Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (28 page)

Then with a quiet
whoosh
accompanied by an almost subsonic hum that rose and faded in a fraction of a second, the sphere released Floyd’s hands and rose to hover above the table. It stopped when it had reached a height that put it roughly at eye level with the humans. Then it stayed where it was.

If it was hiding before
, David thought,
it certainly isn’t anymore.
He motioned to one of Okun’s techs. “Get the general,” he said.

* * *

In her chamber in the alien ship, the queen let out a shriek that echoed through the entire central dome, full of rage and hate. President Elizabeth Lanford watched as the holographic display changed, the sphere replaced by two symbols in the alien language. The massive creature’s head swung toward her and lowered. Beyond her, more light spilled into the room as giant mechanical doors slid open, revealing a monstrous suit of mechanical armor.

Lanford’s eyes met the alien queen’s. She knew what was coming and she had moved beyond the fear of it.

We’re not like you
, she thought.
You are going to kill me, but that won’t matter because any other human can step into my role and lead us. But you… when one of us gets to you, and we will, that’s the end for all of your drones and soldiers. All of you.

And that’s why we’re going to win.

* * *

Dylan, Jake, and a handful of other surviving pilots gathered at the edge of the field, near the base of one of the columns that reached from the ship’s floor to landing platforms hundreds of feet above. Maybe thousands. Jake usually was a good judge of distance, but the strange environment made it difficult.

“We need to get up on those platforms,” Dylan said.

“Steal their fighters and bust out of here,” Jake agreed. “I like your thinking.” Dylan had punched him in the mouth, Dylan had saved his life. They had history now. New history.

“Only problem is, how the hell are we going to open those doors?”

As if on cue, the platforms flooded with alien pilots who swarmed into their fighters and took off in the direction of faint daylight visible in the distance.

“It looks like they’re mobilizing for an attack,” Dylan said.

Nodding, Jake said, “And I think they just hit the garage clicker for us.”

They started to climb.

* * *

Ritter and Adams, followed by a security team, came into the research hangar shortly after David put out the call. They all walked in a complete circle around the sphere.

“This thing better not be a Trojan horse, David,” Adams said.

“I don’t think it’s a danger to us,” Catherine said, “but it might be to them.”

Okun nodded toward Floyd. “He turned it on just by touching it.”

The dark line partially encircling the sphere—where the bright blue line had partially encircled the larger spherical ship—began to glow. Then it spoke.

“I activated myself when I detected your biological signature to be different from theirs.”

“It speaks!” Okun exulted. “In English!”

“I deconstructed your primitive language using your radio signals after you failed to recognize my attempt to communicate.”

“We’re primitive?” Okun said, as if it was a new and exciting idea.

“Correct. My kind shed our biological existence for a virtual one thousands of years ago.”

“It’s a floating super computer,” Floyd marveled.

“That is an underestimation of my capacities. I carry the combined intelligence of my entire species.” Its voice was evenly modulated and pleasant to hear, David thought. Obviously designed to make itself that way for human hearing. That would be part of the research for a machine like this.
Sorry
, he thought inadvertently.
Not a machine. Being.

“Far out,” Okun said, sounding like the old hippie he was.

“Why are you here?” David asked. He was having a very hard time not pointing at the sphere and shouting
I was right!
at the top of his lungs.
See? It’s not one of theirs!
He wished Tanner were around just so David could rub his warmongering face in his mistake.

On the other hand, none of that mattered now. What mattered was Catherine’s idea. If the aliens were hunting this… being… that meant they were afraid of it, too. The human race might well benefit from knowing why.

“Of all the species in all the galaxies they have faced, you are the only ones who ever defeated them. When I intercepted their distress call, I knew they would come to exterminate you,” the sphere said. “I came to evacuate as many of you as possible.”

David nodded. “Why did they come now? After twenty years?”

“Time is relative in space travel. Twenty years for you was only days for them. I tried to warn you, but you attacked me with the same weapons they used on us.”

“They attacked you?” David thought he was starting to understand how the different symbols fit together… and what the aliens were after, but he wanted the sphere to say it.

“Correct,” it said. “A harvester ship conquered our planet and sucked out its molten core.” As it spoke it projected a hologram to illustrate. The massive vessel latched onto the planet and began to grow the same kinds of vine-like structures that were now enveloping the east coast of the United States. “They use planetary cores to refuel their ships and grow their technology. They have done this to thousands of species. They are Armageddon. The end of everything.”

The hologram showed a smaller ship budding from the hull of the harvester, and detaching. It was an exact copy of the mother ship they had destroyed during the War of ’96.

So that was just a baby
, David thought.
One of probably thousands sent out into the universe to find the next feeding ground
. He’d seen the growth of their technology on the level of individual organisms, but it was another thing to observe it at such a massive scale. The combination of biotechnology and advanced materials science was both intoxicating—because of the possibilities—and terrifying, because of the race that possessed it.

Within the hologram, a swarm of spherical ships rose from the planet and attacked the harvester. A battle unfolded.

“I was the sole survivor,” the sphere finished.

“I am so sorry to hear that, Gorgeous,” Okun said.

“What is gorgeous?” the sphere asked. “You used that word before.”

“Um, I’ll tell you later,” Okun said.

David wanted to stay on topic. “Do you have a plan?”

Another hologram replaced the first. An Earthlike planet, bristling with defense cannons. “There is a planet where survivors from other fallen worlds work to build weapons to defeat them once and for all,” the sphere said. “Your victory was our inspiration, but now that I am activated, the queen will detect my signature and hunt me down.”

“She’s already on her way,” Dikembe said. No one challenged this. They knew the connection Dikembe had, and how he had suffered to achieve it.

Whitmore nodded. “Yes. She’s coming.”

“What happens when we kill her?” David asked.

“No one has ever killed a harvester queen,” the sphere said, “but as a hive, I believe her soldiers will fall. But it is too late now. You must terminate me, or she will acquire the coordinates of the refugee planet… and that will be the end.”

That gave David an idea. If the queen wanted the sphere so badly…

“Wait a second,” he said. “If we’re so sure she’s coming here, maybe we can bait her like she baited us.”

They all turned to him, and he started to outline a plan.

Jake thought they would probably be climbing this column forever. It had plenty of footholds, sure, but it was like miles high, and Dylan was struggling. Jake saw it, and he saw the other pilots seeing it.

“How you doing?” he asked, trying not to make a big deal out of it. Dylan followed suit and tried to play it off, but Jake could see he was hurting.

“Don’t let me slow you down.”

“Take a minute,” Jake said. They needed Dylan. They needed everyone, but maybe especially him. So they stopped on a ledge for a minute. Jake had a lot to say to Dylan, but he didn’t know how to start the conversation. How did you clear the air, in the middle of an alien spaceship, with a guy who had just lost his mother? It was a tough situation. He was glad when Dylan saved him the trouble of figuring it out.

“Let’s get going,” he said, getting back to his feet. They kept climbing.

* * *

David and Okun walked with Adams, laying out for him their plan of attack. It was speculative, depended on lots of variables, and would require the unprecedented coordination of several different kinds of technology that had never before interacted, but they pretty much thought it might work.

“Well, General,” David began, and then he corrected himself. “Mr. President. Dr. Okun thinks we can replicate the sphere’s RF radiation signal—”

“English, please,” Adams said.

Okun decided to explain it himself. “Every computer emits a radioactive signature, whether it’s your laptop, your phone, even your watch. The sphere has an RFR that’s completely off the charts.” He didn’t bother trying to explain how it was off the charts, or what charts it was off. Ordinary people usually didn’t want to know that stuff, and anyway, David was already picking up where he had left off.

“We think this ‘signature’ is what their queen detected when we unlocked it,” David explained. “If we put the sphere inside the isolation chamber, and pack the decoy transmitter on a tug loaded with cold fusion bombs…”

“We can fly it up her royal ass and…
bon voyage
!” Okun finished in fine style.

“You set off cold fusion bombs, you’ll kill everyone from here to Houston!” Adams said. The queen was on her way—they knew that from the sphere. They had to kill her but Adams, even faced with this extreme situation, wasn’t ready to detonate cold fusion bombs on American soil. Ten miles in the air over Washington, D.C., that was one thing. Their ship would have absorbed most of the blast.

But in open air, on the ground?

Not a chance.

David, having worked with Adams for years, had figured he might object on these lines.

“Not if we use the shield generators from the base to contain the blast.”

“Then what’s going to protect us?” Adams shot back.

“Do you have a better idea, sir?” David asked.

General—President—Adams turned to Ritter. “Get every able-bodied person to grab a blaster and get ready to shoot some aliens.”

Excellent
, David thought.
He’s going for it.
It was a good thing, too, because that was the only plan they had. “Now we just need a way to see her coming,” he said, and Adams surprised him by coming up with an idea that David thought might solve that problem more easily than he’d thought.

Area 51 was full of old storage hangars attached to the parts of the complex that had existed since 1947 or shortly thereafter. Adams led David to one of those, and they stood back watching as a crew whipped a large tarp off a radar truck from the 1950s. It was perfect, David thought—a tech so old and out of date that the aliens probably wouldn’t even think to look for it.

“It was supposed to go to the Smithsonian,” Adams said.

David was glad they hadn’t gotten around to the donation. He tossed two officers a pair of walkie-talkies.

“Drive it to the highest point you can find that has visual contact with the base,” he said. “The higher the better.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later a crew had changed the oil, along with the plugs and wires and the distributor cap and rotor. Those old parts were stowed in crates near the truck itself. They found an additive to put in modern gas that let the old engine burn it, and when they turned the key it fired right up.

God bless good old technology
, David thought. The officers and their walkie-talkies roared away into the desert, headed for the nearest mountains.

* * *

Whitmore had seen enough. He’d heard enough. He’d listened enough and maybe he’d even talked enough.

But he hadn’t done enough.

He was walking between the banks of lockers in the pilots’ locker room, seeing each one as a tombstone. Agent Travis was with him, but Whitmore was used to that. Travis was almost an extension of him at this point, like one of those weird parts of the body about whose function you were never certain.

Whitmore flipped open lockers as he walked past them, one by one. They were all empty, row after row… and then he flipped one open and saw a flight suit still hanging inside. He stopped.

On the inside of the locker door was a small vanity mirror. Whitmore saw himself in it, saw the gray in his hair—which he couldn’t do anything about. The wrinkles—ditto—and the long gray beard he’d grown over the past years when the alien visions had worsened.

Now that he could do something about, he thought as he saw the shaving kit on the locker shelf.

* * *

Patricia had been angling for a way to get back in the air since Jake had given her the spiel about watching her dad. Now she was glad to have the chance—though she would have traded it away in a picosecond if it meant having Jake back.

Dr. Okun was placing the decoy transmitter inside the reassembled bit of wreckage from the spherical ship. The wreckage was locked securely in the grip of a tug—the same one, as it happened, Jake had liberated from the Moon Base. David and President Adams took care of the briefing as ordnance handlers loaded cold fusion bombs onto the tug. They watched as Okun got the decoy and the wreckage arranged just the way he liked it.

He was a particular man.

“The idea is to bait her into following us into the salt flats,” David explained. “Once she’s got it, we’ll set off the bombs from inside her ship.”

“Let’s get it done,” Patricia said. She was ready to go. Ready to avenge Jake, to prove herself, now that her father was back. All of it. The whole nine yards.

“Well,” he said, “there’s a small catch. They took out our satellites, which means someone is gonna have to fly it. Manually.”

There was grim silence among the pilots. Everyone knew what David meant. Whoever flew the tug was going on a suicide mission.