Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (15 page)

“We need to cut the tour short,” he said.

“I’m sure it can wait,” Tanner said, annoyed that Adams had maneuvered him out of the pictures. Adams didn’t have time to deal with his love for the spotlight, though. The news from Saturn was much more important, and if he couldn’t get to the president directly, he was for damn certain going to make sure he got the information to her cabinet.

“I’m telling you, it can’t,” he said, and started toward the command center with a reluctant Tanner in tow.

* * *

David Levinson was hard at work trying to figure out exactly what Dikembe had learned from his study of the alien language. According to the warlord, the circle represented “fear.” As he considered the ramifications of that, Collins rushed into the room waving a tablet.

“Sir, this just came in.”

David glanced up, then took the tablet from Collins and looked closely at the image it displayed. It was Saturn. He could tell that much. The color, the striations on the surface—or what passed for a surface on a gas giant—those matched, but where he’d expected to see Saturn’s majestic ring system, and the dozens of moons and moonlets that orbited with it in a complicated gravitational dance…

All he saw was debris. The rings were torn into wisps of their former selves, scattered in long strands over thousands of miles of space—maybe millions of miles in some cases. David immediately tried to reverse-engineer what he saw, understand the process that had caused it, and he quickly understood that not only were the rings deformed, but some of the moons were gone. Or if not gone, definitely not where they were supposed to be.

What the hell could move a moon?

Catherine leaned in next to him.

“Is that Saturn?” she asked, her voice incredulous. “What happened to the rings?”

“A meteor, an asteroid maybe…” David trailed off. He knew that wasn’t the case. Passing asteroids cut through Saturn’s rings all the time. Most of them didn’t even leave a trace visible from Earth. The only thing that could have disrupted the rings like this, torn them apart across tens of thousands of miles…

Well, he didn’t know
what
could do something like that. A huge gravitational disturbance of some kind? But what would cause it? Maybe a collision between two of Saturn’s larger moons would have an effect like this, but none of Saturn’s moons had been on collision courses. On the other hand, if there was a passing body large enough to cause that kind of havoc, it would have been visible from Earth. Certainly it would have been visible from Rhea, well before the base there went silent.

A planetary-scale event like this should have been visible from Earth, and should have been predictable. Satellites and telescopes were constantly scanning the solar system for large rogue bodies. David checked quickly and confirmed what he already knew. There was nothing large and unaccounted-for near Saturn.

They were dealing with an unknown phenomenon, and one that had unleashed an incredible amount of power. All the energies of human civilization put together couldn’t have shredded Saturn’s rings this way.

So what had?

* * *

By the infernal glow of the emergency lights, Jake made his way from the hangar toward the command center. Was this the same thing that had happened yesterday, and shorted out his tug’s guidance system?

Maybe it was some kind of electromagnetic storm? They had monitors on the sun for solar storms and flares, but who knew what else was out there. The universe was big enough that there were probably a million different things capable of knocking out power—things that humankind hadn’t even thought of.

He got to the command center and saw half the tech crew pounding away at keyboards and touch screens, trying to get the power back on—and the other half staring out of the huge bay window. Jake looked that way, and couldn’t believe what he saw.

Just above the Moon’s surface, only a few miles from the base, the fabric of space itself looked like it was twisting. Something was happening to gravity, as well. The dust and heavier bits of regolith directly under the… whatever that thing was… spiraled up and were sucked into it. How was that possible in a vacuum? The disturbance had to have its own gravitation.

It might be a black hole. If a black hole was coming into existence, it would do exactly what they were witnessing. At least he thought it would, because black holes had basically infinite gravity, so as one grew from a tiny little pinpoint singularity, it would start eating up all the matter around it. Including ex-fighter cadets who crashed their tugs. Jake remembered Charlie shouting yesterday,
This is how I die!

Well, maybe it was. Charlie would know if this was a black hole. When it came to astronomical phenomena, Charlie had it all figured out.

The disturbance grew and took a shape like… what, a mouth? A hole of some kind. A few moments ago it had looked like a tear, but now whatever had caused the tear was ripping it wider open. But if space was ripping open, what the hell was going to be on the other side? Jake didn’t have the kind of mind that could easily come to grips with ideas like that. Charlie, he would already be spouting complicated formulas about string theory and wormholes or something. That was what he did.

Well, that and put the moves on unattainable women, Jake thought as he saw Rain Lao come into the command center. Dylan came in with her, a whole group of Legacy Squadron pilots entering together. For once Dylan didn’t look cocky. In fact he looked just like everyone else—nervous, confused, wondering what to do next. Jake could practically read his thoughts.

He would have bet everything he owned—not that he owned much—that Dylan was having to hold himself back from making a dash for the hangar to get his fighter off the ground. That’s what a pilot always wanted to do when things got uncertain. If you were flying, at least you could take action if action was needed. Then you could always land if it wasn’t.

But if you never took off, things had a way of running away without you and making you a spectator.

It occurred to Jake that there was some kind of life lesson in that, but then he saw Charlie and nodded toward the window. Charlie, taking in the sight, cut among the feverishly working technicians to stand next to Jake. Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t need to.

The storm intensified as the giant hole reshaped space around it. Larger rocks began floating up away from the Moon’s surface. It was definitely more whirlpool-like than it had been before. Was it going to suck all of them in? Or would it just spin in space, without influencing the gravity any more?

How did anybody here know what to do?

Jake watched the techs, wishing there was some useful action he could take. Scientists would be going crazy at this, like they always did when they saw something that disproved a bunch of stuff they’d always taken for granted. That was the scientist’s state of mind, always looking for the new thing that would make something else wrong. Jake wasn’t like that. Once he knew something, he liked it to stay true.

What he was seeing—that he didn’t like.

From the look of the command center crew, many of them felt the same way. Some were still working to get the main power back online, but more and more of them were joining the pilots and other outside crew, gazing at the strange phenomenon and wondering what it could be.

Lao had been commanding the tech crews, until he seemed to realize that whatever they were doing wasn’t working. He looked back out of the window and said something in Chinese. Jake had picked up a few words of the language during his time on the Moon, but he didn’t know exactly what Lao had said. The general tone of his voice was easy to interpret in any language, though.

What the hell is that?

Something began to take shape inside the anomaly. Jake watched and waited, a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. The twentieth anniversary of the start of the war was yesterday. This couldn’t be a coincidence. There was just no way.

And if it wasn’t a coincidence, then it was a damn good thing he’d wrecked his tug getting that cannon into place, Jake thought. Even if nobody was ever going to give him credit for it.

Then there was motion inside the anomaly. That was when things really started to get out of hand.

David was still trying to make sense of what he was seeing on the monitor when Collins called over to him.

“We have a priority feed from the Moon Base.”

“Put it on screen,” David said. A few keystrokes from Collins’ workstation transferred the feed to another monitor. David, Catherine, and Dikembe gathered to watch.

On the monitor, they saw a swirling vortex in space, seen from the Moon Base. Radiant colors crackled around the vortex’s core, and a long tendril of dust was visible trailing upward from the surface toward it. David instantly made the connection to Saturn’s rings. He looked back at that image, which still showed on another monitor.

Yes
, he thought. The rings had all been pulled out of alignment by a point-source attraction with a huge gravitational pull. Was the cause another spatial disturbance, like the one now active near the Moon?

If they were the same phenomenon, the lunar base could be in critical danger. Anything that could destroy Saturn’s rings could probably also reduce the Moon to a debris field. And what might it do to the Earth…?

He looked back to the feed as a motion caught his attention. From the vortex, a spherical shape emerged. The immense energies of the vortex flickered around it and then snapped away, like arcs of electricity, as it separated itself from the phenomenon and hung in space.

Several things occurred to David at once.

The first was that he had just seen empirical proof of the existence of wormholes. What else could it be? A hole opened up in space-time and a massive physical object passed through it. The sphere had to have come from somewhere. Either another point in the universe, or—the string-theory explanation—another universe. It didn’t matter really. The relevant fact was that the disturbance was a wormhole, and what had come through it was a spaceship.

The aliens were back.

Or were they? As David got a closer look at the ship, he saw that it didn’t resemble the aliens’ design in any way. They built in giant disk shapes, and this ship was spherical. The markings on the sphere’s hull were patterned differently, as well. The ship had a long, unbroken line of bright blue light along what would have been its equator if it were a world, extending halfway around its circumference. As it cleared the wormhole and began to turn, orienting itself toward the Moon, David caught a brief view of its other side, where a trio of circular thrusters glowed the same blue. From that angle it also appeared as if part of the ship’s hull was transparent, revealing complex machinery within.

Its orienting maneuver revealed something else to David—and more immediately to Dikembe.

“It was a spaceship,” the warlord said slowly, referring to the circle-and-line sketch he had drawn so many times over the years.

Colors began to cycle in a clear pattern on its surface. Some sort of communication? The aliens had never attempted that either. Or if it wasn’t a communication, what reason could there be for the change in hue?

David had too many questions, and no way to get the relevant answers. What he
could
do was loop in everyone else who needed to be part of the conversation, and fast, so they could at least be acting in concert. If this was the aliens returning, humanity needed to present a decisive and united front. If it was not—if this was another extraterrestrial race—the way forward was different, and much less certain.

Perhaps much more positive. Not all alien civilizations would be predatory. In any event, David had to speak to Adams, and if possible President Lanford.

“Patch me through to Area 51,” he said, not taking his eyes off the monitor, where the ship was now moving toward the Moon Base.

“You’re already on,” Collins said.

General Adams, Secretary Tanner, and the president appeared on another monitor. David could see from the background that they were all gathered in the command center at Area 51.

The president didn’t waste any time with small talk. “David, are you seeing this?”

“Yes, Madam President. I’m looking at it right now.” Next to him, Catherine was scrutinizing the ship’s light sequence on the monitor.

“It’s a pattern,” she said. “It’s repeating itself.”

David nodded. That’s what he’d thought too. “Yes, it is.” He looked into the camera feeding his image to Area 51 and said, “It looks like they’re trying to communicate.”

“They could be initiating an attack,” Tanner shouted. “We need to strike first!”

“Hold on a second,” David said, studying the ship. It was huge, fifty kilometers in diameter, according to the chatter from the Moon Base, and circular, which fit the aliens’ design, but there was something… He looked at it more closely, testing his initial impressions, realizing that whatever he decided in the next few moments might well have an impact on millions—or billions—of lives. No, he was sure. “The design, the tech, it looks completely different than the ones who attacked us.”

Tanner wasn’t buying it. “So they’ve upgraded!”

David leaned over to center himself in the viewing window. He’d anticipated that Tanner would want to shoot first and ask questions later, and the bellicose secretary was acting true to form. David needed to stake out his position, and insist on the credibility of the work he’d been doing since 1996.

“I know more about their technology than anyone else,” he said firmly. “To my eyes, I don’t think this is them.”

Tanner’s incredulous reply was again along the lines David had expected.

“We’ve spent the last twenty years building these weapons,” he said, looking furious, “and now you don’t want us to use them?”

That was the problem with men like Tanner, thought David. Because they had guns, they wanted to use them. It was the old saying come to life.
If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Adams cut into the conversation.