Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (25 page)

“Now what?” Floyd asked. He looked a little nervous.

Okun turned to the tech who had brought him the diamond cutter. “Do we still have the LXR-73?”

“What’s the LXR-73?” Floyd asked. Apparently the tech had no idea either, because he just stared at Okun. People stared at him a lot. He didn’t mind. He was who he was, and if they wanted to stare, that was cool. He had more important things to worry about.

If you want something done…
Okun thought. He led the group all the way to the back of the hangar, where he’d just put away the LXR-73… well, if by “just” you meant twenty years ago. That was a big thought he didn’t have room for at the moment, so he stowed it and paid attention to the matter at hand. He was going to get into that piece of wreckage and get the sphere out if he had to invent a disintegrator ray to do it.

Sitting on the top shelf of a large steel unit on the hangar’s back wall was a metal crate almost the size of a coffin. Painted on the crate in capital letters was a warning.

“There it is,” Okun said gleefully. If abrasion wouldn’t do the trick, even at fifteen thousand rpm, then he would just have to go with heat. Plus it had been a while since he’d taken the LXR-73 out for a test drive.

Floyd looked even more unnerved, most likely deterred by the big warning label. Okun had him pegged as the kind of guy who obeyed every warning label he’d ever seen.

“What is that?” Floyd asked. “Some kind of alien laser?”

“No,” Okun said with a big grin on his face. “That’s an Okun laser.”

* * *

Isaacs knew Brakish would be obsessing over the piece of wreckage until he got the sphere out, so he took the chance to show Catherine Marceaux what Brakish had been doing earlier that day. She was an expert, after all, and Isaacs was a great believer in expertise.

So he stood with her in Brakish’s hospital room while she gaped at the hundreds of alien symbols drawn on the walls.

“How can his connection be this strong?” she wondered.

“During the first attack, he was exposed to their collective mind. Completely unfiltered.”

“It’s a miracle it didn’t kill him,” she said, pulling out a camera. “I need to ask him about this.”

“I already have,” Isaacs said. “He doesn’t know what any of it means. He doesn’t even remember drawing them.” That’s why he had wanted to get Levinson involved, but Levinson had suggested that he talk to Catherine instead. Surely
someone
could make some sense of this.

Her camera started clicking and Isaacs watched her, preoccupied with worry about Brakish. He was back, and seemed exactly the same as he had been before the coma… but how could he ever really know for sure?

David and General Adams stood in the middle of the Area 51 command center, watching the big screen that displayed the progress of the drones. Behind them flew the first waves of the hybrid fighters approaching from the west. Other fighter wings, carefully timed, closed in on the enemy from other directions, having taken off from their bases across Europe, Asia, and Africa.

“The drones are approaching the target,” a flight officer said.

David watched the tiny specks move across the screen.

“Moment of truth,” he said softly. Live video came up from a surveillance chopper hovering over the Potomac estuary south of Washington, D.C. The drones buzzed toward the alien ship from every direction, stopping when its shields activated and using electromagnetic locks to hold themselves in position on the shield perimeter. Hundreds of them repeated this process in a matter of seconds, and as soon as all of them had made contact with the shield, they emitted a simultaneous pulse.

David held his breath.

The shield flared brightly at every point where the drones touched it—then it began to fracture and lose cohesion. The drones, their electronics fried by the release of energy, fell away as the shield began to evaporate.

“Yes!” he shouted, pumping his fist. David had put years into the drone design and testing, and to see it work filled him with elation.

The professional soldiers who filled the command center played it cool, but he knew they felt the same way he did. General Adams, also maintaining his calm, issued an update to the fighters.

“Shields are down. You’re clear to engage.”

* * *

Dylan heard Adams’s order just as Legacy Squadron came close enough to see the alien ship, its hull rising into the clouds and extending to the horizon both north and south. Its curvature was barely visible, now that they were getting closer.

“Command, we have visual,” he reported, and he activated the combat camera feeds. The closer they got, the more detail he could see, and there was something they hadn’t observed before. Near the places where the ship’s landing petals had buried themselves in the ground, giant roots were growing out. Already they had covered most of downtown D.C. The Washington Monument stuck up out of a thick tangle, and from the look of it, even that would be covered soon.

“What the hell is that?” Charlie said.

“Looks like it’s
growing
,” Jake said. It was a new wrinkle—the last ships hadn’t done that.

As Legacy Squadron gained altitude to fly over the ship, it sank in how huge it really was. By the time they got close to the top of its hull, they were well into the stratosphere, nearing the atmosphere’s upper boundary.

“Where are their fighters?” Charlie wondered. “Why haven’t they attacked us yet?”

“Careful what you wish for,” Jake said, as the pilots all observed gigantic cannons deploying from the ship’s hull.

“You had to jinx us!” he added.

The cannons opened fire, obliterating several of the jets in the first wave.

“Evade, evade!” Dylan ordered. In every direction the human fighters broke formation and took evasive action. As they did, huge hangar doors slid open in the leviathan’s hull and hundreds of alien fighter craft shot out. They were nothing like the alien fighters from the War of ’96. Dylan and the other pilots had trained extensively in simulators against those craft. These were sleeker, more agile, faster…

And wielded better weaponry. In the first few seconds after their deployment, dozens of the human hybrid jets were down, blown to fragments in midair or sent spiraling down to crash against the gigantic superstructure.

“Jesus, look at their firepower,” General Adams said from the command center. Dylan wondered if he knew the comm was open.

He slalomed through the air over the giant ship, dodging other craft, falling wreckage, and fusillades of green energy that seemed to come from every direction. Dylan had always received top marks for accuracy, and he dropped one alien fighter after another—
That one’s for my mom! That one too!
—but it didn’t seem to make any difference in their numbers. He was drawing attention, too.

Three of the enemy dropped into a formation on his tail. He jinked one way, and then hauled the fighter into a tight Immelmann that put one of the three in his sights. It disappeared in a fireball, but as fast as Dylan could shoot, the moment it took him to lock the target was enough for the other two fighters to be right back on his ass again.

“Son of a bitch,” he growled. This was going to be trouble.

He put the fighter through its paces, moving through tight random curves to try and stay one step ahead of the pursuing pilots. Abruptly a cockpit alarm went off, warning that he was too close to another craft.

No shit
, he thought, and then he saw something through the canopy.

As he glanced up, Dylan realized it was Jake Morrison, coming right at him. Jake’s wing-mounted cannons opened up, the blasts passing what seemed like bare inches over Dylan’s head, and both bogeys blipped off of Dylan’s radar.

“You can thank me later!” Jake sang out as he shot by.

“I could use a little help, too!” Charlie called out.

Jake rolled his fighter in that direction, but Rain got there before he did, knocking Charlie’s pursuer out of the sky.

“I got you covered,” she said.

“Okay, now I
have
to take you out,” he said. “Or we could also stay in? I make a killer Bolognese.”

Dylan could almost hear her rolling her eyes.

“Shut up and focus on staying alive!”

* * *

That was going to be a problem for all of them, Jake thought. From the moment the alien fighters had come out, Legacy Squadron was fighting for its life. They weren’t able to get above the giant ship and escort the bombers to the central target point, where the fusion warheads were supposed to punch through and kill the queen. The bombers, in fact, were going up in smoke way too fast. The aliens seemed to have noticed the difference between them and the fighters.

“Command, we can’t get to the top of the ship. It’s too heavily armed! We’re dropping like flies here!” He swerved under the barrel of a cannon, strafing the side of the alien ship just on general principles—and then he noticed that its hangar doors were still open. “But we could try to fly inside! Lieutenant Miller and I request permission to enter the enemy ship.”

“We do?”

“That’s suicide,” David Levinson said.

“Morrison’s right,” Dylan said. They were getting massacred in the air, and that situation was only going to get worse. “It’s our only shot.”

“We’ll trigger the bombs from the command center so we can give you enough time to get out of there,” Adams said, agreeing quickly to the plan.

“Jake, follow my lead,” Dylan said.

“I’m on your six.” Jake shot a pursuing alien practically off the aileron of the nearest bomber, and checked the squadron I.D. decal. “B-7, you’re with me.” Following Dylan, and with the bomber right behind him, he roared into the alien ship, with dozens of the fighters on his tail.

* * *

Dylan and Jake led the tight formation through the cavernous interior of the alien ship, with a convoy of a half-dozen bombers behind them and then Charlie and Rain forming the caboose.

Behind the first group were dozens of other human fighter–bomber formations, and hundreds—maybe thousands—of alien fighters in hot pursuit. They kept going east, toward the center of the ship, tearing through a series of tunnels each of which was miles wide, and then they burst out into the central dome, so large they could barely see the curve of its walls.

Alien machinery pumped and hummed in the walls, powering the gargantuan plasma drill at the very center of the ship. The top of the drilling mechanism got closer and brighter as they arrowed toward the target. Jake saw that the drill was also pumping magma up out of the Earth’s mantle, routing it through a complex network of pipes to God knew where.

“Command, we’re approaching the center,” he said, and added more quietly, “This is too easy.” But they kept flying, and kept climbing, higher and higher to where the alien queen had to be.

* * *

Whitmore woke up screaming. Again. Patricia and Agent Travis jumped up from their chairs in his hospital room.

“Dad!”

“She knows!” Whitmore said. “I saw her, Patty. You have to warn them! Please—she knows they’re coming!”

Patricia looked at her father, and she was torn. Were these just more ravings? She didn’t think so. Dr. Okun had suffered another attack, and scribbled alien symbols all over his room. Why wouldn’t her father, who had also been in contact with the aliens? It made sense that he might suffer an attack when they returned.

If so, wouldn’t that mean he was in touch with their thoughts?

She believed in him.

Patricia ran for the command center.

* * *

Almost there
, Jake thought. Another few seconds and the bombers could drop their payloads, and they could all do a one-eighty and shoot their way out before the queen met her nuclear end.

A blinding pulse of light washed through the entire interior of the vast dome, covering hundreds of miles in an instant. Jake’s engines cut out as if he’d flipped a switch. Which of course he hadn’t—but someone had.

“Command, I have engine failure—”

“Goddammit,” Charlie called. “Mine too!”

All around them, fighters spiraled down toward the floor, ten miles below. Jake and Charlie saw the other pilots wrestling with their controls, running emergency protocols, talking each other down. That was what pilots did. Your plane stopped working, you tried to fix it—and you kept trying until it fired up again or you augured in.

Augured in.
That’s what the old test pilots had called a crash.

Other pilots were ejecting, taking their chances on their own. Jake thought he might be about to join them, but he had at least one thing to do first. His fighter was in a flat spin, the g-forces on the edge of causing him to black out. But Jake couldn’t let that happen. Not yet. Not until he’d let Adams know what they still had to do.

Blackness closed in around his peripheral vision, but his fingers found the comm switch. He struggled to toggle his comm back open. Panting from the g-forces compressing his lungs and his diaphragm, he tried to talk.

* * *

“It’s a trap!” Patricia shouted, bursting into the command center. “You have to get them out of there!” Then she stopped, and her heart sank.

The looks on all their faces told her that they already knew. She heard Jake’s voice over the comm, broken up by static.

“We’re f-falling… E-everybody is g-going down… I repeat, you have… to trigger… the bombs!”

Silence in the command center. Nobody wanted to issue the order.

Another voice joined Jake’s, just as broken up and struggling.

“Don’t l-let us d-die for nothing!” Dylan Hiller said.

David looked at Patricia. She looked at Adams.

“Initiate detonation,” Adams ordered.

* * *

The bay doors on all the bombers began to open at once, revealing the cold fusion bombs.

Appearing from the shadowed distance, and moving with incredible speed, alien objects zeroed in on each bomb and attached themselves. Lights flickered across their surfaces.

* * *

Jake waited for Charlie to say it—

This is how I die!