Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (19 page)

The crowd went nuts. “How’s it looking up there, Captain Hiller?” President Lanford said, her voice booming over the speakers.

As soon as she finished the question, the huge screen switched feeds again. Now everyone on the National Mall witnessed a live feed from the cockpit of Dylan’s fighter.

“It’s truly humbling to see how beautiful Earth is from here, Madam President,” Dylan replied.

Good kid
, Whitmore thought.
He says the right things, and he means them.
His dad had been a real pilot. That was the highest compliment Whitmore could give. He’d reached the front of the crowd now, at the Capitol steps, tired and a little overwhelmed by the noise and the spectacle, but he had to talk to President Lanford.

He had to.

He picked out a Secret Service agent near the cordon holding the audience back from the president’s podium. The agent recognized him, waved him over, and called in support. A moment later, Whitmore was surrounded by Secret Service, keeping his immediate vicinity clear as he got the rest of the way through the throng of the crowd.

Some people noticed him, recognized him despite the beard, the bedraggled clothes, and the wild look in his eyes. One man said his name. It spread. Soon enough hundreds or thousands of people shouted “Whitmore!”

Whitmore!

Whitmore!

Lanford noticed. She nodded and signaled the Secret Service agents to get him up on the steps so he could stand with her on the speaker’s dais. As he stepped onto the dais, Lanford abandoned her prepared remarks. She leaned into the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, another great war hero. The one and only President Thomas Whitmore!”

The people went wild. Whitmore stepped forward, feeling the heat of their admiration and knowing that everyone was going to think he was crazy. But he was old enough now. He could take it.

He had to tell them. The information he possessed could mean the difference between life and death.

“We’re coming up on the Van de Graaff Crater,” Jake said as the tug skimmed low over the far side of the Moon. They’d successfully used the old mother ship debris field to sneak past Lao’s surveillance. Now they just had to… well, find whatever David thought he was looking for, and then figure out what to do next.

Although it was called the “dark side of the Moon,” it wasn’t always dark out here. People called it that because it could never be seen from Earth, but sometimes the sun shone out here. Morrison guided the tug over the rim of the crater, which was more than two hundred kilometers long and four deep. Actually it was two craters overlapping to form kind of a figure-eight shape, and—

“There it is,” David said eagerly, as the wreckage of the downed alien ship appeared scattered across the crater’s rocky floor. The ship had broken apart upon crashing, and David realized how huge the task was they had set for themselves. The debris covered dozens of square kilometers, and without any idea what they were looking for, it might be impossible to prove that the ship came from a different culture than the aliens who had tried to exterminate humanity.

That was science, though—looking for subtle clues hidden in oceans of noise. Jake landed the tug he and David suited up, and out they went onto the surface.

“First walk?” Jake asked him.

David shook his head, then realized Jake couldn’t see the gesture because of their helmets.

“No,” David said. “Just never been to the dark side.”

They reached the debris field, and continued on together.

“What are we looking for?” Jake asked.

“I’m hoping we’ll know when we see it,” David said, which was just like him, and he knew it. Why couldn’t he just give a straight answer? Or maybe that was as straight an answer as he could give. After all, it was honest to admit when you didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.

* * *

Inside the tug, Dikembe was watching David and Jake work their way through the wreckage. Some of the pieces were the size of small buildings.

The accountant came up to him and glanced at the tattoo on his arm. It was an alien’s head, with notches below it in a series that went all the way down to his wrist.

“Nice ink,” Rosenberg said. “So all those notches represent alien kills, huh?”

Dikembe ignored him. He was more interested in what was happening outside, and in learning whether it would solve the mysteries locked away in his own mind.

“That’s impressive,” Rosenberg persisted. Then, when Dikembe kept watching David and Jake, he added, “Not much of a talker, are you?”

It was all Dikembe could do not to unsheathe one of his machetes.

* * *

David had answered Jake’s question truthfully, because he didn’t know what they were looking for. If this ship had been made by the aliens they already knew, he would recognize certain technological components he’d seen before. If not, there was no way to anticipate what pieces of wreckage might be useful or informative.

He poked around, seeing nothing resembling what he knew of the aliens’ tech, and growing more and more certain that President Lanford had made a mistake. Then something caught his eye.

“Catherine, I think I just found another one of your doodles,” David said as he made a complete circle around a large piece of wreckage. It was a framework of some kind, a cage, built into the external hull of the spherical ship. Inside it was a smaller sphere, partially exposed but to David’s hurried and untutored eye looking quite a bit like the large ship itself. It even had a line across it, blazing with the same blue energy as the larger ship.

Also like the larger ship, lights flickered across its surface. Whatever had befallen the rest of the vessel, this—device?—had survived. What was it? To find it intact was a great prize, assuming they could learn anything from it.

“David, we need to take it back with us,” Catherine said from the tug. He sized up the piece of wreckage and tried to match it against what he knew of the tugs’ thrust and carrying capabilities… Then he realized he was standing next to an expert. He turned to Jake.

“You think the tug could handle the weight of this whole section?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Jake said.

That was what David wanted to hear. “Charlie, tell Area 51 to prep the lab. We’re bringing this thing back to Earth.”

* * *

President Lanford stood respectfully aside as her distinguished predecessor climbed the Capitol steps and reached the podium.

“Why don’t you say a few words?” she prompted. Whitmore looked awful, like a homeless version of himself, but the decorum of the occasion demanded that she give him a voice if he wanted one. He was the hero here. She had pulled the trigger on the most recent alien ship, but if he hadn’t fought off the initial invasion, humanity wouldn’t have had the weapons to answer the aliens’ next incursion.

Whitmore stepped up to the microphone and the crowd went quiet, save for a low, expectant murmur.

“I—I just wanted to…” Whitmore began, then he trailed off. Beyond him, Lanford saw Patricia Whitmore and Agent Travis working their way through the crowd.

Good
, she thought.
With any luck he’ll say something inspiring and then they’ll get him out of here before people start asking too many questions.

From the crowd, someone screamed out, “We love you, Whitmore!” Whistles and clapping followed. Whitmore looked disoriented, uncertain…

Come on
, President Lanford thought.
Come on, Tom. Give them what they want.

Then out of the blue he grimaced and fell to his knees, grabbing at his head. Audible gasps came from the dumbstruck crowd. Lanford looked around for a doctor—there was always one on call when she made a public appearance. Patricia rushed out of the throng and up the steps, crying out for her father.

* * *

Dikembe dropped to his knees, hands pressed to the sides of his head, screaming in agony. Floyd stood frozen, not knowing what to do. Outside, Director Levinson and the pilot, Jake, were still hooking up the piece of wreckage. They didn’t appear to know anything was wrong.

“Um, Mr. Umbutu?” Floyd said.

Dikembe kept screaming.

* * *

In his hospital room within the Area 51 complex, Brakish Okun frantically scrawled symbols on the walls. He had to get them out of his head, out into the world where he could look at them and start to understand where they had come from.

He paused and stared at one of them—a circle with a line through it, the line slightly curved—when a white light flashed behind his eyes and crippling pain seized his brain.

Okun screamed and clutched at his head, the symbols forgotten and new visions stabbing into his mind.

* * *

A few hundred yards away from Okun’s room, in Area 51’s command center, Lieutenant Ritter approached General Adams with some bad news.

“Mars has gone silent like Rhea, sir,” he said quietly, and he touched the screen of a nearby terminal. “This was just uploaded from the Moon Base.”

On the screen, an image appeared like something out of humanity’s worst collective nightmare. It was an alien ship, and this time there could be no doubt. It was miles in diameter, a flattened disk like the city destroyers and the mother ship of the War of ’96—only bigger than any of them.

Much bigger.

Only a few hundred kilometers from the Moon.

“How the hell did we miss this?” General Adams said, as much to himself as to anyone else. Then he grabbed his phone and gave the order for Legacy Squadron to scramble. Earth’s orbital defenses had to be brought to bear.

War had come.

David and Jake felt rather than heard a low rumble building around them. The scattered debris of the alien ship started to shake and the dusty top layer of the regolith shook itself smooth, obscuring the footprints they had just made.

Then a shadow passed over them, plunging the wreckage site into darkness.

“Holy shit!” they heard Charlie say over the comm from the tug’s cockpit. Jake looked up and saw the alien ship, bigger than any city, bigger than any man-made object that had ever existed.

“Charlie, I think you better come and get us,” he said, trying to keep his cool. “Sooner the better, as in
right now
!” He and David started shoving at the piece of wreckage, seeing if they could get it loose enough to make sure the tug’s arms could grip it.

“Already on it,” Charlie called.

Jake and David watched the gigantic ship approach. It was… the brain couldn’t even handle how big it was. Watching it was like watching a moon loom over you, threatening to crush you, just getting bigger and bigger until it blotted out the entire sky and everything vanished behind it.

“This is definitely bigger than the last one,” David said.

The alien leviathan pushed into and through the old mother ship’s orbiting debris field, sending thousands of pieces of wreckage hurtling toward the lunar surface. Charlie had just lifted off as the first wave of debris began kicking up plumes of dust and stone around them. Some of the pieces were bigger than the tug.

“Everyone strap in, it’s gonna get rough!” Charlie called out.

From where Jake stood, the falling debris pushed ahead of the titanic ship looked almost like a solid wall approaching them. The tug was coming, but it wasn’t going to get there in time.

“Um, should we maybe start running?” David said.

“That’s probably a good idea!” Jake agreed, and he took off toward the tug with David right next to him, crossing the distance in huge Moon-gravity leaps with pieces of debris pounding down around them. “Charlie, where the hell are you?” he shouted.

“Just flying through my worst nightmare!”

A chunk of debris hit David in mid-leap, sending him careening out of control. Something was weird with the gravity and Jake realized that if he didn’t do something, the scientist might well fly away into space. He jumped from the top of a boulder and barely managed to get a grip on one of David’s feet. The two of them tumbled in slow motion back to the ground with more debris punching into the regolith around them.

“You okay?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” David said. “No. There’s, um… more!”

A huge piece of the mother ship hurtled toward them. Jake pulled David to his feet just as the space junk crashed down. The impact propelled both Jake and David up and away from the surface, spinning out of control—

This is how I die
, Jake thought, remembering again what Charlie had said. Only this time it was for real. They were going to float away into space like Major Tom, and that would be that.

Charlie had other ideas. He dipped and swerved through the nearest falling wreckage and swung the tug around so its ramp stuck out in front of Jake and David. “I got you!” he cried out.

They hit the ramp hard. Scrabbling madly, Jake managed to grab hold, but David was sliding off. Reaching out, Jake caught his hand and dragged him the rest of the way up into the cargo area.

“We’re in!” he shouted. “Close the ramp!”

The door closed, and the two of them took a moment to catch their breath. When he had composed himself, David looked over at his companion.

“But we’re going to get that one piece, right?”

Scientists
, Jake thought darkly.

* * *

Legacy Squadron was in the middle of a choreographed maneuver, preparing to fly their flags up and over the massive cannon turret, when Dylan saw the alien ship.

He knew right away what it was—the shape and the color of the lights were unmistakable. If there had been any doubt about the ship from last night, there was absolute certainty now. The immense object, hundreds of miles in size, loomed over the horizon, approaching from the far side of the Moon.

“All fighters take evasive action!” he ordered. As one the squadron jettisoned the flags and went into combat mode. Over the comm channel, tuned to a frequency shared by the president’s staff, he heard Secret Service agents shouting to get the president somewhere safe. In the background there was mass panic.

Humankind was beginning to realize what was coming.