For a while, it was the best job ever.

Not at the start, though. Most of retail is easy. All day every day, for an entire year, it was all pricebar programming, tidyarm repair, paylink test, rinse, repeat, for seventeen hours. Only two nutritab breaks, but still, it could have been a lot worse. It may have been long and boring, but it was simple.

Apart from one thing. Customers. Screaming, jostling, whistling, mocking, whinging, whining, customers. Also rinse, repeat, for seventeen hours. Anyone who’s worked retail will tell you the same thing. At least the pricebars and tidyarms and paylinks don’t actually tell you you’re a dead-end worthless piece of junk. The worst bit was having to pretend you enjoyed explaining the epsilon fuel rods weren’t included on the multibuy offer for tinned slugfish because they weren’t, believe it or not, a type of tinned slugfish. If I had a gem for every one of the lads that said “It would be a great job if there weren’t any customers”, then at least I wouldn’t be with them at the temp assignment bureau when their dreams came true. I wouldn’t be now anyway.

But between now and then, there was the good bit. For me, the shitty customer bit really did go away. Let me explain.

I worked, and I suppose still work, for a growing transport convenience chain based on Bioworld TM Sponsored By Biocom TM , but I’m not going to name it because no matter how bad my situation seems now, I still don’t fancy mandatory decapitation by corporate’s Public Image Agents. After my first year, I had successfully completed the ‘exciting first leap into the universe of service’ as the handbook said, and qualified for ‘furtherment into the lucrative career of sales opportunities’. My company was growing at intergalactic speed, because about the time it hired me, it had scored a contract with the Alliance wayports dotted along strategic hyperoutes through the Blue Arm Nebula. I repeat, the company is NOT Biocom TM (I love you, Biocom TM), but the Alliance must have figured it couldn’t much go wrong with a partner from a homeworld that had elected to rename itself in the holy name of advertising.

The company was looking to open another couple of wayport stores, but it was running out of yearlings who would accept a two-hundred raise for a potential lifetime of solitude on a mostly silent cubic mile of metal floating in space. My primary hobbies were getting drunk and drunkenly sobbing that I didn’t have a girlfriend, so suffice to say I didn’t have much in the way of intimate potential to hold me back. By then, they were offering two-ten anyway.

I shipped off at the first chance. The dispatch took eleven whole days, unpaid. Store 207654356 HYP 8 was about as far away from any hunk of rock you could only politely describe as habitable as you could get. As I descended into the hangar, though, I couldn’t help letting out a disappointed sigh. It was still busy. Alliance megacruisers, indie pulsejets, and about ten bazillion little flitty shuttle things circled the launch deck looking for that sweet spot where the walk to the nourishment station would be short and the authorised off-time to spend in the arcade would be long. They’d just released Astro Traveller Delta Force 12XL after all.

My dreams of long, long days staring out at the endless darkness and doing nothing at all while we waited for the decade’s solitary cruiser to make its ten-minute refuelling stop were dead. But what I hadn’t counted on was the type of customers we’d be getting.

The Alliance crews of screaming, jostling, whistling, mocking, whinging, whining humanoids were nowhere to be seen. They had their own official facilities all the way across the wayport. We were to cater to the public.

That doesn’t sound too great at first, but let me tell you who that public was: the indie traders from nearby systems. I couldn’t give you a single species or homeworld; I’d never seen any of those guys in an episode of I Married A Twelve Inch Tentacle. Let’s just say there were all colours and shapes and sizes. Blue furry nanoworms, giant purple melon eaters, big green plant things with these ridiculous orange crests that kept knocking the ceiling tiles out of place. The company could never be sued for racism, it’s safe to say. There were even some twelve inch tentacles, which got me thinking for a bit because as far as I could remember there never were any in my favourite etherwave show.

The important thing for us was that they spoke a trillion weird languages, moved a billion ways, and had a quadrillion opinions on the best way to go about their shopping. Some made a beeline for whatever they’d come for, regardless of what floorstacks or shelving units or poor microbeing might be in the way. Others hummed strange melodies over their choices for hours before ever laying a single appendage on the products. It got a little crazy at times, but it was awesome for us.

You see, people are wrong when they say the golden rule of shops is that the customer is always right. That’s not it at all. The golden rule is that the customer must never be Offended. The O word, if spoken aloud in any shop on any planet, hangs over the place like a mushroom cloud until the duty manager is forced to put down their mug and come out on the shop floor to deal with it, and no-one wants a manager anywhere near the shop floor other than the customer that is ‘O’d. That’s the one thing we can all agree on right down the pecking order. The mind-boggling clientele of our sparkling new establishment meant that anything we said to them, all the good old ‘would you like a hand with that’ and ‘have a nice day’ and ‘how about a nice add on of a premium soundsystem to go with that dehydrated fungus you’re purchasing today’ were liable to Offend someone.

Management were starting to get sore feet. We were forbidden to interact with the customers.

All at once, the shifts stretched out for miles before us. It was quite alright, because we could chat to each other to pass the time. We were on a cubic mile of metal floating in deep space, remember, so there was pretty much only chatting to do any time and we might as well be paid for it. But never underestimate the ambition of a master slob. We had tasted the hint of nothingness between our menial tasks, and we wanted more.

We used the O word to our advantage. They couldn’t stop us communicating with our visitors off the clock. Through tapping and snapping and clapping, not to mention the exchange of a few poorly-earned Alliance gems, we got our plight through to the strange traders. Sid got the blue sponges off a big freighter that stayed for a week to convince the bosses the paylink checks were Offending their honour, as if we suspected our guests of tampering. That got the tests down from every thirty minutes to every hour, and never if there was a blue sponge on the premises. Of course, the manager was never there to see them at all, so we could use that excuse whenever we didn’t sign the sheet. Our laziness knew no bounds.

The plants with the crests were persuaded that they were frightened of straight lines, so standards could never be too good. Junn bribed the shifty-looking tomato-people to keep hacking the pricebars with their glowing pads, which in turn forced Merchandising back home to rearrange the shop by cost and get rid of the glitchy equipment in the process. Brob even braved the dodgy powder-bar beneath the flight deck to negotiate a price on getting manual labour banned altogether. He was a legend for a day or two, and we all chipped in to put that one through. It was a step too far in the end, because as we were often reminded, the deliveries didn’t work themselves, and we got put on ridiculous 37AM early starts to get them done before opening. It earned Brob the nickname ‘37’ for a couple of weeks, until he won ‘38’ for the number of gamma cells he swallowed before setting off the back door Geiger counters, but that’s for another time.

Those were the days. For lowly dead-end no-lives like us, it was bliss. Slugs move faster than we did. In those days, my drunken sobbing was only beginning two or three weeks past payday.

Then, bigwig politics ruined the fun. Like it always does.

Proper currency that you can hold in your hand hadn’t been seen since the age of the Globalists back home. Good old Alliance gems are practically written into your brainwaves; it’s how those paylinks work when you walk out with the goods and why you get that awful paralysing zap when you forgot you only worked ten days last week. Pretty nice system for us all told, so I guess it had to go. We came in one morning to a random briefing saying that corporate had decided to ‘embrace a wider customer base’ by accepting coins and other trinkets as payment in wayport stores. What I think they really meant is that when the scout fleets of the Dret are sweeping across the Blue Arm blowing up everything in their path, it’s not a good idea to piss them off over a fuel pod.

Either way, we were told the installation engineers were en route there and then. They showed up a week later to install another Globalist relic either side of the paylink pylons. It was the end of the days of getting by with a bit of sanity left for bedtime. My god, I can see them now. They were ‘tills’.

The tills, for anyone living somewhere vaguely civilised, are little tables with a drawer that springs out to put tokens or coins or whatever in when the non-Alliance traders come through. It worked, I suppose, because as soon as we started we got double the trouble through the doors. The problem is checking everything. Above the drawer is a massive screen with loads of scales and panels and microscopes sticking out the frame. We got a programme that tries to scan the payment and tell you if it’s genuine, but like everything that gets shipped out to trial stores systems away from anywhere a director wants to go and criticise, it usually didn’t work. That meant checking manually, which was where the scales and panels and microscopes came in. Also booklets, on real paper that you had to use your fingers to flick through, to help calibrate everything to measure the strontium ratio of the ten-gram jool that had just been shoved in your face by a very angry clawed gentleman, etc., etc. Checking that the money was flowing was obviously one exemption to the rule about never Offending anyone. Queues stretched all the way to the back of the shop. Did I mention every till needs a biological operator? No new staff or extra hours, obviously, so every time another ball of jelly or singing cactus joined the line, that was just another pain in the arse staring me down over a collapsed display or unattended and alarmingly steaming reactor coupler and wondering why all the flailing and cursing colleagues at the front were taking so little pride in their stock. I’m seriously considering making a few gems in publishing a field guide to the displeasure of the species of the galaxy, if I ever get out of this new transfer. The laser damage that resulted from warning shots in the queue wiped out our annual wastage target in two months, and me and my mates had to cancel our seats at the Hungry Virgins of Virigorga show a couple of planets over when we lost our bonus. I’m sorry, Mum, but I was going. I’m too bitter to lie now.

The tills were bad, but I’m only getting started. What was worse was the policies and procedures after we closed. Far worse, because it meant literally three or four hours extra every day just to get done and prolong our miserable careers. Remember what I said about no extra hours? I was meaning wages. I was literally managing, like, ten hyperyears a night in Astro Traveller before face-planting the floor through the arcade non-screens. If you send me anything when I get the new address, brother, NO SPOILERS PAST THE SECOND ASTROVERSE!!!

All these currencies couldn’t get transferred digitally, you see. We got bought our own section on the flight deck for all the banking ships that came to collect the dosh. All armed, too - at least I got to see some of the new Mentsig ion pulverisers before it all turned to real shit. Our job after the last thing slithered out the door and we picked up what was left of our store was to make sure the right payments got on the right ship, in the right way, at the right time. Simple right?

Oh yeah, real simple. Every single damned time we staggered in on a morning, there were more briefings about the bloody cash. First were the timetables. Some ships came every day, some two or three times a week. Some operated on a three-week rota where they alternated between 3, 5 and 7 days depending on whether or not they were having a Total Celebration Event on Home Planet Zog. The communications were so disjointed we started mooching news chips out of the bar to watch for our own disruptions. It was important because if a banking ship was cleared for takeoff without your sales, you were off back to humanoid land for retraining, half pay. It was getting bad in 207654356 HYP 8, but it was better than Telford.

Then there was the whole storage fiasco. Our dear friends in corporate supplied us a big box of standard security bags to shove it all in, to maintain a positive work-life balance. They had also earlier supplied us with till drawers with twenty-one neat little compartments, when we accepted one-hundred and twelve forms of physical payment. You had to be careful sifting through it all too, because some coins could burn you. Some could give you an unnameable rash. Some could bite. Or if you got lucky, like Laura, you could get your hands turned to ash by an anti-theft radiation burst and get a sweet pair of Swiss Army gauntlets on the house.

The first time we sent off the banking, half of it came back. It was unsafe, it was insecure, it was against convenience regulations, yadda yadda ya. That’s where the real fun started. Anti-static capsules for the frumium. Three pumps of dustfly repellant into the pressurised ubullon tanks. Sticky-stuff remover for the Virigorga dollars. It will be in my head forever.

There were so many memos coming through by then that we didn’t have time to read them any more. We just bought a job lot of virtual folders and stacked them all together by currency. We figured that we if we got confused we could treat them like cheat sheets. Usually, we all stuck it out together to the end of the night, each colleague assigned their own ten or twenty coins with a trolley of paperwork to hand, but it was not enough. We’d survived when we wanted to be lazy, but now that we had exceeded our capabilities, company procedure dictated it was time for punishment.

Even through the exhaustion, we’d always had time for a paranoid chat about the batchlings. We were worried because they were egg-shaped, had an eggshell-like texture, had to be taken to incubation chambers in the warehouse as soon as they were used, and wobbled a bit on their own when there’d been a bank holiday on Post Station Alpha in Week 3A and you’d had them a couple of hours longer than usual. We were starting to worry that they might be eggs. I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Even a bunch of greasy no-lives like us wouldn’t ‘accidentally’ let one slip off the edge of the incubator when we were signing off the thermal settings, because a health and safety refresher course complete with invigorating breakout sessions every two seconds wasn’t the only threat stopping us. The batchlings came from the Dret, and while they obviously belonged to the company once they passed from that awful head-sized pincer into your oh-so-crushable pathetic shaking meat fingers, we weren’t taking any chances in pissing them off. At least a direct encounter, Junn argued, would be over quickly. If they were playing nicely though, and went through your Sector Director... well, let’s just say a group of us got together one night outside the arcade to plan that one out. That plan involved a short trip out the back doors, across the decontamination deck, and up through the service hatch that 38 scouted out onto the Alliance megacruiser deck. There, in the glorious pink light of a blazing Yigg bio-decomposer security turret, we would bathe in the relief of rapid dismissal. That’s how much we dreaded meeting the SD over an Offended Dret. Such a shame that when it came to it, there was to be no such happy ending for our little band of retail drones. Was there ever?

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

So, for five whole periods, we struggled on, and for five whole periods, we were ridiculously careful with the batchlings, even if it meant a couple hours extra holding them in place with four pairs of hands whilst someone smoothed out the padding in the incubator slots with a spoon. If you think we were crazy, then you obviously haven’t seen the Dret, and I hate you, all... there sitting nicely on your undeconstructed homeworld.

Then, one morning, I finished my now ritual contemplation of whether it would be best to go in for yet another slog on the delivery and then the checks and the hell of the till and afterwards maybe a nice urgent brief from some bright and desperate Bioworld TM jobsworth who hoped his revelation that moving every single fucking plasma capacitor round onto the next bay so that the new model radion boosters could move to the top shelf at eye-level with the rainbow horse-penguins that his genius customer survey in some miserable backworld shitheap of a store told him were most likely to own the old Rtinya model starjets that would most benefit from this dubiously trialled add-on would earn him an equally miserable raise... or whether to hop through a different hatch in that decontamination deck, fiddle round in the cockpit of one of those old Rtinya starjets until I gave the right jiggle after the right twiddle and the security chips just fell off like they were always doing, and whizz off into the dark on a merry adventure of piracy and daring raids on the forbidding palaces of the notorious asteroid-lords, breaking free their poor, beautiful sex-slaves who would of course then adore me, raise me up as their hero, plead with me to rescue their sisters from the flagship of the enormous intergalactic fleet of the cruel Screggish, the flagship of which if only I charged head on into the bank of ion lasers on its starboard aft I could break through a weakened exhaust shaft, leap out of the wreckage into a maze of alien decks, with only my trusty yet puny handfragmenter at my side and freedom in my heart..... and decided to be a good boy again. And until I work out how to delete things on this stupid cranial recorder, this piece of crap is never going out.

What I meant was, that one morning, I got up, wandered over to the store, timing every step so that I didn’t get there one microsecond too soon, and walked in to find that the entire place had been trashed in the night. I mean, like, everything. Floorstacks just shoved over like those old dominoes people used to play with. Pools of oil and fuel were blending and starting to react in ways that didn’t look too encouraging. The metal walls literally dinted in like an electrostretcher had got more wires crossed than the old lady riding it. I turned a corner in a daze and saw all those stupid plasma capacitors that take forever to peg up scattered across three aisles. That was when I really knew I was in for a bad day.

I found the rest of the morning crew by the doors to the warehouse. Baz and Brob were on their hands and knees trying to gather up the deadlier pieces of the trishock inputs that had fallen from their mangled display. The Assistant Manager, who we called Ass (affectionately, of course) stood talking with a serious-looking guy I’d never seen before. At first, I took him for a Wayport Military Policeman who’d maybe decided that this break-in was actually worth looking into even all this way from Alliance quarters, or who was maybe just lost. Then, he broke off from pretending to listen to Ass’s panicked wittering, that awful scowl of disappointment perfected only after many years of watching others work smeared across his fat lips.

I’ll never forget what he said first. It wasn’t some warning about an evil intergalactic monster unleashed on the wayport. It meant he was the evil intergalactic monster unleashed on the wayport.

“That trishock POS panel has been obsolete for some hours.”

It was the sector director.

I didn’t hesitate. I knew what must be done. I was somehow responsible for this destruction, my life was over, and I wanted it over as quickly and painlessly as possible. I turned and hurried for the back doors. I was relieved in a way; it was my one and only chance to escape retail.

It was a miserably short trip though, because the other intergalactic monster had clawed the controls. There were severed cables dripping blue shit all around my first step to suicide. It seemed I was out of luck, and doubly so, because now I’d not only been one of the last people in there before everything got turned inside out, but I’d actually turned my back on the director. Sometimes though, fate throws you a reroll. There was a deep chuckle coming from the shop floor. It was bloody terrifying. But then I heard Ass squealing something about a thermowrapped box by the break room, and realised the director had taken my retreat for enthusiasm.

I wasn’t thinking much by then. I might never have found the thing he was after. But the devastation actually helped me there. I vaguely remembered the POS coming sometime last week, which meant there was already a whole tottering pile of newer stuff that should also be out crammed in front of it. But the vandal had clouted it all out of the way, and when I got back I think I might have had several seconds spare before even a such a big cheese as Mr. Sector could have pulled the old Ambulatory Performance Concern on me.

When I reached them, the even-sourer-than-usual face of Ass lit up. He jabbed a triumphant finger at the little holographic label glued to the thermowrap. “It has to be on tomorrow,” he panted.

“Which means you’re clearly not capable of the pre-emptive task management I expect of my salaried supervisors,” rumbled the director without missing a beat. “We’ll speak about your transfer to a smaller store in a more comfortable role after this mess is cleared up.” He smiled whitely. “Just worried about your mental wellbeing, John.”

Ass groaned, but Mr. Sector had already turned briskly towards the soft whooping sound of the front doors. It was an almost unheard-of phenomenon to see Pad, the store manager, in before the morning jobs were done or after the evening jobs could start, but here he was. Someone, perhaps Ass, had obviously called him when it was clear it wasn’t just one of those little thermonuclear mishaps again, and when you’re notified via a wristlink connected to a loyalty encourager resting against your carotid artery, you’re gonna pick up before that all-important fourth ring.

“What’s this? Who was in charge last night? Why didn’t you face every aisle to gold visit standard? And heavens around us, why, why oh why is that ancient tripod POS still up?” Pad blustered about for a moment and finally skidded to a halt in front of his boss. He looked around with his own version of the scowl of disappointment, the one which meant all his minions had failed in their pathetically simple tasks and now he was going to have to join in to show everyone just how easy running a shop could be when everyone worked hard. “I’m so sorry, Derek. This is not at all what we accept. Not at all. Who was in last night? Not you, John?”

I gestured at the claw-marks, the dints in the walls, the smoking two-tonne cooling cylinders that had been carelessly thrust across the far aisle. I was trapped and I had to defend myself. “We did face up last night. I think I would have noticed it looking like this on the way out.” I’d foolishly taken up keyholder training for a few extra gems, and it was me that was in charge the night before. And I did remember it looked almost like this. Just without the claw marks and the dints and a few less smashed things lying about. I still wasn’t getting paid enough to care. “And for your info, they’re trishocks. Try knowing your stock.”

I shut my mouth with a snap that made my cheeks tingle. I simply could not believe I’d been stupid enough to answer back like that, but I was a bit stressed out, okay? I looked at the sector director to avoid Pad’s blazing eyes, and the little knowing smirk was more disturbing than anything I’d expected to see. Thank the Alliance he was looking into the warehouse and not at my stupid jabbering mouth. “Follow me,” he said. “I think I know what I’m going to find.”

He found what he thought he would. Briskly, because brisk is what we’re always talking about with a sector director, we all met him out back, staring at the tall metal incubator unit by the left wall. In my rush to escape and then my rush to get the POS, and maybe also because I’m as observant as a cave fish, I’d missed the shattered dome, the huge ragged crumbling hole in the concrete wall, the sparking vitals screen, and the bits of broken eggshell all around. I peered closer and saw that all but one of the batchlings were still there. I started to shake then.

“Have you been observing batchling policy 9?” the director rumbled.

There was a perfectly synchronised drainage of blood from Pad and Ass’s faces. And mine too. I gave up at batchling policy 3, not sure about them two. “Oh yes,” said Pad, much too cheerily.

Derek brightened too. Nothing, I think, cheers a director more than the opportunity to explain something that’s gone very, very wrong to those that have done very, very wrong. “In that case, you will be eager to show me your seismic records.”

“They were destroyed last night,” said Ass immediately. “I spent all morning looking for them before you arrived, just to prove that we were doing everything to policy, but unfortunately-”

“They’re downloaded direct to the back office terminal,” said the director emotionlessly.

Ass glared at me, then stared at Pad, then beamed at Derek. “I’ll delete my access codes before I leave, sir.”

Derek allowed himself a little sad shake of the head. “I’m concerned for your mental wellbeing, John. Use your temp pay for some therapy.”

Nobody watched him go. The director began his lecture in earnest. “As the brief for batchling policy 8 said, the Dret are now only willing to finalise batchlings for payment of goods and services once they have been incubated at 28-31.5 degrees for a minimum period of....?”

“Seven hours!” By this point I was taking any chance I could.

“And seventy-two seconds,” the director growled. It was the last time I spoke until the offer.

“Since policy 2, we have been monitoring temperatures every hour, because that’s the best prep point before they go off to a rather popular fast food chain in the Banana Cluster. Lucrative indeed, that contract. Be sure to check out my brand new Sulfix Jet5 cruiser next time you’re near the valet deck. Anyway, that was for only four hour minimums.” Holy Blob of Bargaw, he actually sort of hunkered down at that point. Flashed us an awful grin. “Now, I’m not one of those stuffy board members, folks, you know I’m always here to help, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. Batchlings are actually Dret eggs.”

Pad gasped in amazement. The team stayed quiet.

“As we know, the Dret aren’t exactly everyone’s friendly neighbours, and they’ve been losing horrifying numbers of soldiers in their disagreements of late. They’re not sentimental about their own kind, hence the egg money, but they need some tough recruits to get their job done.” He eyed us all one at a time, slowly. “Just like we do. And any batchling capable of surviving those incubation temperatures for so long is just what they’re looking for.”

“Why don’t they heat them themselves?” Brob tried.

“Because our superior training allows us to take on new challenges to raise our profits and our end-of-year bonuses,” the director rasped. “Or should do. With all the support you get, you have such easy jobs, you know.”

We had tried to be as still as possible since the day we got here, but never so still as then.

The director stepped forward and flicked the broken screen with a rap that made us all flinch. “And with policy 9 in place for a whole period, our half-hourly seismic checks should have picked up pre-hatching activity in that one and had it off to the Dret Liaison Team hours ago. Safely. Intact. And not almost pissing off a raging, genocidal, murderous species of loyal and valuable customers in the first place. Think of the shares if this got out! And that, Mr. Russell, is why you are being terminated for gross violation of company procedures last night.”

For the record, I’m not Russell. Pad is, or was. He did try the fact that he’d been on holiday for the past five periods, well before policy 9 was out. That was news to us, because we never saw him anyway, although looking back the nutritab allowance had seemed to stretch out a couple more days in that time. The holiday didn’t help though, because the sector director went on to say that a store manager was responsible for everything that happened at all times in the store, whether it was in his control or not, or if anybody could conceivably have ever been in control in the first place. Being keyholder did have its perks, I supposed at the time.

Pad went off sobbing, presumably to caress the smooth, inviting surface of Astro Traveller Delta Force 12XL for one last time or possibly his wife and baby. I almost even felt sorry for him. Then I was back to reality because Jev had just come rushing up to proudly tell the sector director that he had alerted the wayport authorities to the incident. He was promptly terminated for gross acceptance of company procedures.

I was just standing there in the group, floundering around in a weird mix of relief and dread and looking for something to do or say, when there was a tapping on the front doors. It was a very heavy tapping. A clunking. A chitinous clunking. As far as I know, that was our only response to the alert before I went. Alliance security never showed up.

Big brave Mr. Sector made me go to let the Dret in. As I looked up across its rock-hard shell and its row of wiggling disapproving eyes and its awful, awful pincers I knew two things. There and then, like that, two things. The first was that the Dret would know exactly who was on last night, exactly who was responsible for not checking the seismic records and alerting the liaison team to the new hardened warrior ready to burst out of its shell and join the war that was hopefully still somewhere on the other side of the galaxy. The second was that so far I’d not seemed to be actually blamed for any of this mess and that I needed to go out back right then and punch the sector director in his stupid schnoz so that I got dealt with by the company rather than them. I actually turned to do it, fleeing before the lumbering bulk of the visitor, my hand curled into a righteous fist of termination. I got close, so close, but then I made the biggest in a long line of poor life choices.

The director was looking at me and smiling. “How would you like a promotion, son?”

Management. I never knew I wanted to until then, but the magic P-word revealed a wonderful truth in what must be the thickest head in the universe.

I could get paid to do nothing. And hopefully somewhere far from here.

I felt the heavy weight of an iron pincer over my shoulder. “Yes, sir,” I panted.

His smile never changed. “Please, call me Derek.”

We went into the back office then, just the two of us, which was good because a second later an unnoticed bylon engager left smouldering in aisle 3 had reacted with some ingested gamma cells, and I didn’t want to have to clean mashed 38 off the floor. Derek allowed the team a two minute bereavement leave over the speakers and turned to me. “How would you like to be a Special Ambassador?”

I didn’t know what ambassador meant but special sounded good so I nodded. I could hear several Dret clinking away in the warehouse, maybe around the incubator, maybe searching for the escaped warrior which by that point had already boarded Megacruiser Annihilator 2145 and was on its merry way to instigate the Blue Arm Crisis that you were all probably hugging and sobbing over last week.

Derek nodded back. “Good, it’s done.” He held out a hand. I shook it. Never do that, brother. Never. Until you know what you might be shaking on.

You see, it wasn’t really a promotion. After Jev did that stupid whistleblowing thing, the sector director had hatched a plan (no pun intended) to maybe get his store out of future history books by coming up with a deal that the Dret afterwards actually accepted. He might have saved our corner of the universe from all-out devastation, but I still hate him for it.

There was no payment improvement. Derek explained that pay for higher tiers of management and consultants like myself was often a complex web of deductions and expenses, and given that I would be provided food, water, shelter and a chance to amend what I had done, those deductions balanced out to zero. I couldn’t spend Alliance gems where I’m off to anyway.

I was sent from the office with hearty congratulations and a pat on the back, and then he asked one of the newer Dret to step inside. It did make me think actually that they aren’t so different to us, you know. Their managers are the last to arrive too.

While the deal was being done, I had chance for one last conversation with a human. It was with Junn, who approached me with a look of open-mouthed revelation and fear on her ugly mug. “I think we done fucked up, haven’t we?”

I grimaced. I thought of that handshake. “Yeah. We done fucked up.”

I wish my last conversation had been a bit more insightful.

But then she looked around at the wreckage, the smoke, the body bag, and the rummaging giant crab-people, and at last she looked happy. “But think. We’ve got no store manager. No assistant manager. Two colleagues down. Whatever’s happening with you. Shop’s a shithole. We’ve got about thirty things ready to explode-” A huge boom rocked the wayport and sent dust and hidden stashes of sweets raining down on our heads. “Twenty nine things ready to explode. Five minutes ‘til opening. Don’t you see? We can’t open!”

It was at that point that the office door opened again. The big boss Dret came out and took my arm in what was only a delicate hold, given the extent of the bruising later. I took no notice, because the director’s eyes were even scarier than the crab hauling me off to who knew where.

His voice was like death. “The store always opens,” he snarled. Then he slammed the door.

And so here I am. I’ve been on this nameless Dret knobbly spaceship thing for like, ten days now. I don’t know how far away their homeworld still is. There’s a big line of war and fire all around their borders now so maybe nobody knows any more.

It’s exciting in a way, because I’ll be the first alien to cross that line for a long, long time, perhaps forever. And I’ll be safe when I do it. I’m a Special Ambassador after all.

And do you know what? Getting all that shit out of my system has actually started to make me think a bit more positive. I’d rather be able to come home now and then, even if Mum’s cooking isn’t like Greasy Zxysd’s Moondogs on Wayport HYP 8. Or even like the vile slop I’m getting fed now. I’d rather be able to go down to the bar and get sozzled with my crazy stupid pals after the cash-up. I’d definitely rather be able to get my seats back for Hungry Virgins of Virigorga next time it rolls around.

But, in the human enclosure of the Zoo of Inferior Species Which We Will Ultimately Assimilate Or Destroy, in which I’ll be the only exhibit, they’ve put in an entertainment module with Astro Traveller on. I’ve already asked about that. Apparently our obsession with semi-passive gaming makes us one of the inferior species that will ultimately be assimilated or destroyed. So at least there’s that. And there’s something else, too, that’s making me realise this isn’t all so bad as I started off thinking. Something that I’ve just remembered about all those animals in the zoos back home on Bioworld TM Sponsored By Biocom TM.

At long last, I really can do nothing.