Read Will's Galactic Adventure for Free Online

other wanted a toasted teacake.” Mavis paused, as if for effect after having made some great revelation. It was wasted on Will.
    â€œDoesn’t sound very, er, criminal,” he ventured.
    â€œNot criminal! I think you’ve missed the point. The one who wanted the cream tea, he wanted cream AND BUTTER with his scone! American tourists expect that sometimes but you have to make allowances for them because they don’t know any better. These chaps though, they weren’t Americans. You can tell, you know. It’s the accent mostly. And the clothes. Tea ladies are very good at spotting those sorts of things, even the ordinary ones, the ones who haven’t done the Ninja Tea Shop Lady training. To make it worse, the thing that really convinced me, was that he wanted MARMALADE, not strawberry jam, with his cream tea. His friend, the one with the teacake, he was just as bad. Wanted coffee! Coffee with a teacake! I ask you! What sort of sense does that make?”
    â€œSo on the basis of these, er, dietary peculiarities you decided that these people were intergalactic criminals.”
    â€œAbsolutely! That’s not always how they give themselves away though. Sometimes they come in pretending to be children. Tea shop ladies are often suspicious of children.”
    In the past, Will had noticed this for himself. You would expect that ladies in tea shops would be OK with children. Most of them looked like grannies, or mums anyway. But usually they weren’t that friendly. Often they scowled at children, especially when the children were getting bored and starting to play with the sugar basin or making floppy paper aeroplanes out of the serviettes. Very often they seemed to disapprove when someone ordered a child a squishy cake. Sometimes there were even notices telling children not to run around, or rather, telling parents not to let their children run around. Will had always thought that was because the tea shop ladies didn’t want orange juice spilled all over the tablecloths or jammy fingerprints on the walls – but now it all made a different sort of sense.
    â€œAnyway,” Mavis was saying, “as soon as Cream Tea and Teacake had paid and left the shop, in no time at all I had called for a dragon ship and was off after them.”
    â€œThey paid, then, these intergalactic criminals?”
    â€œOh yes. They try not to give themselves away with silly little crimes that would get the local police involved. It’s the trade between worlds that they are trying to disrupt so that they can take over and make a profit. Tea shops are too small for them to bother about. That’s another reason why tea shops were such a brilliant idea as places to fight them from.”
    â€œI suppose that this ship,
Brenda
, was the dragon ship that you called?”
    â€œYes. As luck would have it Drych and Spiv were already after the same pair. That business about the proton disrupter cannons that we told you about. When my message got through they came and picked me up and here we are.”
    â€œNot quite, surely?” corrected Will. “When I came along you had crashed in Wales.”
    â€œNot crashed,” said Drych, “we landed safely enough. The criminals have a way of damaging our…” he hesitated, “you know, the equipment that we replaced by using your phone. They have a sort of force field that, er, oh dear, this is very complicated. The point is that they caused us some damage to slow us down but now it’s fixed and they won’t catch us that way again. If I’m not mistaken we will be coming back from hyperspace into normal space in a couple of minutes. I suggest that we end the story there and get ready to see what is happening outside when we return to normal space.”

Chapter 5
    There was a gentle ‘pop’ as the dragon ship
Brenda
, along with all her contents, returned to normal space. At the same time the screen on the control