to be turned off, too, but when Pilbeam stuck out a little silvery arm and poked his hand into one of the hatches, it started to hum.

  “Thank you, Pilbeam,” said Astra.

  “I am Nom-O-Tron,” said the machine in a big, boomy voice, so loud that Astra was afraid her mom and dad or some of the other grown-ups would hear and come to see who was sneaking a bedtime snack.

  “Shhh!” she said. “Have you got any cookies?”

  “Nom-O-Tron can synthesize all foodstuffs. Please state the exact type of cookie you require.”

  “Ummm…a chocolate chip one?” said Astra.

  Nom-O-Tron hummed a little more. Then it burbled. And it burped. In clear plastic tubes high above Astra’s head, purple liquid glooped.

  This is not looking hopeful, Astra thought. She had asked for a chocolate chip cookie, and the stupid machine was going to give her beet soup.

  But the purple stuff was just food concentrate. There were huge tanks of it deep inside the ship, and it was the job of Nom-O-Tron to give it a shape and a flavor—whatever shape and flavor you asked for. A chocolate chip cookie, Astra had said, so it checked the ship’s memory banks for chocolate chip cookies, decided on the most popular type, and set to work.

  Hum, it went.

  Buzz.

  Spurgle.

  Ping! A hatch popped open in front of Astra, and there sat a single, perfect chocolate chip cookie. She took it out and ate it. When her teeth crunched into it, crumbs flew in every direction, orbiting her head like asteroids. It was delicious.

  “Wow!” she said. “Thanks, Nom-O-Tron!”

  “Thanks are not necessary,” replied Nom-O-Tron. It stuck out a little suction hose and sucked up the drifting crumbs, which it could recycle. “Nom-O-Tron is built to serve. Will there be anything else, miss?”

  Astra didn’t really feel hungry anymore, and she knew her parents would soon start to wonder where she was, but the thought that Nom-O-Tron could make any sort of food she asked for was too enticing to resist.

  What would she have? A grilled cheese sandwich? No, that would take too long to eat. Another cookie? Boring!

  “I know!” she said. “What about a cake? A big cake!” She was thinking that she could eat a little now and hide the rest in her sleeping pod, in case there was a long line for breakfast when they got to Nova Mundi.

  “Please state the exact type of cake you require,” said Nom-O-Tron.

  “A really big one!” said Astra. “And it’s got to have…” She tried to think of all the nicest bits of cakes. Icing? Sprinkles? Creamy bits? Cakey bits? She flapped her arms about, trying to mime a cake. “Oh, just make me the most amazing, super-fantastic cake ever!” she said. “I want something brilliant! I want something so delicious, it’s scary! I want the ultimate cake!”

  Nom-O-Tron hummed.

  Then it buzzed a little.

  Then, quite suddenly, it shut down. Silence fell. All the lights on the front of the huge machine went off, except for a red one that flashed on and off, on and off.

  Astra went closer and looked at it. The light formed a word.

  “Er…Nom-O-Tron?” asked Astra.

  There was no reply.

  “Did I break it?” she asked Pilbeam.

  The little robot shrugged. Astra wouldn’t have thought he could shrug, being completely round with no shoulders, but he managed it somehow.

  The red light on the front of Nom-O-Tron flashed on and off, on and off.

  “I think I broke it!” said Astra nervously.

  “Astra?” The door slid open, and there was Dad. “So this is where you’ve got to! We’ve been looking for you everywhere! What are you doing in here?”

  “Nothing!” said Astra quickly. “It was like this when I got here!”

  Dad looked around suspiciously, but he couldn’t see anything broken or out of place. He took Astra’s hand and led her away. “Come on. It’s bedtime!”

  She waved at Pilbeam as she passed. “Good night, Pilbeam!”

  “Good night, Astra,” said the little robot.

  The freezer beds where they were to sleep looked cold and uncomfortable at first. Astra was old enough to have a pod of her own, and she felt a bit envious of her little brother, who would sleep with their mom, curled up together as if they were in a nest.

  But once Astra was tucked in under her own space duvet with Mammoth and her other cuddlies snuggled carefully in around her, she felt as if she was in a nest, too. Quite cozy.

  Slowly the chattering of the other passengers fell quiet as, one by one, or family by family, the robots put them to sleep. Now Astra could hear the sounds of the ship: the humming of air pumps and computers, the slow throb of the warming-up engines like the heartbeat of a big, friendly animal. She hoped Nom-O-Tron would have mended itself by the time everyone woke up and wanted breakfast. Perhaps Pilbeam would fix it while they slept.

  She looked about for Pilbeam, but she couldn’t see him. Instead, a fussy robot called Bedbot drifted up to her pod and busily stuck little sensors to her arms and forehead.

  “What are these for?” asked Astra.

  “They will allow me to monitor you while you sleep,” said Bedbot. “Brain waves, heart rate…”

  “If you have bad dreams, Bedbot will know about it,” sai
d her dad. “She’ll add more sedative to the air in your pod, and the bad dreams will go away.”

  “Okay…,” said Astra.

  Bedbot rolled off to deal with the boy in the next pod. Astra’s mom and dad hugged her.

  “Sleep tight, Astra!” said Mom.

  “See you on Nova Mundi, when the day is dawning!” said Dad.

  “I don’t feel sleepy yet!” Astra complained as the pod lid closed. Her mom and dad smiled in at her through the clear plastic. She started to worry that she wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. What if everyone else went to sleep and she couldn’t? What then? She yawned and said, “I don’t feel even…a…little…bit…”

  And then her eyes closed.

  Her mom and dad watched over her until they were quite sure she was asleep. Then they went into their own pods, and soon they were sleeping, too. The lights dimmed to a faint blue glow. The pods were cooling. Frost flowers formed on the inside of their canopies.

  When the ship was certain that no one was awake, it fired its engines. They pushed it away from the space station, away from the wide blue eye of Earth. It flew past the moon. It flew past Mars. It swung past the huge, striped face of Jupiter, picking up a little extra speed as the huge planet’s gravity caught it and then flung it onward into the dark, into the huge, still, empty places beyond the light of the sun, while, silent in their misty rows of pods, the passengers all slept and dreamed their dreams.

  And in the dining hall next to Hibernation Section C, the red light on the front of Nom-O-Tron flashed on and off, on and off: