Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (33 page)

“Still alive!” Jake crowed as his vision cleared up and he realized the ships were still in one piece. Mostly. Some little bits were falling off, and there was more smoke than might be considered optimal. But, hey, it had worked!

Dylan was working the joystick. “Our controls are back.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “but our engines are fried.” The two fighters slowed, reached the peak of their climb… and began to fall back to Earth.

“So it’s a controlled dive,” Rain said, which just about summed it up.

* * *

Inside the command center, Adams knew the time had come. They couldn’t defend themselves anymore.

“Issue the evacuation order!” He turned to Catherine. “We have to go. Now.”

“What about the sphere?” she asked.

The look he gave her said it all. The sphere was lost. Maybe the war was lost, too.

* * *

David pulled the school bus to a halt at the Area 51 gates, watching as the alien queen tore into the building near where the destroyer cannon had fallen against it.

“That’s close enough!” Julius said.

“She’s going right for it,” David said. His mind raced, but he had no idea what they could do to stop her. If she’d survived the fusion bomb…

“Why are they turning into a tornado?” Daisy asked.

“They’re protecting her,” David said. All of them watched as more and more of the alien fighters were drawn into the protective vortex, spinning around the queen so fast that the attacking human jets couldn’t get at her.

If her shields were down, though, the queen was vulnerable, and she’d been damaged by the fusion blast—no question about that. How could they penetrate that wall of fighters? There had to be a way, and if there was, they needed to find it fast, because she would soon have the sphere.

She tore another chunk out of the roof, digging deeper into the prison wing’s interior. David knew the isolation chamber was reinforced, but it wouldn’t stop her for long. Their time was running out.

* * *

Okun was a man of science, a man who loved knowledge, who believed the best about people, and who now was so blindsided by grief that he had become a man possessed.

Milton was dead, after watching over him for twenty years, and Okun would never know anyone else like him. The loss tore a hole in him so wide and deep that the only thing capable of filling it was alien blood. He blasted away at the creatures even though he’d never held a gun in his life, watching each go down and moving on to the next. He exulted in every impact and every wound.

When they were all down, he shot their bodies, until at last he heard Dikembe next to him saying something. Okun stopped firing and heard what he was saying.

“It’s over, my friend.”

Yes it is
, Okun thought.
Everything is over.

“They’re dead!” Rosenberg was riding a wave of adrenaline. “We killed all of them!”

As he spoke, the ceiling of the room tore loose and daylight flooded in, along with a shower of concrete and steel debris. They turned toward the hole in the ceiling as a massive alien claw reached down into the isolation chamber and closed itself around the sphere.

“Except that one,” Rosenberg said.

Okun dropped his blaster. He didn’t care about anything anymore.

* * *

“My God,” David said, looking through a pair of binoculars he’d gotten from one of the campers. “She’s got it.”

He watched the queen hold the sphere up to her face. She had been hunting it for thousands of years, and now she held it in her hand—the last member of the species that had created her. Her mouth opened in what must have been the gruesome alien equivalent of a triumphant grin.

Then her head jerked up and David saw two of the alien fighters flash upward, tearing themselves free from the wall surrounding her. What was this? A mutiny? In a hive-mind organism? That wasn’t possible…

* * *

As they fell out of the sky, Jake spotted the queen. It was harder than he’d expected because of all the smoke and dust coming out of Area 51, drawn skyward by the vortex of fighters around her.

“There she is,” he said, pointing.

Dylan worked the joystick to angle the ship’s glide toward the queen. “We only get one shot at this,” he said. “Make it count.”

They lined up their shots, knowing the fate of the human race—of planet Earth itself—rested on their trigger fingers. The queen peered at a little shining metal sphere, almost like a marble…

Oh
, Jake thought.
That must be the thing Levinson wanted to get out of the wreckage.

“You didn’t die for nothing, Uncle Jin,” Rain said in Chinese. She held her ship steady, diving almost straight down.

“For my mom and dad,” Dylan said.

Jake flexed his fingers on the firing controls.

“For our families, Charlie.”

“For our families,” Charlie echoed.

The queen looked up at them as they fell into the wide upper eye of the tornado. Jake and Charlie knew they would never have a better shot than this one. At almost the same instant they started firing, their two ships strafing the queen down both sides of her armor. Explosions staggered her, and a moment later a much larger one blew out the back of the armor. The queen stumbled and leaned into the vortex as the two rogue fighters fell into it.

This was the tricky part. They had to pull out of the dive and make it through the wall in one piece.

“Keep shooting, Charlie!” Jake called out.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

They shot their way through the wall of the vortex and blasted back out again into the open air above the desert. Now their ships were a real mess, trailing pieces of wreckage and plumes of smoke.

“Mayday, mayday,” Jake said, while Dylan tried to keep their final glide as shallow and nonfatal as possible. “We are doing down… Charlie, does this thing have ejection seats?”

“Negati—”

“Let me see those!” Julius grabbed the binoculars from David and peered through them. “David, they’re shooting at themselves!”

The vortex slowed more, and began to lose cohesion. The two fighters that had broken free were now diving back down, their blasters tearing the queen’s armor apart. The gargantuan alien fell to her knees as a fireball blew the back of the armor out. The fighters shrieked overhead and disappeared into twin plumes of smoke, followed shortly by loud twin crashes.

Julius and David and all the children turned back just in time to see the alien queen pitch forward, hitting the tarmac outside the prison wing with a thunderous impact they thought they could feel even this far away.

* * *

The sphere bounced out of her grasp as Adams and Catherine ran out from the command center, the evacuation nearly complete. They saw the queen go down and lose the sphere, and they heard the cheers of the surviving ground troops. For a moment Adams let himself believe that it was over.

Only for a moment, though, because the queen’s armor fell away and she struggled out of it, oozing viscous fluid from a number of wounds but focused on one thing and one thing only—the sphere, still rolling across the pavement.

She staggered toward it, crawling with her head low to the ground, reaching out greedily, badly wounded but still dangerous. Looking beyond her, Adams saw a ship coming their way. Bigger than her personal ship, smaller than a city destroyer. She’d called a taxi, and was running like hell to reach it before the human forces could finish her off.

Suddenly, in between her and the ship…

Adams squinted out over the salt flats.

Was that a school bus?

* * *

The camp kids cheered when the queen went down, and then they went silent when she climbed out of her destroyed armor. They were
really
quiet as she reached her slimy claw toward the sphere.

“Oh, come on,” David said. “Not again.”

“Twenty seconds to Earth core breach,” a tech said from the command center.

“All right then,” David said. He watched the queen trying to get up. “No,” he said. “No, you’re not.” He slammed the bus into gear and stomped on the accelerator.

“Mr. Levinson,” Bobby said. “I think you’re going the wrong way.”

David kept the gas pedal jammed onto the floor and centered the queen in the windshield.

“David!” His father stared at him as if he’d finally lost it—and maybe he had, he mused. “A school bus full of children is not a weapon. David!
David!
”

Ten seconds
, David thought.
Maybe less now.

The queen looked up as the bus roared toward her. She was smaller now that she was out of her biomechanical suit, but still big enough that if she planted a foot on the bus, everyone inside would be crushed. Her head, though…

Five seconds.

The bus hit the sphere, knocking it away from the queen’s grasp. Then, a moment later, the vehicle hit the queen’s head, exceeding its state-mandated maximum speed of sixty-five miles per hour. Not as fast as David would have wanted to go but, as it turned out, sixty-five miles per hour was more than enough to explode the head like a watermelon dropped off the Empire State Building.

Viscous goo in various shades of green and blue splattered the windshield and bits of the queen slid down the windows. David took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. Julius peered through the goo, and behind him the kids stared out as best they could. None of them knew exactly what to say.

The sphere kept rolling for another few yards before coming to a stop in the desert, shining in the late afternoon sun.

* * *

In the tech room of the
Alison
, Ana-Lisa cheered and wrapped Boudreaux up in a big hug as the plasma drill flickered and went out. The submersible rocked in the rush of water collapsing into the space left empty by the plasma beam.

“We’re alive!” Ana-Lisa shouted.

McQuaide went one better. “We’re rich.”

Boudreaux got on the shortwave. “General Adams, the drill is retracting! The core is secure!”

They all heard the cheers from the other end of the connection.

* * *

Catherine and President Adams saw the alien queen’s gruesome end, and then looked up to see the hundreds of remaining alien fighters tumbling to the ground or colliding in thunderous fireballs. They walked outside, as more and more of the ships crashed, until the skies over Area 51 were clear.

“Not bad,” Adams said. “Not bad at all.”

Around them, people began to cheer and hug. This time they knew it was real. Humanity had won again.

* * *

Patricia had just gotten free of her harness when she saw the two alien fighters take down first the alien rescue ship, and then the queen herself. She stood out in the emptiness of the salt flats watching the mass exodus of alien craft, filled with a fierce pride and joy.

Twice the aliens had attacked.

Twice humanity had banded together to defeat them.

Then her mood changed as the ramp of a nearby crashed fighter creaked open and fell to the ground. Maybe the war wasn’t over quite yet, Patricia thought, remembering some of the stories she’d heard about Dikembe Umbutu. She unholstered her sidearm and leveled it at the ramp door of the closest fighter as it opened. She’d seen in the isolation chamber how fast they could move.

“Come and get me!” she shouted, and fired off a round that ricocheted away from the hull near the ramp.

“Whoa, whoa!” a voice called from inside. “Put that gun down, baby!”

Jake!
she thought as her eyes went wide.

“Jake!” she cried out as he poked his head into view. She ran to him and gave him the kind of kiss you could only get when you’d just helped save the world.

When they broke the kiss, they saw Dylan watching. He and Jake both smiled.

She did, too.

“We’re not even married yet, and you already want to shoot me?” Jake said.

“Shut up and kiss me,” she said. He obeyed.

Charlie was standing next to Rain a little way off, both of them watching the reunion.

“We should maybe try that,” Charlie said nonchalantly. “Doesn’t that look fun?”

After a pause Rain said, “Dinner first.”

Charlie couldn’t resist a little fist pump. “Yes!”

* * *

As the last of the fleeing alien fighters entered the drilling ship’s hangars, its plasma beam turned off. The ocean water rushed into the space it had occupied, giving off a roar audible from Western Europe all the way to the east coast of North America.

The ship began to rise, tearing itself free of the roots that it had begun to grow around all of its landing legs, and leaving mile-deep pits in the ground where those legs had anchored. When it had lifted itself clear, the ship retracted the landing petals.

Survivors who had been below its massive body looked up, and could see the sky again.

* * *

“Do you think she’s dead?” Sam asked as Julius and David got all the kids off the bus.

“You’re asking me?” Julius said. David was the expert in this stuff.

Kevin wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”

Already the alien queen was beginning to stink. “Imagine after a week in the hot desert sun,” Henry said. Felix walked over to her body and reached out toward the immense head.

“Don’t touch it!” Bobby ordered his little brother. Who knew what kinds of diseases it might carry? He’d read
The War of the Worlds
.

From Area 51’s front gate, Catherine and Adams walked toward the group surrounding David.

“Director Levinson,” Adams said. “Well done.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” David said. Then he turned his attention to Catherine and started to say something to her. He wasn’t even sure what, but she cut him off.

“Don’t say anything. You’re just going to ruin it.”

She has a point
, he thought.
Perhaps the situation calls for nonverbal communication.
He was about to kiss her, when his father piped up.

“Who are you? David didn’t say anything about a beautiful woman in his life.”

“Dad,” David said, but Julius kept talking as he interposed himself between David and Catherine.

“I’m Julius. His father.”