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"I hate the fucking rain! It's been four years since I last saw the sky, and it's starting to get to me.

"And I fucking hate work! But I guess if I was meant to enjoy it, I wouldn't be getting paid to do it, now would I?

"But that's another story entirely. I mean you gotta pull your weight for god and country and all that crap when you're being invaded right? Right? Please tell me that's right, else all I've been doing for the last four years has been for nought! And if that were the case.

"Then I dunno.

"I might as well just kill myself now and end my suffering.

"The only thing I hate more than this miserable, perpetual and acidic rain are the fucking drunks in this bar that can't shut up once they've had more than a few pints of piss and are starting to get homesick and angry with the world around them. This particular one is the most annoying cos it never takes more than two pints to loosen that waggling tongue of his, and if I relished the thought of another three months in the brig I'd rip his one out too. And since that's counter-productive to 'the cause,' I guess I would more than likely land up doing double shifts for half pay instead, cos that's what appears to be happening these days!

"The pitfalls of being one of the working class when the invaders arrived I guess. We tried our damnedest to repel them. But they just kept coming and eventually we were left with little choice but to nuke everything to keep them at bay. And that kept them at bay for a good, what was it, six months or so? Man they're resilient buggers, but at least those six months gave us sufficient time to regroup and get all of us working stiffs into the Uranium and Plutonium mines.

"Now all we do is get this stuff to the surface so that the eggheads can make them into bigger, more effective bombs, so we can keep nuking ourselves to keep our home-world our own.

"What I'd like to know though is what's the fucking point? I mean we're down here killing ourselves to mine stuff that we're using to destroy our planet, doesn't seem too logical does it? Granted we're no longer affected by the radiation, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be happy about going through the rest of my life glowing in the dark. Yeah sure the chitin conceals the glow until I open my wings, but still? What if I wanted a mate when this is all over? Will she accept a freak that looks like a firefly? I doubt it?

"Anyway enough about me and this predicament that we're in, what do you think's going on up there?"

"I'm not too sure at all actually. I haven't heard from anyone up there in a few weeks and I'm not too certain whether that's a good thing or not."

"Well I hope they let us know if we've fallen, cos that way I can stop shovelling this shit and get back to doing my own thing."

"Do you really think that the invaders will let us get back to doing our own thing?"

"Dunno, who can say, we've never encountered their kind before, and most of the more advanced races we've come across were generally not very hostile."

"Well then these guys definitely don't fall into that category do they?"

"No, I guess they don't."

The three figures in the dimly lit room were all inhabitants of this planet. And since Homo-Sapiens have always been arachnophobic it didn't take them very long, a whole five minutes in fact, to decide that it would be in their best interests to exterminate the lot of them before taking over this minerally wealthy planet. What they hadn't counted on was the technological skills that these "roaches" had here. And when they tried to stop their genocide, the humans had to rethink their tactics.

The original plan was to descend in warships and carpet bomb the surface and then go about picking off what was left. What they didn't know was that the surface dwellings were just that, dwellings. All the cities were below ground and the planet's population was about forty thousand times what was estimated, and to make matters worse they weren't particularly keen on being exterminated either.

This is where I come into things. I'm an exterminator you see. Not the regular kind that pops into your house and wipes out your infestation, but on a slightly larger scale where I get dropped off on a planet, and within a few weeks I get picked up. Oh and did I mention that I'm also the only thing left alive on the planet?

Thanks to my "Universal Translator" I could understand their conversation, and from the readings taken during my descent to the surface, it was painfully obvious that nuking the planet and then waiting for the dust to settle would be a complete waste of time. This was definitely the first time that I'd come across a sentient race that had nuked their own planet in order to keep it their own. Most tend to nuke it while trying to wipe out others of their own species during faction fighting, but this was completely unheard of.

It also went to show that they knew that most other species couldn't handle high levels of radiation and would just leave the planet alone and mark it as a "dead zone." I guess they picked that bit of information up for one of those sentient races they mentioned earlier. But man's never been one of those benevolent races, we're still motivated by greed and the need to kill anything that we don't understand. And the fact that this planet represented both made it all the more important to kill everything here and then strip mine it so that "Big Corp" could make a killing, literally and figuratively.