* * *
We covered the five hundred miles from the Black Swan rocket launch site to Sedona in just under two hours. I landed our chopper in a narrow parking lot at the Enchanted Forest Resort, near the suites we had staked out weeks earlier. Everything looked the same as when we set out on our tour bus with Nebula Jones. The personal belongings that we left on the bus, including the musical instruments, had to be forgotten. Our two alien friends hadn’t shown up yet, but we knew they would at the proper time.
We all hustled into our rooms, cleaned up, and got to work. Time was very short; we had urgent jobs to do. Hacker and Greta needed to put together a mega hack that would enable Nebula Jones to deliver his Alien Manifesto simultaneously to every living human on the planet, in every human’s native language. (There are more than six thousand spoken languages on Planet Earth.) This seemed to me to be an impossible task, even for our friends, who were brilliant computer scientists.
Leela and Jill huddled together in Jill’s room to outline a report of our recent activities for the State Department. One item they debated was how much to reveal about our two alien slash orb colleagues, their plans for the planet, and how they had influenced the arrest and/or destruction of the Black Swan leadership. I knew what the ladies were discussing because I was tuned in to their psychic communication.
I also knew that State didn’t consider me to be on their payroll anymore—I was a temp, with a pineal gland chip implant, a limited assignment, and an expiration date on my psi abilities—so I stayed out of the discussion. How would State know that my psychic powers had not only been extended indefinitely, but also expanded?
My job was to meet with Benny Bravo in the suite that Leela and I shared. He and I hadn’t connected for awhile because I had been busy with an angry ex-goddess, spaceships, and, well, just busy. Benny had stayed behind to keep an eye on things. He updated me on what was going on in Sedona and the world situation in general.
The good news was that Sedona and all of Northern Arizona was beginning to return to normal. In Sedona, the cops and National Guard were no longer patrolling the streets; roadblocks had been removed; it was safe to move around again. Clean water was flowing through the taps, although serious rationing was in effect. The Western electrical grid had been liberated from the icy grip of Black Swan operatives, so the lights were on once more. Businesses were reopening, locals were moving back into their homes, and the Sedona economy seemed to be returning to some semblance of normal.
But the world situation looked grim. With the return of the Internet, plus TV, satellite connections, holo news feeds, and other media, Benny had been able to get a glimpse into the void.
“How bad is it, Benny?” I asked my friend.
“Muy malo, man. There are wars still breaking out all over. People fighting for food and water. Millions of refugees, people just walking around, with nuthin’, man, I mean just the clothes on their backs. Huge refugee camps in every country, even in Europe. Greenland is melting. Africa is toast; cannibalism everywhere. Folks eating each other, man! People are in the streets, fighting with cops, firebombing the government buildings, all over Europe and Asia. North Korea launched two nukes, one for South Korea and one for Japan, but the rockets didn’t work and the nukes landed back in North Korea. Sayonara, baby!”
“Muy malo, mi amigo,” I replied in my limited Spanish, snatching the chilling images of worldwide carnage right out of his cerebral cortex. “Any word on the Black Swan group and what happened to ’em?”
“Oh, yeah, man, almost forgot. It’s all over the news feeds. The whole leadership of Black Swan has been— ¿cómo se dice…¿— neutralized. The cabeza of the monster has been cut off. Seems that the top hundred Black Swans was on the way to their space station to set up some kind of new society when their spaceship exploded. Left nothing but a mushroom cloud. The other top fifty was busted out at a ranch in New Mexico, picked up by the FBI. And another fifty was busted at their launch site at White Sands, out in the friggin’ desert. You know anything about this late-breaking, señor?”
“No, Benny, not a freakin’ thing,” I lied, winking. “Nada. Hey, we’re all gonna meet in the fancy restaurant in a few minutes and compare notes. Come join us. Hacker and his new lady friend are gonna share some ideas with us. I think you met her before we left on the bus. Leela and Jill got some heavy shit to drop, too. I think they need our advice.”
“I’m down wid dat, Daddy,” said Benny. “Let us make our way to da famous Navajo Room.”
Benny’s consciousness was somewhere between La Bamba and Hava Nagila. He was probably the only Mexican in Arizona who had had a Bar Mitzvah. He liked to play the role of a barrio hipster, a faux gangbanger with a college degree; but he was whip-smart and my ace investigative reporter when I had the Sedona Confidential website.
Benny had been our link to the crumbling status of Planet Earth during the psi team’s adventures outside of Sedona. Yet, he had only briefly rubbed shoulders with the ET called Nebula Jones, way back when that entity was known as Harry the Handyman. And he was totally in the dark regarding the alien’s scheme to drop the Earth into a black hole to save the ass of, potentially, a whole galaxy. He would need to know about that piece, and soon.