Nebulistica…the home of the most wished-for holiday experience on Earth, located in deep space. Only the rich and famous could afford to buy passage on one of the spaceships that traveled there and enjoy a vacation at the coveted resort with its wheels of delight.

Ashwini stared at the letter she’d just opened, containing a job offer. A tempting one when she looked at the compensation offered. She could earn in three months or so what it took her a year to earn at her regular job. But it meant taking a long leave of absence. It wasn’t as if she could get there by plane and return as soon as the job was over. No, the trip to Nebulistica would take way longer than a week or two, and who knew how long it would take to solve the case. She doubted the precinct would hold her job for that long.

She’d worked so hard to get to where she was, and now, she had finally made lead detective of her team. Was she willing to give all that up? It had taken her years of training, working her way up the ranks, and eventually gaining acceptance from her coworkers. It took them a while to finally learn that the green-skinned young woman was no different from them.

Not that there weren’t other alien immigrants on Earth, a few even worked at the precinct, but she and her parents were the only green-skinned people on Earth. They came from the planet Laharia, a planet discovered by Earth’s space explorers twenty-nine years ago, not long before she was born. When she was two, her father had been offered the position of Laharian ambassador, and her parents had moved to Earth.

She took pride in the fact that she was the first alien who had been accepted at Quantico. Her childhood dream of becoming an FBI agent had come true. Except, when she’d completed her training with flying colors, not one of the FBI’s field offices wanted her.

After Ash had given up on being accepted at one of the FBI’s divisions, she had applied at the local precincts in several smaller towns out of desperation. She became a cop, giving up her dream of being an FBI agent.

Almost…

Deeply hidden in the far recesses of her mind, the dream still hovered.

And now, after all this time, the FBI contacted her. Why? Because according to the letter, they needed a special agent for what appeared to be an almost unsolvable case. It was a mysterious offer, to say the least.

On Nebulistica… Wheels of Delight…

The famous space station had been constructed in deep space by an eccentric billionaire. Except it wasn’t really a station. It was a contraption built for pleasure that had taken its builder many years to bring to completion. The man had also built three spaceships at his space dock in Mexico. First, to haul building materials and parts, and after completion, to transport prospective pleasure seekers to Nebulistica. The pleasure station had been in full operation for more than five years now.

The billionaire had already made the news many years ago when he’d built his first spaceship and journeyed into space. But then, his latest venture with the space station had made world headlines…and still did. Everyone on Earth knew about it and had declared him out of his mind. Nebulistica offered people pleasures they couldn’t fulfill on Earth, adventures conducted in utter privacy. A vacation on Nebulistica promised to bring to fruition a visitor’s wildest dreams and fantasies.

Ash had no idea what the case was about because the letter contained no further details. If interested, she had to report to FBI Headquarters and meet with the director. If she contacted them saying she was interested, they would send a flyer for her. At the end of the letter was a warning not to speak to anyone about the offer, that it was classified. If she decided negatively, she was to destroy the letter.

She dropped the letter on the coffee table. “Viewscreen,” she ordered. “Show images of Nebulistica.”

A large screen lit up on her living room wall. First, it displayed a six-D image of the space station as drawn by an artist. A male voice in the background described the pleasure station. Ash counted six bright-colored wheels in red, aqua, green, yellow, blue, purple, and a smaller gray wheel. The eighth wheel at the top of the structure was a shimmering gold and apparently the command center and quarters of The Red Pimpernel, as the man was commonly called—a takeoff of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Though that didn’t make sense because, in the historical book, that individual used the alias to smuggle people to safety.

The voice droned on, describing some mechanical stuff. Then the narrator mentioned the billionaire by his nickname, explaining that the name meant someone mysterious and daring.

She assumed the next images were taken with telescopes. The contraption looked colorful against the backdrop of space. Not far from it was a nebula. She saw no planets, but the station was surrounded by a sea of stars.

“It almost looks like a child’s toy,” she murmured while waiting for more images and information.

“Unfortunately, there are no internal images available of the station. Cameras are not permitted on board,” the narrator said, then went on to talk about how The Red Pimpernel had been the recipient of a large inheritance and had become a multimillionaire at a very young age. He then built his empire into a multi-billion-dollar industry and was now the wealthiest individual on Earth.

Besides his achievements, little was known about the billionaire except for rumors. Gossip had it that he was an alien who had come to Earth years ago and refused to be photographed because of his appearance. So far, no one had unearthed one photograph of the elusive man, where he lived, or any of his personal history. He was a ghost.