Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (13 page)

“He just walked in, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did,” Charlie replied in a wary tone.

Wonderful
, Jake thought.
All I want to do is get on with my life, and I can’t even do that because Captain Perfect has to drag his ass all the way to the Moon and show up in my mess hall.
He’d known it was coming, but it didn’t make it any easier.

He didn’t want to make a scene, though, and he didn’t want to be a drag on the squadron’s big moment. The best thing to do was leave.

“You’re not gonna finish this?” Charlie asked as Jake got up. He didn’t wait for an answer, grabbing Jake’s carton of milk. “This is the only thing I’m gonna miss from this cold rock,” he said, and he downed it.

Jake had to pass near Dylan to get out of the mess hall, but he kept his eyes straight ahead and pretended he wasn’t seeing anything.
Don’t mind me
, he thought.
Just the loser making way for his famous one-time friend.
It didn’t work out that way.

Dylan stepped right in front of him. He didn’t say anything, just stood there.

Jake stopped. The mess hall chatter stopped as everyone present saw the two of them, face to face. They all knew the story. It was legendary among ESD spacers, and had percolated out from there. Jake felt like it followed him around, and would his whole life.

He’d had it. He’d tried to do the right thing and leave, and here was Dylan, deliberately not letting it go. Hadn’t he already won? He was flying point on Legacy Squadron, and Jake was a mailman. Did he have to show Jake up now, in front of the people he had to work with?

This wasn’t Dylan’s world. He was a famous tourist here, but when he was gone, Jake would still have to deal with everyone watching on a daily basis. He’d have to hear their snide comments and feel their scorn.

All right
, he thought, when Dylan kept staring at him and standing in his way.
If this is the way you want it, this is the way we’ll do it.

“Mind moving?” he asked quietly. “We both know what happens when you get in my way.”

Dylan kept his eyes locked on Jake’s for a long moment. He bit his lip. Jake could have turned around, gone the long way, past the other tables—but he wasn’t going to do that. He’d committed. He’d called out the star of Legacy Squadron, and he wasn’t backing down. Not now.

Jake never saw the punch coming, but he felt it. A light flared in his head and he felt himself hit the floor hard. It was a good shot, a straight right to the face. Jake tasted blood. Then he sat up, and saw Dylan staring down at him.

“Been waiting a long time to do that,” Dylan said.

Charlie had seen the whole thing and now he ran over and helped Jake get to his feet. Jake shrugged him off, not wanting Dylan to see how badly the punch had shaken him. He could barely keep his legs under him, but that wouldn’t last.

“Morrison!” Commander Lao stood in the doorway. Jake didn’t know how much he’d seen. “What’s going on here?”

He walked up to Jake, standing next to Dylan. Both of them stared hard.

It felt just like it had when everyone had blamed him for the tug crash. Nobody cared about the burst of white noise that crippled the tug, and nobody was going to care that Dylan had started this just to show him up. It didn’t matter. When you were Dylan Hiller, you got your way.

“I asked you a question!” Lao snapped.

“These floors are really unpredictable,” Jake said evenly. “Be careful, sir.” He turned slightly. “Dylan, great seeing you.”

He could feel his lip swelling. It was split pretty good. Jake wiped the blood away and started for the door, brushing past Dylan on the way. He could have sworn he saw regret on Dylan’s face, but it didn’t matter.
Whatever.
Jake was going to take his fat lip back to his room, crank up some tunes, and contemplate life.

Blamed for the cannon accident even though he’d saved everyone’s lives, girlfriend mad at him, then his one-time pal busted his lip in front of all his coworkers… it had been a hell of a twenty-four hours.

“Captain Hiller,” he heard Lao say behind him. “I’m so pleased to have you here. I once had the honor to meet your father…”

Blah blah blah
, Jake thought. Lao would love this scenario. Captain Perfect shows up the chump who once imagined he might be a space pilot too, but couldn’t even fly a tug. But everyone was wrong about Jake.

One of these days, maybe he’d show them.

Charlie gave Jake a little while to cool off—by which he meant sulk—and then he headed back to their quarters to do what he privately called a “Jakervention.”

Jake was a good guy. Charlie liked him, and admired him, and certainly owed him for the way he’d helped him out back when they were kids. Jake had been a big brother to Charlie when the kid had badly needed one. But Jake also needed to get out of his own head once in a while. He got all wrapped up in self-pity sometimes, and it was up to Charlie to get him out.

So he kicked around the base, checking out the knockout Chinese pilot. Rain Lao. What a name. What a woman. The fact that she was Commander Lao’s niece deterred Charlie not one bit. Maybe she was out of his league, but how would he know until he gave it a try? It was the truest thing anyone had ever said to him.

“You gotta shoot to score.”

That was one of the volunteers back at the orphanage, on one of the occasions when they’d dragged all the kids out to get some exercise. Charlie liked playing soccer, but he wasn’t very good at it, and after he’d had a couple of chances to score and muffed them badly, he’d stopped trying. He passed every time. Finally the volunteer, an older guy named Leonardo, came over to him.

“Oye, Charlie,” he said, “you gotta shoot to score, man. Don’t you ever want to score?”

Charlie did. After that, he’d still been lousy at soccer, but he’d decided it was better to try and fail than not try at all. That was one of the few life lessons he’d taken away from the orphanage.

Most of the others had to do with Jake—and later, Dylan and Patricia. So here he was trying to help. He opened the door and saw Jake staring at the wall. Music was playing in the background, some classic rock tune from thirty years before Charlie was born, and on the screen was the helmet-cam footage from the accident. Jake always watched it when he was depressed. Charlie knew it by heart at this point—Jake cutting too close on Dylan’s left, the sharp metallic bang of their wingtips touching, then Dylan shouting that he was ejecting…

Charlie waited until it was over. Then before Jake could start the video over again, he spoke up.

“You okay?”

Jake didn’t say anything. This was bad. He’d had a rough couple of days, what with the tug incident and now the Dylan thing.

“I was so close to punching him back,” Charlie said, making a fist.

“I think you made the right choice,” Jake said, with a ghost of a smile.

Aha
, Charlie thought.
Progress.
He plopped next to Jake on the couch. “When is he gonna let it go? It was a training accident. I mean, yes, you did almost kill him, but that’s why they have ejection seats.”

“I went too far,” Jake said softly. “I just wanted it so bad.”

“It was never gonna be you. The world doesn’t work like that. He’s—” Charlie couldn’t find the word right away. What did you call a guy like Dylan Hiller? “He’s royalty. We’re just orphans, Jake.”

Charlie knew Dylan had lost his father, too, and then his stepfather. His life hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries—but there was a long, long distance between having a heroic pilot adopt you and see you through to adulthood, and the kind of childhood Jake and Charlie had experienced.

“When they dropped me off at camp,” Jake said slowly, “the last thing I said to my parents was that I hated them. Two days later, L.A. was incinerated. They saved my life.”

There were a lot of ways to go with that, Charlie thought. Jake’s parents hadn’t meant to save his life, after all. They’d just wanted him to go to camp. Charlie hadn’t even been at camp. He’d been a toddler at day care when the aliens killed his parents at their jobs. He and Jake had met at an orphanage school, Jake with his big dreams and Charlie just trying to survive. He was small, and smart, and maybe had a bit of a big mouth, and life at the orphanage was hell.

Then one day Jake was there, chasing away the worst of the bullies. He was that rare thing in Charlie’s life, a big strapping kid who also had a big heart. Once Jake got involved, the worst of the bullying stopped. Charlie could go through his days without fear of being beaten, or worse. In return, he’d figured out something he could do to help Jake.

Study. Jake had dreams of being a pilot but the top-flight—so to speak—tech schools weren’t exactly trolling the orphanages for their next generation of the best and brightest. Still the dream kept Jake going, so Charlie jumped in. And it worked! Jake got into the Area 51 flight-prep academy.

The problem was, Charlie hadn’t finished school yet. If Jake left him at the orphanage, Charlie was going to be in for a serious shit storm. Five years’ worth of stored-up frustration his tormentors were just waiting to take out on him. So Jake came through again.

He found a place where they both could live, and Charlie found his way into the Academy’s engineering track. After that, they’d been inseparable. Jake had saved Charlie, Charlie had saved Jake.

Then the Dylan Hiller thing had happened.

It was stupid, but they’d both been stupid. A simple exercise, scored by the observing officers deciding which cadets would move on to the next round of Legacy Squadron training. Jake tried to cut in on Dylan as they flew through a canyon, and in the ensuing collision Dylan nearly died. Because Jake was Jake and Dylan was Dylan, guess which one of them got scrubbed out of the higher program, and reassigned to space tugs?

The orphan without the famous last name.

To be fair, it
was
Jake’s fault. He should have yielded and taken his chance the next time they ran the drill. Problem was, Jake wanted the win as badly as Dylan, and he had a chip on his shoulder as big as his whole life. He was
never
going to back down.

Things had ended with a hundred-million-dollar burning wreck, and everyone had pointed fingers at Jake. Competitive fire was part of the pilot personality, but Jake had gotten carried away, and he knew it.

The worst thing about it was that it had ended their friendship. They’d all been friends. Jake, Charlie, Dylan, and Patricia Whitmore—who also wanted to be a pilot. She was already gone before the Dylan incident, dropping out to take care of her father, but her relationship with Jake had survived. So had her friendship with Dylan.

For a while, they’d been a fine little surrogate family, Charlie thought. But then…

That got him thinking about parents again. About how neither he nor Jake had any, and what Jake had just said about how his parents had saved his life.

“I’m glad they did,” Charlie said. “’Cause you’re the only family I got.”

Jake nodded. He was too far down to perk all the way back up, but Charlie could tell he was helping. So, true to form, he started joking around before everything got too serious.

“And don’t beat yourself up, man,” he added. “Enough people are doing that already.”

Then Jake
did
smile.
There we go
, Charlie thought.
Another successful Jakervention.

After they’d spent all night trying to figure out what was going on in the newly reawakened alien destroyer, Dikembe brought them back to his house. All of them were still riding the wave of energy from their discoveries. David knew he should be tired—he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours—but sleep could wait. His brain needed to solve problems, not dream.

Catherine, of course, related everything they’d seen to her scholarly work on the alien consciousness and its relationship with the human mind. As they walked from the two trucks toward Dikembe’s compound, the monumental shape of the alien destroyer casting a long shadow over the savanna, she brandished her tablet at him, pointing at a series of drawings.

“This symbol comes up more than any other I’ve encountered,” she said. “Look at the similarities. How can you not see the relevance?”

The symbol in question was a circle with a sharp line cutting through it. She was right, they had seen it up in the ship, but David wasn’t a psychologist. He was more interested in hard data, and in actual machines.

“It’s not that I don’t see it,” he said as they kept walking. “I just feel like there are more pressing matters than analyzing, uh, doodles. You know, like a giant spaceship turning back on.”

He could tell that she was irritated by the word “doodles,” but as far as David was concerned, that’s what they were. Sure, people were affected by the alien presence in their minds. And sure, they tended to draw the same things, over and over. But that was standard obsessive behavior—a response to frightening or incomprehensible stimuli. It might not be related to the aliens at all. It might be an artifact of how the human brain processed the alien telepathy.

That’s what he’d said to her back at the xenology conference in Lisbon, and again in French Guiana. She’d been irritated then, too. Something had interrupted them. David couldn’t remember what, until the expression on Catherine’s face triggered the memory.

It was a pilot, the famous Chinese one. Rain Lao, that was her name. She and another pilot were flying around the Earth in a publicity stunt to raise support for Earth Space Defense’s research activities. The other pilot’s propulsion system failed as they were approaching reentry. Rather than leave him to die, Lao had pulled off something David wouldn’t have thought possible. She’d matched the falling fighter’s speed, nudged herself underneath it, and then decelerated slowly and smoothly enough that both aircraft survived reentry.

They had both crashed, somewhere in Montana, but since they both survived that had only added spice to the story. Legacy Squadron heroics, before Legacy Squadron was even put together.

Anyway, Catherine had been frowning at him in the same irritated—
and, let’s face it, beguiling
—way when the video feeds in the conference bar area had cut away to Lao’s daring rescue.