The Planet Conqueror

  King Portal stood short and squat beside Captain Jrek, equally short and squat. Both men arranged their eyebrows in a most severe and serious manner as they watched a tall, slender figure walk towards them.
  The tall figure, dressed in a long red cape, took his time as he crossed the dusty ground. Behind him in the distance loomed an enormous red spaceship, with points and angles as equally jagged as the man’s shoulder pads. He had a somewhat aggressive sense of style.
  “Ah your majesty King Portal.” The red cape swirled gently as he approached. “I assume you have come to meet my attack party to surrender your pathetic little planet?”
  “You assume wrong Vuze,” King Portal replied, stern and gruff. “We’ve come to warn you that you attack at your own peril, we have means to defend ourselves.”
  Vuze, or as he preferred to be called, Commandor Vuze Great Lord of the Known Universe, ran his fingers over his shiny bald head and smiled. “And pray tell what do you plan on defending yourselves with?”
  King Portal glanced at Captain Jrek and nodded.
  “We have these.” Captain Jrek spread a short arm indicating a line of six grey aliens, shackled in chains and staring ahead vacantly with big oval eyes. “Alien Zombies.”
  Vuze, allowing his smile to spread, stroked his angular chin. “Why are they zombies?”
  “We had to turn them into zombies so they would obey us.”
  “And do they?”
  Jrek flinched. “No.”
  “What do they do when you release them?”
  “They attack.”
  “Who?”
  “Whoever’s nearest.” Jrek paused for several moments whilst beside him Portal’s eyebrows leapt about frantically before he forced them back down into intense severity. “We release them then we run very far away.”
  “Ah I see.” Vuze looked from one blank drooling alien face to the next, their grey skin much greyer than normal, heads as big as watermelons on puny little bodies. “Very menacing, very menacing indeed.”
  “We also have an army of mutant cactuses,” King Portal said.
  “Oh really? That sounds extremely frightening. Are they Zombies also?”
  “Oh no, they actually obey us, I just have to say the word and one thousand mutant cactuses will swarm from over that dune and destroy you.”
  “Really?”
  “Yes.”
  “And what defeats these mutant cactuses Captain Jrek?”
  “Weed killer.”
  A swift elbow landed in Jreks ribs.
  “How very interesting,” Vuze looked back and forth at the two men, equally amused by both of them. “But it doesn’t really matter if you had twice that number of mutant weeds.”
  “Cactuses,” corrected Jrek, wheezing.
  “Because in this ship…” The red cape swirled as Vuze spun to face the spaceship. “I have an army, three thousand strong!”
  “We also have Catmen.”
  The cape swirled again. “Catmen?”
  “Yes, Catmen.”
  “What’s a Catman?”
  “It’s half cat half man.”
  “Are you sure you don’t mean you have cats, and you have men?”
  “No definitely Catmen. It’s a very lethal combination.
  “How many?”
  “Five million,” said Jrek. “Seven thousand,” said Portal.
  “Seven thousand,” repeated Portal.
  “Yes seven thousand.” Jrek sweated gently.
“I wonder…” The dark brooding eyes of Vuze's face swayed back and forth between the wide blue eyes of Portal and Jrek. “How do you think Catmen would go up against an army of… killer androids?” The eyes snapped to Captain Jrek
  Jrek thought about it for a moment. “Not very well,” he concluded. “They wouldn’t last two minutes. If it were an army of killer Mousemen on the other hand...”
  “Hahahaha! Well I’m so glad I left my army of Micemen behind when embarking on this little quest. You see my army consists of nothing so interesting.” Vuze was enjoying this. “Quite simply within that spaceship I have an army of three… thousand… killer… androids.”
  “Oh dear.”
  “Oh dear indeed King Portal. You wouldn’t happen to have anything that could defeat an army of three thousand killer androids now would you?”
  “What would defeat killer androids?”
  “Nothing.”
  “We have noth-” Another elbow to the ribs cut Jrek’s sentence short.
  “We have mutant Cactuses.” Portal’s eyebrows twitched a little, threatening to retreat from their position at any moment.
  “And Catmen,” added Jrek
  “Yes, and Catmen.”
  The smile that had been spreading across Vuze’s face over the past few minutes broadened so much that it threatened to slice off the top of his head. “Lieutenant Vapor!” he shouted. A uniformed man was by his side in a matter of moments.
  “Yes Commandor Vuze Great Lord of the Known Universe?”
  “Deploy the androids.”
  “At once sir!”
  Vapor held a remote control with a variety of buttons and knobs, he pressed a half dozen of them, twisted several more, then punched a big green one violently. The underside of the ship creaked open. Three columns of robots began pouring out of the dark recesses in long orderly lines. Shiny red bodies clanging their metallic feet down the ramp as they formed three perfectly square blocks of a thousand each. It was several minutes before the last android joined the ranks, stock still awaiting instructions.
  King Portal let his eyebrows do whatever the hell they wanted. “Captain Jrek!”
  “Yes sir?”
  “Release the Alien Zombies!”
  “At once sir.”
  Jrek struggled a moment with the shackles then set the aliens loose. Immediately following this, both he and King Portal as rapidly as possible, ran very far away. In a slow limping gait, leaving a trail of drool, small footprints and a general air of apathy behind them, the Alien Zombies chased them.
  Vuze took the control from Vapor and faced the horizon, beyond which lay the pathetic empire of King Portal, the last scrap of the universe that lay in his path of total domination. Vuze, with red cape flapping gently behind him, an army of three thousand shiny red androids behind that, and his enormous red spaceship looming above them all, extended a long bony finger and pressed the large red button in the centre of the remote.
  His smile erupted into an explosion of rattling laughter as the button yielded with a tiny click. At that exact moment three thousand explosions simultaneously sounded from behind him.
  The laughter ground to halt as he spun around. The androids heads were gone. In their place were jagged shards of metal with wallows of black smoke pouring out into the sky.
  “What just happened?”
  Lieutenant Vapor clicked his heels together. “You activated the self destruct switch Commandor Vuze Great Lord of the Known Universe.”
  Vuze looked at his Lieutenant, whose expression was all but unreadable, though at a stretch it could have read something along the lines of, “You idiot.” The wind that moments ago had lifted his cape in such a dramatic pose shifted gently, causing it now to twist around his body uncomfortably.
  “What is that coming over the horizon Lieutenant Vapor?”
  “It looks like an army of mutant cactuses sir.”
  “Yes, I would have said the same thing.” Vuze’s eyebrows furrowed into a frown. “Tell me - Do we have any weed killer?”
  “No sir, we do not.”
  “Damn.”