Perilous Planet, by Tedney Vaaaak
Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set, first female captain in the Interplanetary Army of Earth and Its Moons, gently landed her craft in the only clearing among the unbroken planet wide forest of Sagittarius IX. She carefully went through each and every scheduled landing task, exactly as she’d been taught in the Academy. This was her first mission, and she was determined to do everything absolutely perfectly. She didn’t want to ruin all of her hard work so far with a moment of carelessness. She knew all the men in Command were desperate to see her fail. They resented her, maybe even feared her, and what she represented, and none more so than Admiral Hlug-Holm, the horrible misogynistic dinosaur in charge of the fleet. She remembered her graduation ceremony, and the way he had called her “Lady”. She blushed in anger, almost failing to complete the final check on the ship’s external sensors in her rage. I need to keep focused, she told herself bitterly.
Once the landing procedures were complete she unstrapped herself from her chair and strode purposefully to the airlock. In everything I must retain my composure, she reminded herself. Any hesitation will be pored over back at Command. She removed her flight suit, briefly rubbing her hands across her ample, sensuous bosom. The lighter gravity on this planet made her breasts appear to float unnaturally before her, like a mirage, or an erotic dream. Ignoring her beautiful free-flowing flesh, she climbed into her rigid metallic dual-use space and combat suit (DS-SACS). Robotic arms descended from the ceiling, their long phallic appendages invading the tight holes in the neck and back of the suit, tightening the screws that sealed her inside. Once they had withdrawn she stepped into the airlock.
The airlock door rolled closed behind her. The dim red light in the chamber flickered as the room began to decompress around her, and then eventually the outer door dilated open like an anus revealing its secrets to the world.
She stepped outside. Sunlight dazzled her, the extraordinarily pink sun directly above taking her by surprise. The mission brief hadn’t said anything about light levels. She wondered what else they had missed out.
Memories resurfaced of an overheard conversation at Mission Headquarters. Two men laughing smugly together around the corner of a sterile white corridor. “Let’s see how she likes the perilous planet,” one said. At least she thought he’d said perilous. It was difficult to tell through his chuckles and wheezes.
She suddenly remembered that she hadn’t checked her suit for equipment back on the ship. A frantic opening of all the panels and compartments revealed that the suit was empty. All her weaponry and tools must still be back on the ship. She groaned inwardly. This is just what they want to see. Me sheepishly returning to the ship in embarrassed disgrace. Well it isn’t going to happen. Not until I’ve done this mission better than any of those men back home ever could have done. With that she turned and marched into the woods without looking back at the ship even once.
Her mission was to respond to an SOS call emanating from within the woods, fortunately just a mile or so away from the clearing. It was a nice and simple low priority mission for her first command. They hadn’t even let her have a crew. The signal was probably just from an environmental reconnaissance robot that had got itself trapped in a ditch. The whole thing was designed to humiliate her. Disastrous if she failed, worth no praise if she succeeded.
She hated them all so much. She daydreamed idly about blowing up the sun and destroying them all. Then they’d treat her with respect.
Her dream was so comforting and consuming that she had been walking for nearly twenty minutes before she noticed how strange the plant life was on this planet. She looked again, disbelieving her eyes for a moment, but it was real. By some freakish coincidence of evolution, every plant was shaped wherever it could be like human penises. Ferns grew in the underbrush around her ankles, the fronds a network of delicate but perfectly detailed phalluses. Tree trunks were little more than huge silvery cocks thrusting themselves upwards violently in an attempt to push their way into the pink sky high above, their branches a fractalising maze pricks reaching out where the could, the leaves tiny papercraft dicks rustling in the breeze like a demented series of daisy-chain angels. Fruit hung down from some of the branches like hundreds of tiny testicles removed from their sacs left to dangle free. She stared around herself in awe.
Ubbliona’s suit started bleeping frantically. The SOS beacon must be nearby. She was almost on top of it. Getting down onto her knees she searched through the ferns. Parting them, she came face to face with the dead body of another Interplanetary Army captain. Through his visor she could see a look of the most abject fear immortalised on his lifeless face. Poor man, she thought. What could he have seen to cause him to die like this?
Behind her the trees began to rustle. She turned and faced true horror.
Back on Earth, two men sat in an office, watching a TV screen inset into the opaque marble walls. On the screen, Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set of the Interplanetary Army of Earth and Its Moons stared down at the lifeless body of the unfortunate dead man. Admiral Hlug-Holm chuckled.
“He just died of fright, you know? Couldn’t take the sight of all those penises. The horror took twenty minutes to completely overwhelm him. And to be honest, who can blame him.”
“So, is that why you sent this woman? Because you thought she might not be affected by them,” Vice Admiral Schessen asked.
“Good God, no. Don’t be absurd, man.” The Admiral sipped at his whiskey. “I thought she’d be dead within seconds. Women are even more terrified of penises than men. All our psychologists say so.”
“But she doesn’t seem to be affected by them at all. In fact she looks like she’s enjoying herself.”
“Just you wait. She’ll start screaming once her fragile female mind finally realises what’s all around her. She probably just hasn’t noticed yet.”
As if on cue, on screen Ubbliona turned to the camera (the pictures were being provided by a tiny hovering nano-ocular camera that was undetectable to the human eye and which her suit had been programmed to ignore), her face filled with emotions and impulses beyond her control. She started to scream and scream and scream.
“See? It’s all just a matter of patience.”
The Admiral flicked the TV screen off, and then spun around in his chair. When he came back to face the Vice-Admiral, who was standing on the opposite side of the Admiral’s ominous desk, a huge cigar had manifested itself in the Admiral’s grinning mouth. By some arcane trickery it was already lit.
“Now the Corps has nothing to fear,” the Admiral began to monologue. “No more women swanning around, stretching our uniforms in all the wrong places beyond sense and reason. No more thrusting breasts to distract us when we can least afford it. No more glimpses of the hideous depths of their vaginas when we’re trying to concentrate on drying ourselves thoroughly in the locker room. No more ridiculous wastes of Army funds providing bins for their hideous blood soaked towels This insane experiment of equality ends here, with Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set’s lamentable failure to complete or even survive her first and only command. The worst record of any Captain ever produced by this army.
He sucked so hard on his cigar the end briefly glowed as bright as the sun. The Vice-Admiral wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to applaud or not, and stood there frozen by indecision. Luckily his failure to react in any acceptable way was hidden by a knock at the door. A secretary entered, her augmented breasts pushing their way into view a few seconds before the rest of her.
“Your wife and daughter are downstairs, Admiral. I told them you were busy, but they insisted on waiting. It’s your daughter’s birthday, apparently.” She paused for a second to push her long black hair away from her eyes. “Oh and also, Captain Brush-Set has returned from her mission. She’s demanding to see you on the roof. She’s landed her ship on your private launchpad.”
“Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set?”
“Yes, Admiral. Is something wrong?”
“No, no. I’m just surprised she’s back so quickly.”
“Very well, Admiral,” the secretary said.
The Admiral and the Vice-Admiral both watched her leave.
“How can she be here?” the Admiral said. “How? Those pictures were live.”
“The pictures are all sent back by accelerated light waves. There’s still an appreciable delay,” the Vice-Admiral explained. “Our ships all use Instant Travel Drives now. That’s much faster.”
“How much faster?”
“I don’t know. It depends how far away she was. I’ll have someone look into it.”
“Well, it’s too late for that now. I’ll have to go and speak to her.” He spun round in his chair again, his cigar disappearing as he rotated. “I hope she’s happy now.”
Ubbliona stood on the roof of the Interplanetary Army of Earth and Its Moons Headquarters, looking up at the moon and the snowy sky from under the shadows of the wing of her ship. She was dressed in her flight uniform, but something about her looked different to the Admiral. It was her stance he concluded as he approached. She no longer looked cowed or defensive. Instead a confidence exuded from her, an easy air of power usually only seen in the truly privileged and authoritative. This wasn’t the stance of a mere captain, of a woman, of anyone in the presence of the Admiral. This was the stance of a queen or a goddess glorying in her freedom before a slave.
“Captain, congratulations,” the Admiral said. “I take it your first mission was a success.”
“Don’t insult me, Captain. We both know you wished me dead. Well, it didn’t work.”
“How dare you talk to me like that? I’m the Admiral of this fleet. I could have you destroyed.”
“I suppose you thought it was funny? I can imagine you laughing, sat in your chair, fat and swollen with smug self-congratulation. Laughing at me trying to cope with a jungle full of penises. Did you take some pictures? It’d make a fine postcard for the boys.” She began to laugh at her own joke. “We’re you planning on making a video of me being raped to death by that phallic dinosaur?”
“What? What the hell are you blathering about, Lady?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. I know you wanted me killed. And what better beast to do it than a snarling forty foot conglomeration of penises?”
“But that planet’s supposed to be uninhabited. It’s just a vegetable patch.”
“Uninhabited, you say? Well, I wonder what Rex would say about that…”
She tugged on a leash, and from out of the darkness behind her lumbered an indescribable creature.
It mostly resembled a tyrannosaur, short stubby arms and huge muscular legs, a tail swishing behind it to keep itself steady. But its fingers were all tiny penises, as were its toes. Its tail was another huge cock, twitchingly erect, its engorged green helmet larger than the Admiral’s corpulent face. When the Admiral finally looked up at the creature towering above him he stared directly into its face with mounting horror. Its gaping maw was a toothed caricature of the meatus in the centre of its horrible pulsating travesty of a glans. Its foreskin hung round it like a cowl. It roared at the Admiral in disgust and competitive anger, flecks of thick white mucus spraying his face.
“I don’t think he likes you, Admiral.” She saw the Admiral begin to back away. “Don’t worry. I’ve got him on a tight leash.” She patted the creature’s neck. “For now.”
“You’ll never get away with this. You’ll be cut down before you can even escape.”
“Escape? I don’t want to escape. This is my world now. Our world.”
The way she emphasised “our” made the Admiral assume she meant all women, and he shuddered involuntarily at the thought of such a place.
“I’ve seeded this world, Admiral. I’ve dropped pollen from every plant on that wondrous planet across the Earth. This isn’t snow!” She held up her hands to the sky. “This is their semen. A storm of seeds that will wash your world away.”
The Admiral turned away, glad he was wearing his hat and gloves. “Your insane,” he spat back at her over his shoulder.
“Not at all. In fact, it is you who will be turned insane soon, driven mad by the pointlessness of your existence. Imagine a world where penises sprout like grass from every patch of soil in the land. A world where women can keep beasts such as this as pets. A world where a man has no worth beyond his mind.”
The Admiral began to scream.
“This pollen is remarkably fast-acting, too. Look, even here on this roof some have started to grow already.” She pointed to the corner of the roof but the Admiral refused to follow her finger. He stumbled away from her and rested his hands on the ledge at the edge of the roof. Beneath his hand spongy moss grew, and when he examined it he saw it was composed of a hundred thousand soft penises swarming across the stone. It was too much. Bewildered tears filled his eyes. He climbed up on to the ledge and looked out at the city below.
Already there was pandemonium on the streets. Men ran panicking from their homes. Some fired guns at the flaccid ferns growing from the gutters. Others tried to stamp the delicate grasses in their gardens to death beneath their feet. Most just collapsed, their hearts unable to cope with what was before them.
“It’s almost sunrise,” Ubbliona said behind him. “You’ll never have seen such glory.”
The Admiral jumped. As he fell, he twisted in the air. The moon looked beautiful above him. He imagined it as a single pristine breast, untouched by the abomination of a planet it now surveyed. He reached out his hand to touch it, although of course he never could.
His body crashed down into the street. A magnificent Cockwood tree speared into his neck from below, pushing its way through his skull and out through his mouth. His wife and daughter walked hand-in-hand through the pollen fall toward him in marvelling wonder, and he looked at them through dying eyes.
“It’s so beautiful,” his daughter said.
“It is,” said his wife. “It really is.” There were tears in her eyes.
His daughter approached him. He wanted to speak but there was nothing his mouth could do. She placed a hand on his cheek, and pushed him roughly down to the floor. The thickening trunk of the hard wooden penis tore his cheeks apart and he slid down it. His daughter leant forward, stood up on her toes, and placed a nervous kiss on its tip.
The Admiral died just as the sun came up. A whole world came into bloom.
