Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (27 page)

Rrrrriippp
.

Her time was running out.

“Just taking in the scenery?” someone said from nearby. Rain looked over and saw, of all people, Charlie. He was perched on a ledge a few meters away.

“It’s not going to hold,” she said.

“You have to swing yourself to the edge,” Charlie said. He scooted along the ledge as far as he could, but he still couldn’t reach her. “I’ll catch you.”

“What if you don’t?”

Charlie looked down at the distant ground, then back up to her. “Positive thinking is key in a situation like this.”

Well
, she thought,
I can’t very well just hang here and wait to die.
Rain kicked herself into a series of swings. Each movement brought her a little closer to Charlie’s outstretched hands, but each one also tore the chute a little more. Far below, she heard the thrum of the alien transports powering up their engines.

That was another problem. Whether or not she could get to Charlie, they were both dead if the aliens noticed them, and she was hard to miss when she was flailing around like this.

“Almost there,” Charlie said. “Just a bit more!”

Rain swung one more time.

Snap!

The parachute tore loose, but Charlie was quicker than gravity, and he caught both of her wrists before she could fall. For a long moment she swayed over the drop, her life literally in his hands. Then he pulled her up and they both ducked back into the shadow of the column that had snagged her chute.

One of the alien transports flew past. They practically held their breath until it was gone into the distance and they were sure they hadn’t been spotted.

“Thanks,” Rain said. “You saved my life.”

“Oh, it’s… um…” For the first time she’d ever seen, he wasn’t sure what to say.

“I’ve never seen you so quiet,” she said. Maybe she liked him a little. Just a little.

“This is kinda like a date,” he said. “We even got to hold hands.”

Rain rolled her eyes. “Aaaand he’s back.”

* * *

President Lanford snapped awake in darkness, sweaty and disoriented. She couldn’t tell where she was. Had the aliens pressed their attack on Cheyenne Mountain? Was anyone left? Was she even there still?

“Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone here?”

In the darkness she heard something moving. Feet scraping the ground, or… something larger? She couldn’t tell. The room seemed huge, and sounds didn’t carry well.

“Show yourself! I can hear you.”

Out of the shadows, she saw Tanner slowly lumbering toward her.

“Tanner, thank God!” she said, grateful to see a familiar face and also remembering how brave he’d been when the aliens attacked—

Then she saw it. A giant tentacle, thick as her leg, translucent with strange fluid running through it… wrapped around Tanner’s neck. His feet barely touched the ground.

She wasn’t in Cheyenne Mountain. She had to be on the alien ship.

“Oh no,” Lanford said, backing away from him, and then Tanner spoke.

“Wherrrrre issss it?”

A holographic image appeared. It was a representation of the spherical ship that had come out of the wormhole by the Moon, and it started playing in a constant loop near Tanner.

“We shot it down,” Lanford said. “It crashed on the Moon.” Why did the aliens care about the ship if it wasn’t theirs, as David thought? And if it was, couldn’t they find it on their own?

“Not the shiiippp,” the alien said through Tanner. “I waaaaant what waaass insiiiddde—”

Something else moved in the darkness, beyond the radius of the faint light falling on Lanford and Tanner, and a moment later a massive alien head descended into view. The alien queen must have been a hundred feet tall, Lanford thought, stunned by the scale and sheer malevolence of what she was seeing.

The infrared image hadn’t done her justice. Her head was the size of a house, each eye nearly as big as Lanford herself, the slope of her skull extending back into the darkness. She was horrific, a thing out of human nightmares, predatory and evil—but Lanford could also recognize that she was beautiful, in the way all living things had a certain beauty. That wasn’t going to stop her from killing the queen, though. Not for a minute.

“I don’t give a shit what you’re looking for,” she said, right into the creature’s monstrous face. “I know I won’t live to see it, but we’re gonna beat you again, you ugly bitch!”

That was all she had to say, and when she was done saying it, President Elizabeth Lanford stood defiantly in front of the alien queen, preparing to die.

* * *

With Okun fussing over them the entire time, the hangar crew got the LXR-73 mounted on a crane so they could move it across the hangar to where the piece of wreckage still hung in the tug’s cargo arms. The laser bumped over a crack in the floor.

“Careful!” he said. “Don’t agitate the crystals!”

Floyd was watching the proceedings, wondering if maybe he should be in another state. Okun turned and spoke to him.

“Built it back in ’94,” he said. “Had to shelve it though after the meltdown in sector G.” He gave it an affectionate kick and a frightening noise came out of it, as if it might blow up at any moment.

“What meltdown?” Floyd asked nervously. “Are we sure this thing is safe?”

Okun gave him a big grin. “Not in the slightest.” He flicked a pair of welding goggles down over his eyes, and as soon as the laser was in position, he powered it up and started cutting into the wreckage.

Floyd weighed pride against safety, and safety won. He took cover behind a console, waiting for the whole thing to go
blooey
.

* * *

“Stop,” Dikembe said. “Go back.”

Catherine clicked back. Dikembe stared at two symbols on the display. One was the familiar circle-and-line. Catherine recognized the other from the charts Dikembe had tacked up to the walls in his study—

“What?” she demanded. “What do you see?”

Dikembe waited a moment. “That symbol means ‘hunt,’” he said.

At last we’re getting somewhere
, Catherine thought—but where? “If that’s ‘hunt’ and the circle means ‘fear,’ then maybe they’re being hunted by it.”

“Or the opposite,” Dikembe said.

Maybe he was right, she thought, and then she remembered something else, from another case. She started digging through her laptop case files until she came up with the one she was after.

“I had one case study in Brazil where my patient didn’t describe the circle as fear. He referred to it as ‘enemy.’ What if the aliens aren’t afraid of it?”

What if instead they were at war with it?

* * *

When the satellites went down, the crew of the
Alison
had to find a new way to keep in touch with the American government. Ana-Lisa and Jacques thought they remembered a shortwave radio stored down below somewhere. When they found it, they dragged it up into the tech room, where McQuaide and Boudreaux were watching the drill on the monitor. The aliens either hadn’t noticed the submersible or didn’t care.

“We found a shortwave in the hold,” Ana-Lisa announced. “We should be able to communicate with that.” The captain nodded as Boudreaux noticed something on the monitor. A sudden upwelling of bright-red sludge, boiling into slag around the plasma beam. Ana-Lisa saw it, too. “What’s that?”

“The drill cracking the outer mantle?” Boudreaux offered. “But that shouldn’t happen for another—” A thought occurred to him and he grabbed the pad he’d used to do his math before. “Oh, no. No
no no
…”

“What’s no no no?” McQuaide wanted to know.

“We didn’t compensate for the porousness of the mesosphere,” Boudreaux said, as if either McQuaide or Ana-Lisa would know what that meant. He finished his new round of calculations and sat back. “We don’t have seven hours left until the Earth core breach. We have two.”

There wasn’t enough booze in the world to make McQuaide feel better about that.

* * *

The laser did the trick, and didn’t even blow up in the process. Floyd stood up as Okun powered down the laser and yelled at the crew member inside the tug.

“Pull!”

The tug’s arms engaged and pulled the wreckage apart, releasing the smooth sphere from its battered casing. It hit the floor with an ear-splitting
clang
and then rolled slowly toward Okun. He beamed down at it.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he said. “It’s time to see what secrets you’re hiding.” Waving the rest of the team over, he started issuing orders. “Let’s run every scan, and find out what we’re dealing with here!”

Amazing
, Floyd thought. He’d never in his life met someone he considered a bona fide mad scientist, but Dr. Brakish Okun fit the bill perfectly.

Not knowing where else to go, David wandered into the fighter hangar and stared out into its emptiness. Without the fighters and their crews, the place felt uncomfortably like a graveyard. A few mechanics and ground crew milled about without purpose—or maybe that was David projecting, because he sure as hell didn’t know what his purpose was now.

Everything he’d done had failed.

“Well, Dad,” he said, “Earth’s gonna be destroyed and in the end it wasn’t even global warming.”

“David,” Tom Whitmore said from behind him.

David turned around. “Ah, President Whitmore! Good to see you up and about, Tom. You gave us a scare.”

“It’s been a while,” Whitmore said.

“Connie’s funeral,” David said. “I miss her every day. At least she didn’t have to see this.” Since Whitmore was there, David kept up his confession. He had to get it off his chest. “I had twenty years to get us ready. I threw myself into work, ignored my wife, my father… and we never had a chance, did we?”

“We didn’t last time either,” Whitmore said. After a pause, he added, “We always knew they were coming back. We’ve been fighting this war in our heads for a long time. It’s worn us down.”

That’s one way to look at it
, David thought. “Maybe we just got lucky last time.”

“You think that was luck?” Whitmore said. “David, look how far we’ve come. For the last twenty years, our planet has stood united. That’s unprecedented in human history. That’s sacred. That’s worth dying for. We convinced an entire generation this was a battle we could win, and they believed us. And now we have to believe in them. We can’t let them down.”

Despite himself, David was inspired.

He wasn’t the only one. A soldier passing by had stopped to listen. Some of the other ground crew personnel, seeing the former president in the room, also started paying attention. Whitmore saw this and turned so he could speak to all of them.

“Look around you,” he said. “They’re the reason why we all have to fight. Until our last breath. It wasn’t luck. It was our resolve. Our will to live. We don’t run. We don’t lose hope. That’s not who we are. We sacrifice for each other, no matter what the cost might be. That’s what makes us human. That’s what will lead us to victory.”

The last time Whitmore had given a speech like that, his audience was a ragtag group of pilots about to fly a suicide mission. This time it was a small gathering of mechanics and soldiers, in a base emptied out of all its combat capability, two thousand miles from an alien ship that in a few hours would destroy the planet—but it didn’t matter. Whitmore had stirred them, given them a little hope. They clapped for him, the sound echoing through the hangar, and David couldn’t help but smile.

“He always had a way with words,” he said to the onlookers.

The hangar loudspeaker popped, breaking up the mood. “Director Levinson to the research hangar.”

David turned to Whitmore. “After you.”

As they walked out, David noticed that Whitmore had left his cane behind.

* * *

As they got to the end of the corridor leading to the research hangar, Dikembe and Catherine came rushing around the corner, nearly piling into the former president. Catherine looked flushed and excited. He knew that look. She’d found something amid the litter of symbols Okun had drawn all over his walls during his latest fugue.

“David!” she said, the excitement in her voice, as well. “They’re
hunting
it.”

Together they hurried to the research hangar, where the sphere sat on a worktable while Okun swiped and pounded feverishly at a large computer console. It was a beautiful thing, David thought. Whatever its intended function, its form was… perfect. There were many objects in the world that were pleasant to look at, but this was different. David found himself in the unusual position of being unable to articulate his response to the sphere. It… it got to him.

“You guys have to see this,” Okun said. They gathered with him as he went on. “I’ve run every possible scan, and it’s not giving off any kind of signal. I mean
nothing
. It’s as though this thing doesn’t exist.”

David understood what he was getting at. A device created with such advanced technology would be giving off some kind of electromagnetic signal, along some frequency that could be detected. If it wasn’t, that was by design.

“Almost like it’s trying to hide itself.” He, Whitmore, and Catherine were so caught up in Okun’s enthusiasm that none of them noticed Floyd Rosenberg approaching the sphere with an oddly captivated expression on his face.

“It’s really smooth.”

They looked up. Rosenberg had placed both hands on the sphere and was gazing at it as if he was in love with it, David thought, or it had beguiled his mind in some way.

“You’re not wearing gloves!” Okun protested. “You’ll contaminate it!”

“Remove your hands, Floyd,” David said, trying to dial back Okun’s response a little.

“That’s weird,” Floyd said. “I can’t.” The surface of the sphere shifted, roiled somehow, and Rosenberg’s hands disappeared into it. His eyes got wide and fearful. “Okay, I’m trapped now!” he said. “Can someone please do something? It’s
swallowing
me!”

They gathered around him, making half-motions like they were thinking of trying to pull him away, but David spoke up before anyone could do something rash.

“Just stay calm, and don’t panic.”

“This thing is trying to eat me, and you’re telling me not to panic?” Floyd was getting pretty worked up, David thought. Approaching a full-blown panic attack.