Lenny had few job prospects despite his engineering degree, but Novastar was hiring. Of all the space companies that'd begun launching with the newly invented stardrive, theirs was the one making the headlines. All with a ton of trade secrets. So when he showed up for an in-person interview he was thrilled, having passed the 1-in-100 screening by ruthless AIs and HR ladies.

He'd entered a sleek silver cube building with several layers of obvious and probably hidden security, to reach an interview office. An employee sauntered in afterward and handed him a bottle of water with one slender arm, showing off a bracelet of electronic, flickering artificial pearls. She said, "To answer everybody's first question, you don't get to see the critical technology in your first few months here. You'll likely start out with relatively mundane work on electronics or, with your background, circuitry. Is that a deal breaker?"

"No, ma'am," he said, intimidated by her severe corporate suit and movie-perfect hair. "I'm here to earn a living, and advancing the space program is a bonus."

She nodded, then walked him through mundane questions and the need for a blood test. Lenny figured it for a drug test variant, and he didn't mind. And that was that; he got ushered out with no indication of whether he'd passed.

It was a week later that he finally got what he nearly deleted as an automated No message. Actually it said, "We'd like to accept you for a trial internship period!" The pay was low but it was a foot in the door.

He showed up early, flustered and with his shirt collar messed up. The company secretary didn't seem to mind; she sent him to some kind of scanning room. It seemed as much medical as security based: a glass tube with an open side, hooked up to a ton of intimidating machinery.

He said, "Do I need to empty my pockets, take my belt off? This seems like a lot for a spy check."

The woman grinned. "We trust but verify. Yes, you should change clothes completely into this." She handed over a paper medical gown, and backed out of the room.

Reluctantly he did as told, stowing his clothes on a shelf, then stepped into the booth. This was the price of getting to see even the less secret tech, apparently. He wasn't eager to be subject to constant paranoia.

The machinery whirred and metal bands orbited him. "Hold still," said a mechanical voice. Then, something blasted him. A searing sensation ripped through him all at once and was gone before he could do more than notice the pain. He wobbled but felt grabbed and steadied by some force. The cylinder warped his vision so that it loomed larger and larger around him. Something else rippled and floated like drifting cloth... in fact it was the gown he'd just been wearing, but suddenly magnified.

He was on the floor, standing atop a sock the size of a rug, surrounded by the collar of the clothes that'd fallen off him. Instead he had a grey fur coat on. He tugged at it, stunned, but it wouldn't come off, and the motion made his tail flick...

It took Lenny a few seconds to register that the extra-long spine twitching behind him was a tail. Pink, slightly hairy, and firmly attached just like the fur covering him.

A huge video screen on the wall lit up. It sat at floor height but still stretched above his head. A lab-coated, elderly man appeared on it, saying, "Welcome, new recruit, to our astronaut training program! Your genetic profile proved compatible with our trade-secret conversion technology."

"Conversion? What?" Lenny's teeth gnashed weirdly as he spoke, making his voice squeaky.

The screen went on, "This recorded instruction guide will --"

"Argh, you won't even talk to me?" Lenny looked around and way up at both the door and the mad science booth he'd been tricked into.

"-- preparation for your adventures in outer space."

That got Lenny's attention, making his ears flick toward the screen. Now it showed the well-known exterior of a NovaStar prospecting starship, but zoomed in to show an interior that the public knew only from wild speculation. The compact, cramped design wasn't nearly so bad as the conspiracy videos showed. Instead, most of the hull was mining equipment and other hardware, and the crew area was absurdly small... until the view zoomed in to show the outlines of rats inhabiting a room complex that was spacious from their perspective. Like the room Lenny was in right now.

Lenny's long new snout hung open. "That's the big secret? You kidnap people and turn them into critters to live in a tiny space habitat?"

The sleek video paused and got replaced with a different image of the same man, now dressed in a suit and reacting to Lenny. "That's overly strong language, sir. Although you'll find the non-disclosure paperwork you signed limits your options from here, you're also in an enviable position."

"I am one foot tall! If that!"

"And you came here dreaming of the stars, but expecting to be stuck in a low-level ground crew position for years, didn't you? Few of our applicants have the right genes for the conversion you just went through. "How would you like an all expenses paid trip to Barnard's Star? We're putting together a crew for a mining expedition."

Lenny looked at his hands, now fuzzy paws with claws. The change had left him with thumbs, and he was standing on two legs with only a little trouble. Not a normal rodent then. Plus he was talking. So was this really that bad? He could understand the secrecy. And since they seemed to need altered crewmen and had to go to great lengths to find them, he could probably get a decent deal here.

Lenny took a deep breath and said, "Let's talk pay and benefits."

#

The acceleration was intense but not half so bad as a traditional rocket. Lenny was strapped into a seat hardly a foot tall, getting flung into orbit by the amazing space-twisting engines that'd made journeys like this one possible. Beside him sat nine other crew grimacing from the force and vibration of launch. Industrial specialists, a medic, a pilot, like him all given a few months of intense training in how to do everything while being a rat. They'd commiserated with him about how the company had barely told them anything before "compression" to this shape, and had basically shanghaied them. But hey, they'd all concluded, what mattered most was that they were astronauts now. So what if they couldn't get their whiskered faces on public video for a couple of years while the trade secret lasted?

The acceleration faded out, putting the ship into orbit. Earth's night sky glittered below. The people down there assumed the company was using advanced robots for crew. So Lenny got to be in on a conspiracy to build and explore and get rich in a way hardly anyone imagined. He looked forward to the adventure.