Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (2 page)

“Look,” the closest technician said. He pointed toward the command center’s large bay window. Belyaev walked closer to see what the latest problem might be.

The window was partially iced over, but enough of it remained clear that he could see the disturbance occurring between Rhea and Saturn’s rings. The rings themselves looked like a road from this perspective, curving away around the vast arc of the planetary body.

The disturbance partially obscured the rings. At its edges they appeared warped and shimmering, like the distant surface of a road on a hot day back on Earth. It appeared as if space itself was rippling, and colors flared around the phenomenon—which Belyaev guessed was approximately a kilometer across.

It was growing rapidly, and seemed to be taking on a more definite shape, though he couldn’t tell for sure. He had never seen anything like it, and his brain seemed reluctant to interpret the images fed into his eyes. One thing was certain, however. There were huge energies there, radiating outward and washing over Rhea and nearby smaller moonlets. The monitors in the command center detected remarkable amounts of radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Belyaev guessed that if he had neutrino and plasma monitors online, they, too, would be registering substantial energies.

“Call it in,” he ordered. Earth Space Defense protocols dictated that all unusual events had to be reported to the United States Army command and control headquarters. All nations of the world contributed to the ESD, but the United States had taken the lead in the integration of alien technology, and therefore were the de facto leaders of the ESD. In some ways this rankled the other participating nations, but it also made their jobs easier.
When something unusual occurs
, Commander Belyaev thought,
let the Americans handle it
. They wanted the problem, they could have the problem.

“We tried,” a nearby technician answered. “Our long-range communications are down.”

Impossible
, Belyaev thought. They were on the Earth-facing side of Saturn at this point in Rhea’s orbit. Only empty space lay between the base and Earth’s orbital satellite network, speckled here and there by orbiting rocks. How could communications be down?

Occasionally a solar storm or intense fluctuation in the Van Allen belts disrupted communications, but those disruptions never lasted more than a few hours, and they never occurred across all frequency bands. The ESD had built a great deal of redundancy into its outer-planet communications systems.

“This cannot be,” he said. “Try the EHF band.”

“There’s too much interference,” the technician said. He could see that Commander Belyaev didn’t believe him. “Listen.” The technician flipped a switch, routing the long-range satellite communications through a speaker system in the command console.

All they could hear was white noise. It wasn’t the ordinary white noise, however—the kind that came from the background radiation of space. It seemed to have a pattern, to pulse and fluctuate just as the visual disturbance did. Something about the rhythm of this noise gave Belyaev a deep-rooted sense of unease—a feeling in the pit of his stomach like his ancestors must have felt when they saw an eclipse.

He and the entire Rhea Base team were in danger. Of that he was certain. If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain how he knew it, or what the danger was, but all of his survival instincts were on high alert.

Small objects began shifting and floating away from the table tops where they had been resting. Was the ripple in space interfering with gravity? It would have to be something tearing at the fundamental fabric of space-time. How was that possible?

That was a question for the scientists. Belyaev was a soldier. All he cared about at the moment was that he and his crew were more than a billion kilometers from home, and now they were cut off behind a wall of white noise and the unraveling disturbance over Saturn’s rings.

Dawn broke over the Rockies. General Joshua Adams sat in the back of a Marine helicopter, irritated at his abrupt summons but reconciled to his duty. He was a career military man, and had done his part to battle the initial invasion that had come to be known as the War of ’96. Since then he’d worked for the past twenty years on the integration of alien technology into existing human military hardware. The Earth Space Defense systems were at least partly his baby, and he was a proud father.

Even so, he hadn’t been happy when the request had come in from the research site at Area 51. They needed him pronto, they said. No explanation available over unsecured channels. So he had gotten up from the breakfast table, climbed into the chopper, and here they were speeding over the salt flats south of Salt Lake City, on their way to New Mexico.

His wife was still at the bed and breakfast, as far as he knew. He also knew he would hear about this later, when she got things wrapped up and went back to their home just south of Area 51. Janine was an Army wife, and knew what came with the territory, but she also wasn’t shy about letting him know when he was putting the work before the family.

“It’s one thing to save the world, Josh,”
she’d told him once when they were arguing.
“It’s another to convince yourself that every time you sign a report you’re fighting a war. You need to be able to tell them apart.”

She was right, too—he had a tendency to lose himself in his work, and thanks to Janine, he could fight it better. Adams had learned a long time ago that listening and assessing made a good general. Any idiot could point to his stars and bellow orders. A real leader made sure his subordinates understood why the orders were necessary, and made it clear that he trusted the people around him to carry them out—or propose better ideas if they had them.

Janine had a lot of ideas, and they were often good ones. Adams wouldn’t have climbed the career ladder so quickly without her, and both of them knew it.

“We’re two minutes out, General,” the pilot informed him. Adams nodded even though the pilot couldn’t see him. It was a distracted reflex. His attention was occupied by the scene below. They crested a pass between two mountains, revealing a sight Adams never got tired of seeing.

Spread out over miles of the salt flats, and still looming large enough to be part of the horizon from Area 51, was the wreckage of one of the alien city destroyers.

In flight, each of the city destroyers had blotted out the sun over a large metropolis—in more than a hundred of those instances, they were the last things citizens ever saw. New York, Washington, D.C.… Four of America’s largest cities lay in ruins by the time the sun set on July 2, 1996. Fifteen by the end of July 3.

Fifteen still, on July 4. The same was true on a larger scale worldwide. London, Berlin, Paris, Bombay, Shanghai, Moscow, Lagos… the list went on, and would have been much longer were it not for the heroism of President Thomas Whitmore and the pilots who had flown with him. Because of their courage, the devastated wrecks of three dozen city destroyers lay scattered across the world, monuments to the dangers that came from space and the resilience of humanity in fighting them.

The destroyers’ landing arms—petals, the scientists called them, because of the way they had unfolded from the craft before landing—were each larger than three aircraft carriers lined up nose to tail. Or bow to stern, if you were a Navy man… which Adams wasn’t. The main body of each destroyer was fifteen miles in diameter, a circle containing huge fighter hangars, labs, facilities for growing the various organisms the aliens had domesticated and engineered for their own use, command and control rooms, and a seemingly infinite number of other inscrutable devices that would keep Area 51’s scientists busy for decades.

Scattered across the salt flats, the wreckage still held some of the incredible menace of the ship in flight, when it had seemed impossible that it could be destroyed. Adams had been a staff officer during the invasion. He’d coordinated surveillance and intel for the joint command that oversaw the pilots who flew to their deaths attacking the city destroyer, and nobody had been happier than him to see it go down when that lunatic crop duster had flown his jammed missile right up the barrel of its main weapon.

Russell Casse, that was his name. Adams tried to take a lesson from that moment. He would never have let Casse near one of his jets, if the fate of the planet hadn’t been at stake. The truth was, he’d been inclined not to anyway. And then Casse’d come through, sacrificing himself in a manner as heroic as any career serviceman. You never knew about people.

In the aftermath of the War of ’96, when the Army had led the war against the surviving aliens, Adams had seen enough combat to put him on the track to the stars he currently wore on his collar. His mission in the Atlantic had been one of the toughest—he hated being undersea even more than he hated outer space. Still, it had been a success, and results were all that mattered.

He’d spent the next twenty years coordinating efforts to reverse-engineer alien technology and put it to use, and that in turn had put him right in the middle of the founding of the Earth Space Defense initiative. He was no-nonsense and demanding, because the work required it, but he was also smart enough not to think he knew everything. That meant he was good at putting the right people in place, and he had taught himself to listen to them even when they spouted crazy theories.

After all, as far back as the 1970s some of the scientists had voiced theories about what would later be the alien invasion.

If more people had listened then…

But that was hindsight. Pointless. What mattered was today, and what ESD could do to keep the people of Earth safe—which was why he was on this chopper, instead of lingering over breakfast with his wife. Not many people on the planet knew as much about the aliens and their technology, and it all began when the city destroyers came crashing down to earth. He had flown over this one a hundred times, and to him the sight of the monumental wreckage would always mean one thing.

Victory.

Thousands of workers were breaking it down, and as the chopper skimmed over the wreck, many looked up. One of them even waved. Adams didn’t wave back.

Recovery teams worked around the clock, loosely divided into two different specialties. Inside the vast spaces of the destroyer, dedicated teams of technicians and scientists investigated the ship’s systems. The aliens apparently used genetically tailored organisms for a number of tasks, which kept an entire department of biologists and geneticists busy. Extraterrestrial computing systems were built on completely different principles than Earth’s, and had spawned a whole new science of mind-based computing.

Even now, after twenty years, scientists were in the depths of the ship, learning more about how those systems worked. Their initial results found their way to the research and development wing of the new Area 51, where applied scientists and computer engineers hybridized the technology and built it into new generations of military hardware.

The structural and materials engineers, on the other hand, had different interests, and for them, teams recovered huge intact pieces of the ship’s hull and mechanisms. Military contractors had designed transport platforms specifically to move those pieces from the crash site to Area 51, where a battalion of engineers waited to document them and take them apart, piece by piece, analyzing each component in an ongoing effort to understand and utilize the alien technology.

The invasion had left terrible destruction in its wake, and hundreds of millions dead—but it was also a gift, in a way. Because of it, Earth knew what was out there, and knowing enabled them to prepare for when they encountered it again. Adams had made it his life’s work to guide that preparation.

The city destroyer fell away behind them and the chopper followed the main approach road from the crash site to the new Area 51. Not for the first time, Adams reflected on how Area 51—once the focus of so many conspiracy theories—had become exactly what the most wild-eyed kooks of the 1950s had believed it to be. The nerve center of Earth’s investigation of alien technology.

In old photographs, the Groom Lake facility was just a few buildings behind a fence. It had grown to include runways, hangars, several small repair and manufacturing facilities, and laboratories. For decades the government had denied its existence. Until the aftermath of 1996, they had continued to deny its true purpose—which had always been to investigate, analyze, and attempt to use bits of extraterrestrial technology. The spy planes and stealth technology were all part of that, the tip of the iceberg that eventually became visible to the public. Yet for every B-2 that thrilled spectators at an air show, there were a dozen other projects that only a few people on Earth knew about.

Then, after 1996, Area 51 had exploded into a small city of its own, built alongside a huge complex of research facilities—the best in the world. Crashed alien fighter craft, pieces of unidentified technology from the alien vessels, even a few surviving invaders themselves, all had been brought here. Now Area 51 was one of the largest military installations on planet Earth. Thousands of military and civilian workers lived and worked there. Manufacturing and testing facilities were getting close to good enough to reproduce alien technologies.

All of it existed for one purpose.

When the aliens came again, Earth would be ready.

And they would come again. Adams knew it. They’d made contact once, and gotten a bloody nose, but any race that would traverse the great spaces between the stars would possess the kind of determination that a single setback couldn’t overcome. Adams had studied military history his entire adult life, and there was a truism. The conqueror didn’t give up after his first effort failed. The aliens would come back, and when they did, they would be pissed.

The chopper flew toward the helipad next to the fighter hangar. As it swung around to orient itself for landing, Adams could see the destroyer again, a few miles away. He remembered watching it burn after it crashed to the ground.