Admiral Cheep, the Gleeps and their Battlecruisers
Admiral Cheep lifted a teeny tiny handkerchief with his teeny tiny paw and wiped the teeny tiny beads of sweat from his forehead. He coughed an itty-bitty cough.

Smoke was pouring from the reactor core of the S.S. Twiddlebum. A massive steel battlecruiser loomed on the viewscreen. Inside it, a thousand Gleep rebels prepared to give Cheep's crew a burial in deep space. Cheep tried to keep his voice from squeaking as he issued orders to his frightened crew, their fuzzy blue fur stood on end and their walnut-sized knees quaked.

"All right men, we need to get out of his ship before we are all glowing in the dark like a string of Cuddlemas lights. But first we have to show these darn Gleeps which one of our ships has the better crew! Take your stations on the ticklecannons, men!"

The crew acted as one. One hundred pairs of steel-tipped, pink and yellow military-issued boots rang on the metal deck of the S.S. Tweedlebum as the sailors rushed to their posts.

The munitions lockers clanged open, revealing stores of rubbery yellow ticklecannon shells. The oversized googly eyes on the munitions blinked in excitement as they were loaded into the massive glitter-spangled guns.

Admiral Cheep gnawed on the stub of a licorice stick and paced back in forth in front of the captain's chair. His shipmates' lime-green antennae quivered in excitement but he his face was set and calm.

He had been "promoted" - as it seemed - just half an hour ago when a shimmering beam of neon light came giggling through the hull and took Admiral Tootblat's head with it. Cheep was standing just inches away from the Admiral when it happened. The head erupted in a spray of pink liquid and lime-green curlicues. Some of it flew in Cheep's open mouth, filling it with the tangy taste of a rootbeer float.

His tummy churned at the memory, but that could have been the onset of radiation sickness.

Another volley of giggles tore through the outer hull of the ship. An automated voice piped up with.

"Dere is a pwobwem. I wepeat. Dere is a pwobwem. Engine Fwee is on da fwitz. Situation Cwitical."

Cheep winced as the power flickered. "Beat the Gleeps and we can all go home?" he thought. "Who the hell was I kidding?" Cheep knew what would happen. He saw the training videos they showed in officer academy. Poor sonsofbitching saps who were exposed to reactor cores swelled up like overripe grapefruit, they screamed for morphine before exploding into bright orange puddles of sputum.

Cheep found himself fingering the holster to his own giggle ray. Were there two charges left in it? or only one? No matter. It could get the job done.

He held the blaster's muzzle - a cartoon smiley face - to his temple. He prayed that the stories the holy men told about paradises filled with trampolines and rocky road ice cream weren't just pretty, pretty lies.

He looked at the viewscreen and saw the Gleep cruiser inching ever closer.

A fat lot of good praying ever got him.

He held his breath and was about to close his eyes to do the deed when he allowed himself one last look at his crew. He saw their smushed-up faces and noticed a grim, but steely determination that made him holster his blaster.

His men, with atomic-clock precision lit the fuses to the cannons and clamped their fuzzy paws to their ears.

Space seemed to explode. A smell of burnt movie popcorn poured from the canons. The crew twitched their pink noses at the stench and loaded up another volley.

The second volley from the ticklecannons did its work. Blazing fuzzball fireballs turned the hull of the Gleep cruiser into nothing more than a floating cheese grater. Gleep after Gleep was sucked out of the holes in the hull and into the void of space. A wonderfully stupid expression was on their faces for just a moment before they swelled and exploded, their bodies "Pbpbtpthpbpthpbth"-ing into the inky void of space like deflating balloons let loose to fly around a room.

Cheep felt his world being crushed by a massive victory roar of his crew. He thought his poor antennae would go deaf to hear it. It wasn't a relieved sound. His men weren't cheering their good luck. No. The crew roared with a feel that can only come from being the more worthy foe. It was a proud sound. It was animal. It wouldn't end.

Cheep involuntarily reached into his uniform for the picture of his dead fiancé, Astra. She was killed when 300 billion gallons of pink frosting was dumped on her city by the Gleep invaders. The five o'clock news that night showed Cheep flinging massive gobs of the stuff wildly in the air. He screamed her name again and again until he went hoarse and sunk down to his knees in the sticky mess to weep.

"This is for you my wuv," he whispered, but it was lost in the titan roar of his crew.

The cheer didn't even dampen when the 50 megatons of steel began to crack over their heads. Somewhere, impossibly far away, a computer voice warned of a critical hull breach.

Instead, the proud sailors pushed on with their celebration. One pulled his father's kazoo from his pocket and began playing the opening notes of the national anthem. Two other crew members began the traditional victory hat dance.

The hull made the slightest of death rattles and then - 5 million light years away from Earth - a tiny steel acorn was reduced to nothing more than pulverized atoms.

In about thirty years or so, we'll be able to see its soft, pink glow.