Read Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) Online

Authors: Greg Keyes

Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #Thriller

Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (7 page)

BOOK: Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel)
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“Good,” Whitmore said. “Just—write it down.”

“Okay,” David said.

“One more thing,” Whitmore said. “The Earth Space Defense will largely be a military organization, but I think it needs a civilian director. I want you to be that director. I want you to run it.”

“Yeah, right,” David said, grinning.

But none of them smiled.

“Oh,” he said. “You weren’t kidding. Ah—run it? Not so fast. Look, that’s not—that’s not me. Let someone else do that and let me, you know, do my thing. I’ve got ten projects going right now. I’m not—
clearly
not—the leader type. Evil counselor, I can do, you know, the guy plotting in the shadows, Cardinal Richelieu and so forth—”

“David,” Whitmore said. “You’re a hero, and like this building, you’re a symbol. You
beat
them. People will feel more confident if they know you’re in charge.”

“Because they don’t know me,” David replied. “I just—I’m sorry, no. I’m happy to help build this thing, make it work, pass it along. Give me a fancy title. Just don’t put me in charge. I’m the guy who tells the guy in charge what’s wrong with what he’s doing. I can’t do that if—well, you get the picture.”

Whitmore studied him for a moment, then sighed.

“I wish you would reconsider,” he said, “but I can’t make you do it.”

“I’m honored,” David said. “Really.”

* * *

Patricia watched as David Levinson shook hands and left with his wife. Mr. Bell seemed to want to talk about something, but her dad sent everyone out of the room. Then his shoulders slumped. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

“Is something wrong with your dad?” Dylan asked.

The two of them were hiding up on the unfinished second floor. They had begun the day when Dylan’s mom dropped him off so she could go to nursing school. It was their summer routine. Then it was playing on the lawn, pretending to be explorers in an ancient ruin. The new favorite game was giving the secret service woman who was supposed to be watching them the slip, so they could slide down the newly finished banisters, pretending to be fighter pilots, blowing aliens out of the sky.

And sometimes eavesdropping on Dad.

“He’s just tired,” she said. “He works all the time.”

“Mom says everybody needs a good night’s sleep,” Dylan said. “Of course, she’s up late studying, too.” He scratched his head. “So what now?”

“I feel like ice cream,” Patricia said.

They snuck back downstairs to the kitchen. There were a couple of people doing the dishes from breakfast, and Chef Cortez was in a huddle with his staff, probably talking about lunch. Dylan kept watch and she stole into the walk-in cooler and emerged with a container of rocky road. Then the two of them retired to the garden with a pair of spoons.

“That’s good,” Dylan said.

“Yeah,” Patricia replied.

“I like hanging out here,” he said. “I’m glad my dad moved us to D.C.”

“Me too,” Patricia replied. She took another bite, kept it in her mouth while it melted.

“He wakes up at night sometimes,” she said. “He has really bad dreams.”

“What?”

“My dad. You asked if there was something wrong with him.”

“Oh.”

“I still have nightmares about all that stuff too,” Dylan said.

She nodded. “He misses Mommy,” she said, “and he’s tired a lot. He says it will get better.”

“Well, that’s good,” Dylan said.

“Yeah,” Patricia said.

5

Bakari stopped short of the top of the hill.

“You feel them?” he whispered.

“Yes,” Dikembe said.

If he had to explain it to someone who didn’t understand, he would probably describe the sensation as similar to hearing a swarm of bees or the pins-and-needles feeling when his foot went to sleep. Yet it was neither a sound nor a feeling, but a thing inside of his head.

It had started small, but as the months of the war dragged out—as the aliens hunted them with their minds, like bats used sonar to find insects—a sort of feedback loop was beginning to develop. Their human minds were somehow adapting to the alien mental probes and attacks. It was becoming easier to know where they would be, sense a trap, know when they were at your back. Some were more sensitive than others. Dikembe, as it turned out, dealt with them better than anyone.

“It’s only a few of them,” he said. “On the other side of the hill.”

“Okay,” Bakari said. “Let’s do this then.” He signed for the flanks to move around, and began to move the middle up. At the top of the hill, Bakari pulled the pin from a grenade and hurled so it cleared the top and fell downslope on the other side.

An explosion, then Dikembe felt their anguish, their pain, if it could be called that. Green energy began spearing up from below, and five of them crested the ridge. They never had a chance, as thirty-four soldiers opened up on them, but as they died, Dikembe felt something… different.


Merde
,” he swore. “I think…” He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate. The gunfire continued, as the rest of the alien force died.

It was nearly over. In the early stages of the war, the aliens had expanded away from the ship, foraging for food—and breeding, planting cocoons in stands of trees and lowland marshes, spreading their own insidious vegetation. The cocoons contained fetal aliens which absorbed the vegetation around them for nourishment.

Not long after Dikembe returned, the tide had begun flowing the other way. The cocoons were hacked to pieces, the alien flora burned, the perimeter of their occupation pushed steadily back. Now the creatures had been driven back almost to the ship.

For Dikembe and Bakari, their present mission was to reconnoiter the west, to make certain they wouldn’t have any nasty surprises when they made their final push, which was planned to begin a few days from now.

But something was wrong.

Dikembe stepped to the edge of the slope they had just come up, and looked down.

At first he thought it was nothing, just the wind rustling the grass.

But it was no wind.

There were hundreds of them, maybe every single remaining alien, and they were coming from every direction. The mass of them had kept their distance, so he had only sensed the nearer ones. The bait.

They swarmed up the hill in a constricting ring. It looked as if someone had kicked open a termite mound in reverse. The aliens ran up the slope, and they died by the dozens. Dikembe fired his rifle until it felt like it was going to melt in his hands, until at last a mass of aliens breached their lines, screeching and scrambling over soldiers, the viridian flash of energy weapons everywhere. He dropped his rifle and drew his machetes. Hitting an alien in the middle of the head, he split it open, revealing a smaller, more delicate head inside. He slashed his weapon into it.

Bakari was behind him, cutting like a dervish.

The thing to do was to get behind them, cut their tentacles off at the source and then split the unseen seam of their exoskeletons. Dikembe had become quite good at it, but now the press was too great to maneuver.

He and Bakari managed to rally the remaining men into a fighting square, a formation at least as old as ancient Greece. Those on the front of each line knelt and cut at the aliens’ legs, while the second rank slashed at the horrid, mouthless faces. Still there were too many of them. They plucked men from the square and hurled them back to their comrades behind them. They snapped arms and broke necks. Bodies piled so thickly that footing became first difficult, then impossible.

Eventually, the square fell apart, and it was Dikembe and Bakari alone, back to back.

Suddenly, the aliens drew back, leaving the two brothers panting, standing amid the foul-smelling corpses. To his horror Dikembe looked around and saw that everyone else was dead.

Then he realized that wasn’t true. Two other men still lived. Both were wrapped tightly in alien tentacles. One of them was Pierre, a man from Gara village. The other was Zuberi. Pierre opened his mouth. What came out was a human voice—Pierre’s voice—but with a distinctly alien intonation.

“You are alike,” Pierre said.

Two dozen energy weapons were trained on them.

“We are twins,” Dikembe answered.

“Don’t,” Bakari cautioned. “Tell them nothing.”

“Two minds, much alike,” the possessed Pierre continued. “Sons of the leader.”

“Why aren’t we dead?” Dikembe whispered to his brother.

“I don’t know,” Bakari said, “but I don’t like it.”

“The leader must die,” Pierre said.

Bakari frowned. “I don’t like this at all,” he said. “Are you ready, brother?”

“I suppose,” Dikembe sighed.

“I love you, Dikembe,” Bakari said. “I’m proud to die with you.”

“What do you mean?” Dikembe said, lifting his chin and waving contemptuously at the enemy. “Look at them. They don’t stand a chance.”

“Of course not,” Bakari agreed. “I’ll see you after, then. You bring the Scotch.”

Then they charged the aliens.

They didn’t get far. Dikembe’s mind filled with a thousand voices screaming for him to stop in his tracks. His mind fought, but his limbs succumbed. Then, mercifully, everything seemed to dissolve.

* * *

He woke surrounded by aliens, but he had been moved into the shade, on flat ground. In the distance, he saw rain moving across the savanna, slanted streaks of gray against a yellow sky. Nearer, a herd of wildebeest grazed as if nothing unusual was happening.

Then he understood what was casting the shadow.

The ship, rising above them, unimaginably huge. If he didn’t know what the alien craft looked like from television—if he hadn’t seen this one from afar—he knew he would never even be able to guess at its shape, any more than a flea in the folds of an elephant’s skin could comprehend the appearance of the entire animal. They were near one edge of it, and from there it seemed like a vast gray sky that faded in the distance behind them.

Bakari sat to his left, Zuberi across from him.

“What’s going on,” Dikembe groaned. “What are they doing with us?”

“Waiting for us to wake up, I think,” Zuberi said.

The words had hardly fallen from his mouth when Dikembe felt a tentacle wrap around his neck. He grasped it with both hands, but it might as well have been made of steel for all that it gave to his strength.

His entire body suddenly felt pins and needles.

Then the pins and needles pushed all the way to his bones, and he was distantly aware of his own voice, a thing apart from his body, a scream that was like a living thing. The pain was like nothing he had ever felt before; it was total, without relief. His blood vessels were rivers of fire, his marrow was magma. He felt his skin splitting like an overcooked sausage and his flesh liquefying. A thousand voices mocked him, insisting he was nothing, lower than the lowest worm. He hoped only for death, for the release it would bring.

When oblivion finally arrived, he was grateful.

* * *

He woke, still in the shadow of the ship. His body was whole, untouched, but he still remembered its destruction.

Bakari was awake also, starring at him, glassy-eyed.

“Why?” Dikembe managed to wrench out. His throat was raw, and when he spat, his phlegm was bloody.

“They tortured all of us,” Bakari said. “And then they released Zuberi.”

“They’re trying to make Papa come here,” Dikembe suddenly understood. “They think if they kill him, this will end, and they will be unopposed.”

“I believe you’re right,” Bakari said.

“He’ll know it’s a trap,” Dikembe said. “He won’t be stupid enough to come himself. The smart thing would be to use our remaining surface-to-surface missiles to take all of this out.”

“That would kill us, too,” his brother said.

“We’re dead already,” Dikembe replied.

Bakari started a reply, but instead his eyes went wide.

“No!” he said. “Not again!”

Then the tentacles wrapped around their necks once more, and the pain became everything.

* * *

David managed to keep it in until they got home and he had mixed himself a gin and tonic. When Connie came in to sit with him, he had to let it out.

“You knew!” he said. “You knew they were going to ambush me with this.”

“I hardly think asking you to be the director of the organization you want them to build for you constitutes an ‘ambush,’” she said, sipping her Scotch calmly.

“It’s not about me,” he said. “That’s the point.”

“Oh, David, come on. You’re like a kid in the biggest toy box in the world. You’re loving it.”

“Sure,” he said. “But director? That’s politics. That’s bureaucracy. That’s red tape. That’s not the toy box.” He frowned. “Is this the thing again? You always wanted me to be a part of something bigger, more important. I have to be director of an international agency now?”

“David,” she said, “I’m not pushing you into anything. You saved the world. I don’t think you have anything to prove to me or anyone else. But I do think you would make a hell of a director.”

He absorbed that, feeling a bit sheepish.

“You did know they were going to spring this on me, though.”

“I suspected,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“You should have told me,” he said.

It wasn’t often he couldn’t read Connie at all, but this was one of those times, and he was suddenly very, very worried.

“Well,” she said quietly. “You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

He sat up straighter. “What? About what?”

“I quit my job,” she said.

“I may be having a stroke,” he said. “It sounded like you just said you quit your job.”

She smiled and shifted forward in her chair. “David, whatever issues you ever had about me working for Tom—you should have gotten over that by now.”

“Over, yes, completely,” he said.

She gave him the look.

“Okay,” he said. “Some reservations. About the secret stuff.”

She smiled and nodded. “I’ve been ready to move on for a while,” she said, “but after the Fourth he needed me more than ever. Everyone was gone. But now…”

“Now what?” he asked. Then he saw it.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

BOOK: Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel)
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