Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (14 page)

“That’s sort of the point, Pops,” David said.

“Look at this one,” Julius said, gesturing at the sagebrush. “Some sort of weed, I think.”

“Yeah,” David acknowledged. “So what was this big news you mentioned over the phone?”

Julius paused and rubbed his hands together. “I’m very excited,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’m a humble man by nature. I don’t make too much of myself, but after all of these years I think, why not? The world deserves to know.”

“Know what, Pops? What are you up to?”

“I’m writing a book,” he said.

“Book? What kind of book?”

“I’m not sure about the title yet. I have some ideas. I’m thinking of calling it
How I Saved the World
.”

David regarded his father for another moment.

“You know what?” he said, finally. “I think I’ll go freshen my drink.”

Ms. Park, the chemistry teacher, reminded Jake of a crane. Long-limbed and graceful on the one hand, but with dark cold eyes that seemed to contain very little emotion or empathy on the other. In this she stood in stark contrast to the coding teacher whose room Jake had just come from, where the jovial Mr. Lenhoff seemed prepared to offer a hug at the least sign of stress.

“You will now choose lab partners,” she said, after some twenty minutes of dry, soulless lecture. By the time Jake had turned his head to look, more than half of the class had partnered up—many of them had been here for a year already, or were locals and so knew one other.

Jake did notice a girl looking his way. She wasn’t smiling, but she seemed to sort of have a question mark over her head. And she was pretty, with brown hair cut in bangs and a little spray of freckles around her nose. He was about to signal her when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He glanced up to see a boy about his own age. His frizzy hair was shaved very short.

“So,” the fellow said. “I’m new here and from the looks of it, you are too. Want to partner up?”

Jake glanced back at the girl, but she wasn’t looking at him anymore.

“Sure,” he said, wondering why this guy didn’t seem to know the rule that you were supposed to pick a girl for your partner, preferably someone hopelessly out of your league, so some sort of screwball romance could evolve. So the movies told him anyway.

“My name is Dylan,” the boy said.

“I’m Jake,” he replied.

“Where are you from, Jake?”

“I was born in L.A.”

The boy grinned. “No kidding? Me too.” His face quickly sobered. “Were you there, when…?”

“I was at summer camp,” Jake said. “My parents dropped me off a couple of days before.”

“Did they make it out?” Dylan asked.

Jake realized he had been asked that question more times in the past few days than for most of the balance of his life. Living in an orphanage, it was more or less a given that your parents didn’t “make it out.” Out here it was a valid question, albeit one he didn’t enjoy answering.

“No,” he said. “Or if they did, they never managed to find me.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Dylan said. “I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

Jake shrugged. “To be honest, I barely remember them,” he said. “I was six.” He pointed with his nose. “We’d better set up our station. Ms. Park is giving us the stink-eye.”

They moved into the lab and found an unoccupied spot. Jake noticed the girl still didn’t have a partner, but Ms. Park was pointing a guy in her direction.

“So how about you?” Jake said.

Dylan smiled. “We lived on a hillside, so I actually saw the ship arrive. I was pretending to shoot at it with my toy laser gun. I had no idea.”

“I saw it too,” Jake said. “When the Knights took their first run at it.”

“When they lost,” Dylan said.

“Yeah.”

Now Jake felt obligated. “So your parents?”

“They’re fine,” Dylan said. “We lived in D.C. for a while, and then my dad got a job here a couple of years ago. Mom wanted me to stay in the D.C. school, but when I got in here, we moved.”

“Cool,” Jake said. “I guess we have a few things in common, then.”

“I guess we do,” Dylan said. “Oh, man, she’s looking at us again.”

They turned their attention to the experiment.

* * *

It was no accident there was a tech school in the town of 51. The community had grown up outside of the military boundaries of the Center for Alien Technology, which employed thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians. People like that demanded good schools for their kids, and here they had gotten one. It stood just off the border with military housing, and although it had dorms, a lot of these kids—military or not—lived with their families. The group home Jake had found was about a kilometer from campus.

Walking back after school, Jake noticed the girl from class, sitting on a bench at the bus stop, reading a book. Her eyes flicked his way for a second, then back to her book.

Great
, he thought. Should he just walk past without saying anything? Play it cool? That would be his strategy.

“Hey,” he said involuntarily, and he flinched.

She looked up. “Hey,” she said.

“So, you’re waiting for the bus?”

What am I doing
, he wondered. Could he have asked anything dumber?

“No,” she said. “This is how I amuse myself. I watch people get on and off the bus while I pretend to read.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “I know it was a dumb question. So.”

He started to walk on.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” the girl called after him. “That’s actually what I’m doing. There’s not a whole lot interesting going on around here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Looking back, Jake tried to get a read as to whether she was still making fun of him, and decided it didn’t matter.

“Anyway,” he said, and he started off again.

“How is it,” she asked. “Consorting with royalty?”

That turned him around. He took a few steps toward her.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You’re going to tell me you didn’t know?” she said.

“I’m going to tell you I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jake replied.

“Your lab partner,” she said.

“Dylan?” he said. “What about him?”

“Dylan
Hiller
,” she said. “Son of Steve Hiller.”

He struggled with that for a second.

“
The
Steve Hiller,” he said.

“Yes. You really didn’t know?”

“No. I had no idea, and he didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t watch a lot of TV growing up, did you?” she said.

“We only had one in the orphanage, and there was always a fight over what we were going to watch—so, no.”

“Orphanage,” she said. “Okay. Well I guess that makes me feel a little better.”

“How so?” he said.

“Well, you were giving me the eye,” she said. “The ‘I’m desperate here, I guess she will do’ eye. Or maybe that doesn’t make me feel better. I thought you skipped over me to go with the famous kid, but if you didn’t know who he was—”

“Dylan asked me first,” he said. “That’s all that was going on there.”

“You could have lied and told him you already had a partner,” she said.

“But—” Jake found he was becoming very confused, very quickly.

“Now I’m stuck with David Bustard,” she said, “who is—put nicely—a lump. His parents must have paid someone off to even get him in here.”

“You’re making my head hurt,” Jake said. “What’s your name?”

“I have that effect on people,” she said. “My name is Emily.”

“I’m Jake.”

“Well, Jake, nice to meet you,” she said, “and nice being your last choice for lab partner.”

That seemed like it should be the end of the conversation, but he found his feet wouldn’t move. After a minute he figured out it was because he had something to say.

“For the record, that ‘look’ you saw wasn’t a look of desperation,” he informed her. “It was more of a ‘she’s really cute’ look. I was actually disappointed when Dylan asked me.”

She frowned a little bit, and for the first time since the conversation began, she suddenly didn’t seem to be in control of it anymore. Which felt kind of good.

“Well,” she finally said. “I guess that’s different, then.”

He saw a bus coming in the distance.

“Sit down,” she said. “Quick. Don’t blow my cover.”

“What?”

“Just do it!” Emily said.

He took a seat, as requested, acutely aware of her presence only a foot away. The bus pulled up, three people got off, and then it drove away. The former passengers walked off in different directions.

“What do you think?” she asked, once they were gone.

“Of what?” he asked.

She sighed. “Okay—the guy in the suit? Corporate spy. And did you notice there’s a pale area around his wedding band? He has two families in two different states, and they don’t know about each other. His wedding rings are two different sizes. He was wearing the smaller of the two just now.”

“Oooo-kay,” Jake said.

“The lady in the plum-colored dress?” she said. “Dominatrix.”

“She’s, like, sixty,” he protested.

“She’s wearing a corset under the dress. Did you notice the one weak eye? In private she wears a monocle.”

“I don’t even want to know about the guy in the Hawaiian shirt,” he said.

She looked a little horrified. “No, you don’t,” she said. “We shall not speak of him.”

He continued to sit there for a moment.

“Is this literally the only thing to do around here?” he asked.

She seemed to think about that for a while.

“There’s a place in town that shows old movies for a dollar,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. Then he cleared his throat. “So, Friday?”

“Okay,” she said. “Right here, six o’clock.”

She turned her attention back to the book, and after a moment he mumbled a goodbye and continued home, wondering exactly what had just happened.

* * *

Dikembe was kneeling, reading the tracks in the damp understory of the forest. They were deep in the south, probably beyond the borders of the country his father had invented, moving into the Congo basin. It was supposed to be the last hunt.

Part of him refused to believe it.

Since his brother’s death, nothing had been the same, including the aliens. They never again showed the level of organization they had shown before. Over the years they became increasingly aimless. Some fought, especially if they were in a group, but many seemed hardly aware they were being slaughtered. But there were so
many
of them. The ship, after all, had been more than twenty-four kilometers in diameter.

For the nine years since his brother’s death, Dikembe had hunted. His ability to almost
smell
them had deepened over time, deepened in them all. From a decade of butchery, his arms had grown as hard as the steel of his machete. He felt, at times, like some sort of automaton, a robot that did only one thing.

So he hardly dared hope that it was nearly at an end.

No one had seen one for almost a year—and then, a few days ago, a report came from a village on the edge of the rainforest.

The jungle seemed to explode in front of him, as the vegetation ripped open and the aliens came swarming at him and his men. Without a sound, he launched himself forward, sliding beneath the legs of the first, a maneuver now so practiced it took no thought at all. His machetes, honed every night to a keen edge, did their work, as did those of his men, and they did it in almost unearthly silence.

There had been a time when the men cried out with fear or anger or jubilation as they came at the foe, but that had been ground out of them long ago. They saved their breath for the fighting. These aliens fought better and harder than any he had encountered in many years. A few still had energy weapons and tried to use them, although to little effect.

As he struck one down, another loomed over him, and he realized with a start that it was larger than the others, larger than any alien he had ever seen. It looked a little different, too, although he didn’t have time to reflect on why, because its tentacles struck him in the ribs and sent him sprawling. He rolled and came back to his feet, finding it hard to breathe, reckoning that he must have broken ribs and hoping the newly sharpened edges of bone hadn’t pierced his lung.

He sliced off the tentacles that were reaching for him, and backpedaled. He ducked behind the trunk of a massive tree and darted around it. The alien was already turning, but too slowly. He slashed at its back, severing the rest of its flailing tentacles, and then cut into its head. It required three chops as opposed to the usual one, but the exoskeleton finally split.

He felt the monster trying to get into his thoughts, something none of them had managed to do for a long time. His legs tried to seize up, and he felt a deep despair, as if he had failed in something profoundly important, a failure for which there could be no forgiveness…

Then Zuberi slashed the thing inside of the exoskeleton. It died, and only the echo of its pain remained.

“You’re okay?” Zuberi asked.

“Yes,” Dikembe murmured, shaking it off.

“This one was different, don’t you think?” Zuberi asked.

“It was,” Dikembe agreed. He moved in for a closer look. The creature inside the ruined armor was a different hue than the others, a dark mottled green. Its head was bigger, too, proportionally. Thicker, the shield more widely flared. Zuberi’s weapon had severed its neck, but above its left eye was a sort of pucker.

“Looks like a scar,” Zuberi said. “An old bullet wound, maybe. What do you think it was?”

“The last one,” Dikembe said. “That’s all I care about. It was the last.”

* * *

That afternoon, he brought the news to his father.

“It is finally over,” he told him.

His father shook his head.

“It will never be over,” his father said. “For me, it will never be over.”

Rain Lao had barely had time to settle into the cockpit when the guy was suddenly all over her, putting his hands places they had absolutely no business being. He wasn’t rough or anything, but she still didn’t like it. She pushed him back, irritated.