“Wait a minute. Does that mean you knew about last month’s fundraiser scheme for the pin-up silver fox candid calendar?”
Axel laughed until tears actually filled his eyes. “Now that would have been a humdinger of a moneymaker, wouldn’t it?”
“Some kind of dinger, anyway.” That observation only made Axel laugh harder. One day, Diesel thought, he was going to roll his eyes back so hard, they’d stick and stay lodged upward forever.
Axel finally wiped his eyes and handed over the paper he’d brought up from the communications center downstairs. The gray color meant it was a high priority message. Diesel hoped it wasn’t bad news from their home planet, Alpha-Prime. His brotherwasuncharacteristically joyful, so maybe he could relax on that front.
“Check it out. We got it!”
“What did we get?” Diesel studied the paper, gaze fixing immediately on the initials UGG—United Galactic Gulag—centered at the top of the page.
“The detention route contract.” Axel sounded very proud of himself.
Diesel huffed. This was dubious good news at best. He set the sheet of paper down on top of the dozens of others on the desk in front of him. “You mean the Galactic Gulag Run?” he asked sardonically.
Axel sighed. “I hear the disdain in your tone. Don’t be difficult. This is good for us. The money this deal brings in will help keep us operational and more viable as a way station in this area of the galaxy.”
“We’re already operational. What’s wrong with simply being a galactic way station for space travelers on their way to nice vacation destinations instead of the big house?”
“We’re too far out from the popular vacation routes nowadays. This quadrant of space isn’t hip anymore.”
“Not hip?” Diesel started to roll his eyes, but stopped and shook his head. He needed to find a better way to vent his annoyance. If he didn’t, he’d go blind or spend the rest of his life staring at his brain.
He took a deep breath and attempted a more positive approach. Perhaps yoga was the answer to combating his growing stress.
“The Paradise Planet is a beautiful tropical place to vacation—”
“Yes. And it wasawesomefor our grandparents. But now we’re competing with adventurous vacation destinations for the younger generation like the Gothic Ice Floe Planet and Lava Rock World, both of which are in the Tri-Spiral Galaxy way on the other side of this galaxy. We’ve had this discussion before. I thought you were on board.”
“I am. You’re right. This is good for us.” His tone sounded impossibly forlorn to his own ears.
“So why the resistance?”
Diesel looked up at his brother. He wasn’t getting information he hadn’t heard before. He knew he was merely parroting the voices of the current council of elders.
He was in charge. He did have the final word, but the council—made up of retired former leaders of the Big Bang Truck Stop and its alien underground operation—always wanted their voices and opinions considered.
Every single one of the elders’ minds was firmly planted in the past, as were their strict ideas for this venture. At one time or another, each of the elders had been in a position of power—either upstairs or down—before retiring to a position on the council.
His father was a council member, but spent much of his time traveling the country with Diesel’s mother, Xenia. Zebulon Grey understood Diesel’s leadership issues since he’d once faced his fair share, and generally left his eldest son to it. Diesel hoped he’d be just as reasonable when the younger generation took over. Perhaps he’d also travel far, wide and continually like his parents in their spiffy new RV.
Diesel and Axel, along with their brothers Cam, Wheeler, Gage and Jack and even little sister Valene, all knew the future in this part of the Milky Way was ever-changing. They needed to adapt and change with it or become obsolete. Alpha-Prime, in the Caldera Forte Galaxy, wouldn’t let them simply operate as the Big Bang Truck Stop, the largest full-service refueling station in south central Arkansas. There had to be something worthwhile for them beyond the single reason their people had come here so long ago. While profits from their business made the Greys successful by Earth standards, and in the surrounding area of Arkansas, the ruling party on their planet always wanted improvement.
“The Bauxite mine will always keep our people in the area,” Axel said out loud. “Folks on Alpha-Prime will always need fuel.” Diesel would volunteer to stay, as would his brothers and every other off-world-born resident of Alienn, Arkansas.
“But we both know it would only take a handful of the folks from our planet to handle the mine alone,” Diesel said. “We also need to keep the way station viable for galactic citizens traveling in this region of space. Any regularly scheduled traffic only helps our goal to stay on this planet.”
“Because we like Earth and we want to live here forever, right?”
“Yes. We do.”
Earth was a great assignment. The more Alphas who lived here, the more people from Alpha-Prime they needed to keep things running. If more people visited or volunteered to live and work here, they might realize the perks, but so far only a small portion of their out-of-this-world visitors had ever ventured beyond the truck stop into the beautiful landscape of Arkansas, much less the country. The last person to voluntarily come to Earth to work and live was their orphaned cousin, Stella Grey.
Typical visitors to Alienn’s way station were all understandably impatient to get on to their galactic vacation destinations. The few who wanted to explore Earth had to go through a rather elaborate procedure to procure a guide and understand the rules they all lived by here on Earth, the primary one being that no human could know aliens lived among them and had for years.
Only a handful of extraterrestrial visitors had gone through the necessary and lengthy procedures to get a permit to explore beyond the safety zone that was the truck stop.
Alpha-Prime’s strict colonization prerogative kept their people’s numbers on Earth restricted so as not to reveal their existence and promptly rile up the indigenous population, or rather, thepuny earthlings, as the ruling party members always said under their breath during discussions of Earth. They were only partly kidding about the nickname.
