Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (17 page)

Now they were seeing it.

Cutting back to the studio, the Fox broadcast settled on the anchor, who couldn’t resist a little quip.

“It seems that Independence Day has come one day early—”

Whitmore shut the TV off.

“It wasn’t them,” he said in the silence that followed.

Patricia was wary about this topic, knowing how apt her father was to fall into one of his fugues. “You can’t know that for sure,” she said gently. It would be better for all of them if he could feel secure. When he got worried, that made his episodes worse.

Also, she was sure
it had been
them. How likely was it that another alien race had chosen the twentieth anniversary of the War of ’96 to show up? The coincidence was too hard to believe.

“Sir,” Travis said, glancing at his watch. “It’s time for your meds.”

“I don’t need any goddamn meds!” Whitmore snapped. Then he lapsed into silence, sitting on his bed and staring off into space. It struck Patricia how old he looked, how far removed from the powerful figure who had led, not just the United States, but the entire human race through the War and its aftermath.

“Can you give us a minute?” she asked Travis.

He left, shutting the door quietly behind him.

“You shouldn’t be wasting your time with a crazy old man,” Whitmore said when they were alone. “You should be with Jake.”

“He’s on the Moon, remember?” Patricia reminded him. She did want to talk to Jake. She felt bad about the way their last conversation had ended, and on top of that she wanted to know everything about what the cannon shot had looked like from the Moon Base. Jake had been in a front-row seat, and Patricia was a little bit jealous of that.

“Then you should be with the president,” her father said.

She sat by his side on the bed and smiled. “I am with the president—and you’re not crazy.”

He was visibly struggling not to fall into his visions again. She knew the expression on his face—that haunted anticipation that made him look even more haggard than worry and long-term lack of sleep. It got worse late at night, like now, when he was tired from the day. She hoped he would sleep tonight.

“I’ve seen it in my dreams,” he said softly.

“That’s all they are,” Patricia said. “Just dreams.”

“No, Patty, they’re coming back,” he said, and he was fully present again. He looked her in the eye and added, “And we won’t be able to beat them this time.”

She thought of all the drawings he’d made over the years, the circle with a line through it. He had seen the ship in those dreams, and he had been correct. The ship shot down over the Moon had looked just like that. Realizing this, Patricia grew uncertain. If her father’s vision of that ship had been true, was he also right that the ship was different—and that the real menace was still out there?

Could that be?

Watching her father lost in his thoughts, Patricia felt the celebratory mood ebb away, replaced by a foreboding she didn’t want to feel but suddenly could not shake.

Tomorrow was Independence Day.

Albert Lemieux paused in his work to take in the peak of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, looming over the horizon to the east of the Earth Space Defense base he had been building for the last three years.

It was a sight he never tired of seeing, because the mountains reminded him of home. He had grown up in Grenoble, hiking and skiing the Alps, taking the cable car up to the old Bastille fort and the caves that riddled the mountainsides there, imagining he was a bandit hiding out from the King’s soldiers. That sense of adventure had never left him.

He had taken to the skies as a pilot, then to space as an astronaut, and after surviving the destruction of Paris during the War, Albert had joined the newly formed Earth Space Defense the moment it had been internationalized. Through the years he had worked on successive generations of spacecraft designed at first for near-Earth operations… then Moon landings and return… and then, at last, voyages to Mars.

When Albert saw Olympus Mons, he imagined future generations of children growing up on its slopes the way he had grown up on the slopes of the Chartreuse Mountains. The aliens had tried to destroy Earth, but instead in their defeat they had given humanity a great gift. They had left behind the technology that unlocked space, and now Albert was living the life of his dreams. Mars!

Even though he wasn’t flying now, he still felt the sense of adventure. Three years on Mars hadn’t dulled Albert’s sense of the marvelous. He was millions of kilometers from home, building a defense outpost that would oversee this part of the solar system the way Grenoble’s Bastille had once overseen the Isère River. He was part of the grand enterprise of space exploration, and if that meant he spent some of his days leveraging pieces of steel and polymer into place, Albert had no problem with that whatsoever. He loved what he did.

Today he was part of a crew tasked with finishing the clamp assemblies on a turret mount that one day would hold a cannon identical to the one that yesterday had shot down the alien vessel approaching the Moon. Like every other human being in possession of a computer, Albert had seen the video, over and over, hardly able to believe his eyes. The reappearance of the aliens gave urgency to his work, but the success of the defensive action gave him confidence that the human race would repel any new full-scale invasion. The aliens would find that the human race of 2016 was much better prepared than the human race of 1996—and after all, hadn’t they won in 1996 even without the benefit of the aliens’ own technology?

Humanity stood on the edge of a new golden age. Albert felt privileged to be part of it.

He thought again of the brilliant green flare and the explosion when the cannon blast hit the alien ship, and he got goose bumps inside his space suit. He wanted to watch the video again and feel the fierce joy that he had felt when he saw it the first time. Instead, he climbed back up into the open driver’s platform on the crane he operated every day, and swung its arm around so the rest of the crew could attach a huge hydraulic joint for the last of the clamps. In another week or so, the turret mount would be ready.

The delivery of the cannon was scheduled for August 1.

Then any new aliens would have not just the Moon, and the orbital satellite cannons, but Mars to contend with. By New Year’s Day of 2017, Rhea Base would be online, giving humankind a defense presence beyond the Asteroid Belt.

Albert wondered if the aliens on board the ship shot down last night had been able to send a signal home. The scientists at Area 51 were still trying to understand how it had appeared out of space. The working hypothesis was via a wormhole, but as far as Albert knew, no scientific team had salvaged wormhole creation technology from any of the alien ships. That wasn’t entirely surprising, since ESD guarded the details of its research quite jealously until they were ready to release them to the public.

But people were people. They tended to talk, and although Albert had conversed with the Russians who stopped on their way to Rhea, and the Chinese on the Moon while Albert was there on his way to Mars—and the American staff coordinating the base construction from Area 51—he had never heard a whisper concerning wormholes.

Maybe that technology would turn up when ESD investigators got a look at the crashed ship on the far side of Earth’s Moon. Albert hoped so. That would mean he could live to see humankind, not just spreading into the solar system, but beyond. Into the stars! Was he too old to sign up for that? Not a chance.

In any case, if the aliens had sent a message back, Albert hoped it had been simple.

Steer clear. They were ready for us.

Because we were
, Albert thought proudly,
and we get more and more ready every day.

A shadow passed over him. That was odd. There were no transports scheduled to arrive near this time, and in any case their landing paths never took them over the construction site. Albert couldn’t look up at it. He had the hydraulic joint on the end of his crane arm, and it was a delicate operation to get it into place.

The shadow did not disappear.

Uneasy, Albert realized that only something massive could be causing it. Either of Mars’s moons—Deimos or Phobos—would have passed by now. So what was it? The crew on the turret mount looked up. So did Albert.

When he saw what was casting the shadow, his unease turned to terror. Reflected in the visor of his helmet, a green glow began to build.

On the morning of July 4, Independence Day, Milton Isaacs showed up early for his rotation because he had a gift for Brakish. He’d been working on it for some time, and had finished in time to bring it in on the big day—the celebration of twenty years since the decisive battle in the War of ’96.

The occasion was a somber one for Milton, because every anniversary of the war also marked another year that Brakish had remained in a coma, all but lost to him.

He produced the gift with a flourish, even though he knew Brakish wasn’t looking. It was a scarf. A silly thing, maybe, but he had brought Brakish so many plants that the hospital room was starting to look like a greenhouse. Also, Isaacs recently had taken up a variety of different arts and crafts activities to pass the time he spent alone. He was now a competent potter, an enthusiastic woodworker, and when he looked at the scarf he thought maybe he had a little talent for knitting, too.

Of course, he would never say that out loud. Not unless someone else said it first.

Isaacs lifted Brakish’s head just enough to get the scarf under his neck. He swept aside the long hair, now completely gray, moving it out of the way, and then set his head back on the pillow. He tucked the scarf around Brakish’s neck just right, and knotted it in the European style.

“I took a knitting class,” he said. He’d selected the yarn carefully to go with Brakish’s complexion, and he thought it looked very distinguished—not that things like that had ever concerned Brakish. The only thing he was vain about was his hair. Clothes, shoes, everything else a human being might put on his body, all of them were afterthoughts. Indeed, what mattered to Brakish was his work.

Suddenly Isaacs was worried that the scarf would irritate Brakish’s neck.

“Is it itchy?” he asked. “You’d tell me if it was itchy, right? I won’t be offended.”

Brakish sat bolt upright in bed, screaming.

Isaacs screamed, too.

First in fear, and then out of the raw emotion of seeing consciousness return to the man he still loved after twenty years. A thousand things went through his mind all at once, but first among them was the simple astonished thought that he had never really believed this day would come. He’d told himself it would, told other people it would, but when he was alone at night and there was no one who needed him to put on a brave face, Milton Isaacs had privately admitted to himself that Brakish was probably gone forever.

Only he wasn’t.

Isaacs’ eyes filled with tears.

“You’re awake?” he said, even though it was so obvious as to be stupid.

Still coming to his senses, Brakish looked at him and asked a question that in three words encapsulated all of the time they had missed.

“Did we win?”

Oh my God
, Isaacs thought.
He’s really back.
He shouted out of the door to a passing nurse. “Eric, get a medical team! He’s awake!” Then he turned back to Brakish, who was staring around the room wide-eyed and with a dazed grin, as if he was remembering a crazy dream—which maybe he was. Isaacs couldn’t wait to hear about it.

“That was a trip,” Brakish said. “Where are my glasses? I can’t see anything.”

His glasses were right on the side table next to his bed, where they had been for twenty years. Isaacs polished their lenses once a week because when they got dusty it made him miserable to think of them not being used. He had just polished them the day before, in fact. Now he handed them to Brakish, so filled with gratitude that he could do this simple little thing that his hands shook and he started to cry again.

“Here.”

Brakish put them on and looked around the room before settling his gaze on Isaacs.

“How long have I been out?” he asked, his tone full of wonder as he looked Isaacs up and down.

“A long time.”

It was all Isaacs could say. He was too overwhelmed to get into the details, and he was trying to keep the doctor part of him from being affected. If he told Brakish that the coma had lasted twenty years—
to the day
—the psychological impact could be unpredictable at best.

Better to ease into it.

Which Brakish did, and quickly. “Yeah, I can tell, baby,” he said. “You got bald. And really fat.”

Well
, Isaacs thought, but he couldn’t find a reply. That cheerful candor was something he certainly hadn’t missed. Except he had.

Abruptly Brakish looked concerned, and he reached up to his own head. When he felt his hair, and ran his fingers down its length to his shoulders, a look of pure relief washed over his face.

Same old Brakish
, Isaacs thought.
Calls me bald, and then worries about his own hair.

He was the happiest man on Earth.

* * *

Tugs like Jake’s took a long time to drag a cannon up and out of Earth’s gravity well, then to the Moon. Unencumbered, however—and piloted with a certain, um, zeal—one could get from the Moon back to Earth in a matter of hours.

With Charlie sitting nervously at his side, Jake brought the tug through a long approach, hitting Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over Baja California.

“Lao’s never gonna let you make this run again, you know that, right?” Charlie said it out loud, over and over again before they left, until Jake had to snap at him that he didn’t have to come.

“Of course I’m coming,” Charlie replied. “I just need to know you’ll take the blame if we get caught.”

“No problem,” Jake said. So far everything he’d tried to do right had gotten him in trouble anyway. He figured he might as well try to do something wrong, and see if people would like it.