Attack of the Spider Bots Read Online Free PDF Page A

colors of fall, but then they were left looking like skeletons of their former selves.
    When snow came, though, the picture was totally different. Those naked tree limbs were coated a glistening white with icicles draped all over them. The whole treescape shimmered and twinkled like a magical fairy land — if you believed in such things.
    It was a little tougher working on the tree ship when you were wrapped up like an Eskimo, but Beamer’s mom always insisted he dress warmly. Ghoulie and Scilla got the same lecture from his nanny and her grandmother. Actually, it turned out to be a good thing, because whenever any of them rocked the tree, they’d suddenly be pelted by a load of snow bombs from the branches above.
    At the moment, the tree ship had its own layer of snow frosting with icicles hanging all over it like Christmas decorations. “How’s it going up there?” he yelled at Ghoulie through the attic window.
    Ghoulie winced as an icicle drop fell into his eye. He wiped it off and went back to tucking wires into the instrument panel. “How should I know?” he shouted back irritably. He was supposed to be making a universal translator, but that wasn’t easy to do when you didn’t have all that good a grip on your own language.
    Beamer snickered to himself. Nobody could juggle numbers and electrons around better than Ghoulie, but, at the moment, he wasn’t on the best of terms with verbs and adjectives. Oh, he could talk circles around anyone and used words big enough to strangle a normal person’s brain, but diagramming sentences in English class drove him nuts.
    â€œD’ ya’ll need any help?” yelled Scilla as she swung up onto the trunk where it crossed into her yard.
    â€œNo, I think I’ve almost got it,” Ghoulie shouted. “Okay . . . it’s finished . . . I think,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “At least it’s as finished as I can make it.” All he’d done was load word processing and voice recognition software into the ship’s computer and attach a microphone and a speaker. Just reading English was going to be a stretch. “Universal” it was not. All Ghoulie could hope for was that when they and the ship warped into one of their adventures, it would work just as well as everything else did. Let’s face it: in the real world, a plywood ship in a tree had little chance of making light speed. In fact, it was right in the middle of that thought that Ghoulie’s stomach dropped, his eyes blurred, and his ears filled with a whoosh .

5
    Siege on Bot World
    Up in the attic, Beamer saw a yellowish white light in the corner of his vision. He whirled around to see the web glowing like . . . like — he couldn’t think of anything it was like — maybe fairy dust. All he knew was that it meant the ship was taking off, and he wasn’t on it!
    â€œWait!” he yelled as he scrambled out the window and fell in a roll down the roof to the tree. He clamored along the branches, jostling snow clods into pelting him with every frantic movement.
    It momentarily occurred to him that he might see what the tree ship looked like when it warped away. Of course, if the whole experience is only in my head, the tree ship isn’t really going anywhere — or is it? Maybe the ship took them into another dimension. Whatever it was, Beamer wanted to be in the ship, not watching it. “Wait!” he shouted with even more urgency.
    Ghoulie looked out the cockpit window. The sky was now black with tiny sparkling dots. He looked down and noticed that he was wearing a red, yellow, and blue uniform with brass buttons. He’d gotten a promotion since their last jump — all the way to Captain.
    The captain’s eyes flared wide when he saw, directly in front of the ship, what looked like a large battleship floating sideways in space.
    Ghoulie suddenly realized that Beamer and Scilla were nowhere to be