Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (8 page)

“It’s an honor, Madam President,” Hiller said.

“Your father was a great man,” Lanford said. She decided to throw Tanner his bone. “You know the Secretary of Defense.”

Dylan nodded. “Sir.”

“And I don’t have to introduce the two of you,” Lanford said, indicating Patricia.

Another aide appeared. “Ma’am, let’s get you touched up for the photo.”

While the makeup artist worked, Lanford watched Patricia and Dylan together. They hugged and then held each other at arms’ length.

“Moving up in the world,” Dylan said.

“Says America’s knight in shining armor.” Patricia smiled at him.

“You’re the one who’s back in the White House.”

“As an employee, I don’t have the same benefits as I did when I lived here,” she said, looking around as if she was seeing the rooms the way she had when she was a little girl, her father was still president… and her mother was still alive.

“How did they let us get away with everything we did?” Dylan wondered.

“Because my dad was commander-in-chief,” Patricia answered, her tone of voice leaving no doubt that she was adding an unspoken
Duh
.

Dylan grinned. “That probably had something to do with it.”

Once Lanford had been made camera-ready, her aide approached Dylan. “We’re ready for you, Captain.” Dylan nodded to Patricia and started to walk away.

“Dylan,” she called after him, “be nice to Jake when you see him.”

He didn’t answer, but Lanford could see that her words had landed. Lanford didn’t know who Jake was, but there was clearly some sort of vexed history there. The dramas of the young. She put it out of her mind as the young man approached her and became Captain Hiller again, standing at her side as flashes popped and their images went out all over the world. If she was going to make her new program work, and begin to emphasize reconstruction and normalization over military spending, she would need all the photo ops she could get. Particularly with young, handsome, and famous military officers. It was a cynical point of view, but that was politics.

While she smiled for the cameras, Lanford still kept an ear out for the conversations around the room. One of the things politics had taught her was that people would speak as if she wasn’t there, if they didn’t think she were paying attention—and that listening to what was happening with her back turned was a vital skill. So it was that she could appear fully present for the photographers, even joking with some of them about making sure they got her good side, while at the same time hearing another of her aides approaching Patricia.

“Ms. Whitmore, it’s Agent Travis—he says it’s urgent.”

Once Jake got the tug into the shuttle bay, he and Charlie looked at each other and took a deep breath. For once in his life, Charlie seemed to be at a loss for words. They’d done something actually heroic, Jake thought. That felt pretty good. Maybe he didn’t have to fly a fighter jet to be a hero. He punched in the final system shutdown commands, and they headed for the ramp.

When they got down onto the floor of the bay, they took a walk around the tug to see how she’d fared. Jake had worked some ships hard before, but never anything close to this. The engines were smoking, they could see that right away. The anti-gravity generators in the engine housing tended to give off a lot of waste heat when they were pushed, and in this case they’d given off enough to start little fires in the circuitry and insulation.

Looking at the smoke, Jake realized how close they’d come to engine failure. That would have been lights out, pure and simple.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

Coming around to the front of the tug, the damage was even more obvious. The hull was dented and gouged from the impact with the cannon. All of the landing lights and other surface electronics were either shorted out or damaged in other ways. One of the crane arms—now legs again, because the tug was resting on the splayed claws—was bent so badly there wouldn’t be any way to repair it. The other looked to be in better shape, but would still need some time in the shop before it could lift anything heavier than a sandwich. The tug sat crooked and beat up, kind of forlorn, but Jake was proud of it. He’d asked a lot of it, and it had come through with flying colors, all things considered.

“Shit… don’t turn around,” Charlie said all of a sudden. “Lao’s coming in hot, and he’s got that look.”

Jake didn’t want to turn around. Maybe if he kept looking at the tug, Lao would just be a bad dream that went away.
Ha.
No, it was better to face the music, he thought, and he slowly pivoted as Lao’s footsteps got closer.

Charlie was right. He was hot. Hot enough that when he started screaming, it wasn’t even English. Jake knew perfectly well that Commander Lao spoke English. Also French, in addition to a couple of different dialects of Chinese, but he was so mad right now that he had reverted to his native language. Probably because he could swear more efficiently, Jake figured.

Nobody ever learns to swear right in a second language.

Trailing Chinese invective, Lao stalked back and forth across the bay as the other tug pilots gathered to watch the show. Lao didn’t go off very often, but when he did it tended to be quite a spectacle. Jake glanced over at Charlie.

“He knows we don’t understand Chinese, right?”

Lao stopped in front of Jake and Charlie, looking like he was debating whether to have them shot out of an airlock, or kill them himself. Jake thought he might as well start to make his case.

“Sir, there was a malfunction—”

“You almost got us all killed!”

Okay
, Jake thought.
But is anyone going to mention the power fluctuation and the way the clamps didn’t shut right? Anyone?
“Yeah,” he said, “but then I saved everyone, so I was kinda hoping for a high five—”

Suddenly Lao got in Jake’s face, close enough that if he hadn’t been the base’s commanding officer—and if it wouldn’t have caused an international incident—Jake would have decked him.

“You don’t get credit for cleaning up your own mess,” Lao snapped. “And you destroyed my tug!” he added with a flourish, pointing at the damage.

“That? That’s just cosmetic,” Jake said, as much for the benefit of the other assembled pilots as anything else. One of the engine mounts chose that moment to fall off and hit the floor with a resounding clang.

Jake looked over at it, then back at Lao.

“He can fix that,” he said, nodding over at Charlie.

Charlie must have been feeling guilty, because he tried to cut in.

“Actually, sir, I’m th—”

“I lost my focus,” Jake said, putting on his serious in-the-principal’s-office face. “It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t,” Lao said. “You’re grounded until further notice.” He held Jake’s gaze a moment longer, then stalked off in a huff.

“Grounded as in I can’t leave my room?” Jake called after him. “Or as in I can’t fly?”

“Jesus, Morrison,” one of the other tug pilots said. “Screwin’ up really seems to be your thing!”

Not for the first time, Jake wondered how stories from flight school had followed him all the way to the Moon. He also wondered if there would be any punishment if he jumped the guy and pounded him with a piece of the broken-off engine housing.

Whatever
, he thought, and he just started walking. Charlie went with him.

“You didn’t have to take the fall,” Charlie said as they left the bay.

“He already hates me,” Jake said. “Why break tradition?” He didn’t have to add that taking heat for Charlie was also tradition. It dated back to when they’d both been at the orphanage together, and Jake figured that it would continue as long as they knew each other. Friendships were like that. If you couldn’t dive under the bus for a friend, then what kind of person were you?

He thought again about the strange burst of interference. It had thrown the tug’s navigational controls offline for a critical moment, and clearly it had done a number on the base’s electronics, as well. That’s why the clamps had jammed. So why wasn’t anybody talking about it?

Why the rush to blame him and Charlie?

Jake shrugged. Such was life. Everybody needed someone to blame when things didn’t go right, especially when nobody really knew what the hell was going on. In the command center right then, there probably was an engineer diagnosing the problem and tracking the source of whatever electromagnetic burst had caused the shorts. Then he or she would write up a report and file it, and Lao would read it, and at that point everyone would know that the real cause of the accident had nothing to do with Jake or Charlie.

But by then, it would be way too late to say it. The story was already set. And anyway, Lao wasn’t really the type to apologize.

Dikembe Umbutu didn’t waste any time getting David and Catherine closer to the alien destroyer. In two pickup trucks, the group drove down the back of the ridge and then underneath the giant ship, passing one of the landing petals. By itself that petal was larger than any structure human beings had ever built.

The scale of the whole ship was hard to assimilate. David found that every time he looked at it he had to remind himself that it flew, that it wasn’t a fixed monument or a feature of the land. That’s how big it was. The human brain had trouble putting it in the same category as the ships human beings had created, defaulting to the idea that it was a thing made by natural processes, rather than by sentient beings.

He had asked Dikembe about Floyd Rosenberg. Dikembe had shrugged, like it was beneath him to consider the whereabouts of whining accountants. Collins, pursuing his own lines of inquiry, found out from their United Nations escorts that Rosenberg was back at the border checkpoint. He was described as irritating and stubborn, which Collins took to mean he was unharmed.

The pickups stopped and they all got out. David looked up at the underbelly of the ship, miles above. The cavernous space housing the energy-beam generator loomed directly over his head. David remembered seeing what those beams had done to cities all over the world. The largest cities on Earth, collections of millions of human lives, together with their cultural legacies, their art and history… This ship, he knew, was responsible for Dakar, Abidjan, and Kinshasa. Three of Africa’s great cities, three centers of the Francophone world.

The destroyer had probably been on its way to Cairo when Tom Whitmore brought down the mother ship. That was an educated guess on David’s part, but it made sense. It certainly had been traveling northeast from Kinshasa. Cairo, by far the largest city in the world to survive the War of ’96, lay in that direction. Where else would it have been going?

Billions of people dead. Irreparable losses to human culture. Given another week, the aliens would have reduced human civilization to the hunter-gatherer level again. The entire planet dealt with post-traumatic stress.

Astonishing
, he thought, taking in the spectacle of the ship from the darkness cast by its shadow. Even twenty years later, digging in the ruins of ships like this one, humankind was just beginning to scratch the surface of the vast technological knowledge that created the destroyers and brought them across the spaces between the stars. What if the aliens had put that to work building something other than engines of war? The universe might have been so different.

He brought himself back to Earth.

“I appreciate you finally granting us access, Mr. Umbutu,” he said. “Your father was a tenacious man who really stuck to his guns, no pun intended.” David had known for years that there was an alien presence in this part of the Congo—now the Republique d’Umbutu—but it had been impossible to get permission to see it while the elder Umbutu was still in charge.

“My father was a monster,” Dikembe answered sharply. “His pride caused the deaths of more than half of my people. Including my brother.” He started walking away.

Taken aback, David said, “I’m so sorry.” For once he had tried to be diplomatic, and where had it gotten him? He and Catherine followed the warlord. As they walked, they looked around, taking in the scattered alien bones and skulls that littered the site. David wondered if Dikembe had decreed they should be left there as some sort of memorial, or whether the people of Umbutu simply had more pressing problems than disposing of them. He also knew that Dikembe’s father had fought a brutal war against alien holdouts. Perhaps the memorial wasn’t to the war at all, but to the elder Umbutu, who had left so much damage in his wake.

David wouldn’t be able to ask, of course, but the scenario intrigued him. Dikembe was a young and powerful leader with a European education and experience in war. Men like him went a long way if they kept their heads, but the previous generation in this part of Africa had seen so much conflict and human cruelty that only cruel men could lead them. The elder Umbutu was one such man. He died after the aliens died, but because of them in the end.

So his memory
was
scattered here, among the bones.

“He should have asked for help,” Dikembe said, his tone softening ever so slightly. “I will not make the same mistakes he did.” He stopped and held out his arm to the side. “Be careful.”

They had reached the edge of an enormous hole in the ground, hundreds of yards in diameter and plunging into the earth farther than David could see. Even with the lights, blackness took over immediately.

“What happened here?” Catherine asked.

“They were drilling,” Dikembe said.

David nodded. “We heard rumors, from refugees who fled the regime.”

Catherine asked the logical next question.

“For what?”

“Fossil fuels, minerals, metals…” David speculated. “I don’t know.”

“That’s a first,” Catherine said wryly.

David ignored her. “When did the drilling stop?” he asked Dikembe.

“When you blew up the mother ship.”

That made sense, David thought. From what they knew of the aliens, there was a collective consciousness, a hive mind driven by a central awareness. Probably analogous to the queen of a beehive or anthill. Individual aliens could act autonomously, but they were subject to commands from whatever that central mind was, and they all shared its knowledge and awareness.