Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (34 page)

“
Enchanté
,” Catherine said. “I’m Catherine Marceaux. It’s nice to meet you.”

* * *

Julius gave her an appraising look.

“Oh, you’re French,” he said. “Not perfect… but neither is he.” Why couldn’t David find himself a Jewish girl, Julius wondered. Before he could say it, though, he saw David reading his mind.

“Dad. Would you give us a minute?” David said.

Julius wasn’t always good at knowing when to get out of the way, but this time he could pick up the cue.

“I was never here,” he said, and he walked off toward the kids, all the while pretending not to notice his David laying a kiss on the French woman. And why not, Julius thought. What was the point of repelling an alien invasion—
again
—if you couldn’t get a kiss from a pretty girl afterward?

Sam and her siblings were gathered a little apart from all of the campers, who were still watching the dead queen and daring one another to touch her.

“I’ve been thinking,” Julius said to her. “Maybe you guys should stay with me for a little while.”

She looked touched, and then she smiled at him.

“I’d like that,” she said. “And you owe me a car.”

With an answering grin, Julius looked over at the campers and their examination of the queen’s carcass.

“I’ll need a bigger boat,” he mused. So the situation wasn’t all bad.

Having finally navigated their way out of the wreckage of the prison wing, Dikembe, Rosenberg, and Okun came running out toward the sphere, still lying a distance from the outstretched hand of the dead queen. Okun put his palms on it.

“Are you okay?”

The sphere rose into the air. “I am,” it said. “Thanks to you.”

“Ah. This wasn’t all for nothing,” Okun said.

“You are a remarkable species,” the sphere said.

“Not so primitive after all,” Okun said, wanting to challenge it a little for looking down its nose—figuratively, of course—at the human race that had done so much to protect it. “You know, a lot of people have sacrificed a lot of things to keep you alive.”

There was the briefest of pauses. Then the sphere spoke again.

“Thank you.”

Standing nearby, Rosenberg stared at his blaster like a kid with a new toy.
Accountant no more
, he thought.
I’m a battle-hardened veteran of the alien invasion. They’ll call this one the War of ’16.

“You think they’ll let me keep this?” he asked Dikembe.

Dikembe looked over at him. Floyd looked back, steeling himself. What cruel, dismissive thing would Dikembe hit him with next?

“You have the heart of a warrior,” Dikembe said.

This almost brought Floyd to tears. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” he said, spreading his arms and still holding the blaster in one hand. “Bring it in for a hug, big man.”

Dikembe didn’t move.

“No.”

Floyd dropped his arms. “Too far,” he said. “Now I know the boundaries.”

Okun was still talking to the sphere, and judging from the expression on his face, he really liked what he was hearing. Floyd wondered what the next revelation would be.

* * *

Gathered at the edge of the main compound, the survivors looked through the crowd, searching for familiar faces, beginning that sorrowful task of counting the dead.

“You’re a hero,” Catherine said. “Again.” She and David were arm in arm.

Then they heard the familiar sound of alien fighters and spun around. It wasn’t aliens coming out of the fighters, however, but five human pilots. Jake and Dylan with Patricia in one, and Charlie following Rain out of the other. Dylan was limping.

“I think they’re the real heroes,” David said. As the pilots came close, Adams stepped to the front of the crowd.

“Hell of a job,” he said, and he snapped them a salute. The entire crowd, military and civilian alike, followed suit. The young pilots, newly minted heroes of Earth, saluted back.

David left Catherine’s side and walked up to Jake. “I can’t believe you guys made it out,” he said.

Jake looked over at Patricia. “I had to keep a promise.”

We all had promises to keep, didn’t we?
David thought.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said to Patricia. He and Tom Whitmore hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but they’d grown to respect each other and by the time Whitmore climbed into the tug, David had counted him a friend.

Patricia nodded. The loss was still too fresh for her to really grapple with.

“We’re all still here because of him,” she said simply. One man’s sacrifice had kept billions of others alive.

Suddenly there was motion on the horizon. Visible even from nearly three thousand miles away, the alien ship rose out of Earth’s atmosphere, dragging a trail of fiery clouds and debris behind it. For a long moment it remained visible, and then it was gone into deep space.

Dylan couldn’t help himself.

“Is that all you got?” he roared at the top of his lungs, channeling his dad.
Family tradition
, he thought.
My dad fought aliens, I fight aliens. My dad talked trash to them, and so do I.

His shout broke something loose in the crowd, and everyone else there shouted and roared, too. Some of them shook their fists—or raised fingers—at the departing beaten enemy. Others turned to their friends, lovers, and family. They had survived. Relief flooded through them and came out as joyous celebration.

David stood with Patricia, a little aside from the cheering, exultant group. He knew how close it had been, how narrowly humanity had averted extinction. He also knew the aliens would come back.

“I don’t know if this planet will survive another attack,” he said quietly. He didn’t want to interfere with the celebration, but he had to say it to someone. Before Patricia could respond, however, Brakish Okun appeared, the sphere hovering and glowing behind him.

“Director Levinson,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe what kind of weapons this thing has on its proverbial hard drive. It wants us to lead their galactic resistance.” Okun sounded as if he thought this was the greatest idea ever conceived by a sentient mind.

“What do you mean?” David asked. Earth wasn’t in any shape to lead a space war.

“Two words,” Okun said.

David waited, knowing Okun wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself for long… and he was right.

“Interstellar travel.”

David nodded. That made sense. The ships had arrived through wormholes, but the humans hadn’t yet found any clue as to how the aliens created them, maintained them, operated them…

“Take the fight to them,” Adams said. It sounded as if he considered this an excellent idea. David thought he could see his strategist’s brain already working at the logistics. This was a little soon, wasn’t it? While the fires were still burning, they were already contemplating their counterattack?

Then again, maybe it’s not
, he mused. Maybe there was no time like the present.

Dylan looked around at the salt flats, the distant mountains, the cheering people…

“I was getting bored of this planet anyway,” he said.

Amen
, Jake thought. With the help of the sphere’s technologies, they would hunt the aliens, would find them wherever they were, and they would make sure that no planet ever had to go through what Earth had just suffered. The aliens had picked a fight with the wrong sentient race.

He took a step up to the sphere.

“When do we leave?” he asked. Then when he saw Patricia looking at him, he added, “After we are married, of course.”

Brakish Okun wore a grin, like he always did, but now it had an edge.

“We’re gonna kick some serious alien ass,” he said.

Alex Irvine has published about forty books, including original novels
Buyout
,
The Narrows
, and
A Scattering of Jades
. His most recent books are
The Division: New York Collapse
and
Batman: Arkham Knight – The Riddler’s Gambit
. His other licensed work includes novelizations of
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
,
Pacific Rim
, and
Tintin
, plus books related to
Avengers
,
Transformers
,
Supernatural
, and
Deus Ex
. He lives in Maine but still roots for the Detroit Tigers.

Thanks to Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, for the first
Independence Day
film (which I watched maybe a dozen times) and for this new one (which I’ll probably watch a dozen more); to Greg Keyes, for a slam-bang prequel that gave me more rich backstory to mine; to Steve Saffel and Josh Izzo for keeping the process all on track; to everyone at Titan, just on general principles, because they’re all excellent people who love books; and to my wife, Lindsay, and my kids Ian, Emma, Avi, and Violet, for being swell.

FIRST CONTACT (Roswell, NM, 7/47): An extraterrestrial craft crash lands near a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. The U.S. military launches an investigation.

SILENT ZONE (Nevada Desert, 1970s): Dr. Brakish Okun arrives at Area 51 to work with the NSA and CIA on the study of the New Mexico ship.
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ARRIVAL AND ATTACK (Middle of Atlantic, 7/2/96): A massive alien mother ship enters Earth’s orbit, deploying 36 city destroyers to annihilate the world’s largest cities. Within 48 hours, 108 cities are reduced to ashes.
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EARTH STRIKES BACK (Nevada Desert, 7/4/96): Earth’s nations launch a globally coordinated counterattack, destroying the alien mother ship and eliminating the extraterrestrial threat.

WAR IN THE DESERT (Saudi Arabia, 7/4/96): Military pilots in the Saudi Arabian desert witness the destruction of Jerusalem and engage in a hand-to-hand assault with extraterrestrial crash survivors.
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TERROR FROM THE DEEP (Atlantic Ocean, 7/5/96): A functioning extraterrestrial craft is discovered beneath the Atlantic Ocean. An investigation—headed by Captain Joshua Adams—is implemented by the U.S. military.
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THE WORLD REBUILDS (11/30/96): Aside from a small pocket of resistance in an isolated area of the African Congo, the alien threat has been neutralized—and the world begins to rise from the ashes. Reconstruction starts as the great cities, monuments, and landmarks of the world are slowly restored to their former glory.

LEADERS UNITE (Royal Palace of Naples, Piazza del Plebiscito, Naples, Italy, 3/17/98): Centuries-old conflicts and political distrust are dissolved to create an unprecedented unity among the nations of the world.

EARTH SPACE DEFENSE FORMED (Geneva, Switzerland, 5/25/98): Following the newly established global peace alliance, the United Nations creates the Earth Space Defense program (ESD) to serve as an early warning system and united global defense unit. In conjunction with this announcement, the ESD launches a worldwide publicity and recruitment campaign.

F-22 ADDS ALIEN TECH (Elmendorf Air Force Base, Anchorage, Alaska, 1/8/99): ESD applies recovered alien shield technology to an F-22 Raptor to understand how they can better integrate other alien technology into future full hybrid fighters. This light experiment will serve as the foundation for the dramatic innovations that the ESD delivers nearly a decade later.

PRESIDENT WHITMORE’S FAREWELL (Washington, D.C., 01/15/01): After two terms in office, President Thomas Whitmore makes his final address to the nation, clearing the way for the newly elected President William Grey.

CONGO GROUND WAR CONTINUES (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa, 8/10/01): A faction of aliens continues to hold out in a remote part of the African Congo—the survivors of a stranded city destroyer. The ESD repeatedly offers their support and assistance to the local government, but is met by aggressive refusal.
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U.S. ARMY ADOPTS ALIEN WEAPONRY (El Paso, TX, 10/23/03): Applying new data from recovered alien weaponry, U.S. Army scientists make dramatic advances in applying their findings to military applications.

ALIEN PRISON RUMORS (Area 51, NV, 2/7/05): Rumors of a top-secret alien prison below Area 51 start to gain traction with the general public. ESD officials offer no comment regarding the legitimacy of these reports.

WORLD MOURNS COL. STEVEN HILLER (Area 51, NV, 4/27/07): While he is test-piloting the ESD’s first alien–human hybrid fighter, an unknown malfunction causes the untimely death of Col. Hiller. He is survived by his wife, Jasmine, and son, Dylan.
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ESD MOON BASE OPERATIONAL (2/21/09): Monitored from its command center in Beijing, China, the Earth Space Defense Moon Base opens. Designed with both offensive and defensive weapons capabilities, the Moon Base is the first of several planetary bases designed to monitor our solar system for potential alien threats.

PRESIDENT LANFORD ELECTED (Washington, D.C., 1/20/13): Elizabeth Lanford, the forward-thinking former vice-president under President Lucas Jacobs, is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, becoming the first woman in history to hold the office.

NEXT GEN HYBRID FIGHTER UNVEILED (Tokyo, Japan, 8/19/14): The next generation of hybrid alien–human vehicles and weapons systems are introduced, after years of research and development from ESD scientists around the world. One of the standouts is the H-8 Global Defender hybrid fighter.