Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization Page 4

  When he crested the ridge he paused for a long moment. Not because he didn’t know the answer to her question, or because he didn’t feel like answering, but because he was seeing something that brought back a lot of memories—few of them good.

  Apart from his emotional response, David Levinson was detached enough to understand that he was a scientist, right down to the last molecule of his body, and here in Umbutu he might just have found the research project of a lifetime.

  “The ship’s been dark for twenty years,” Catherine said, and he nodded. Straddling the main settlement of Umbutu’s fiefdom was a nearly intact alien destroyer ship. Its hull was fifteen miles wide, and its fully extended landing petals were another mile wide and four long, holding it high enough off the ground that birds could wheel and glide underneath it and still be far above the ramshackle tin-roofed buildings that spread between the legs.

  Gloom and the hill’s steepness had hidden the vessel as they climbed, but now it loomed over them, taller than anything they could see from here to the jagged ridgeline of the Ruwenzori Mountains, the foothills of which were just visible far to the west.

  Beyond the ship, the last fading light in the western sky cast shadows over the city that had sprung up around its landing petals. Bright lamps lit the vessel from below, resulting in even more macabre silhouettes that twitched and moved with the activity below.

  That alone would have been an amazing sight. Intact destroyers were unheard-of—it was absurd that it had taken him so long to reach this one. He had known, of course, that Umbutu the Elder had fought a brutal war against the surviving aliens after the destruction of their mother ship. He had also known that a destroyer was in this area—that much had been revealed by Lucien Ondekane, a refugee from the National Republic of Umbutu—but to see it now, almost looking flight-ready… it gave him a chill.

  He’d been inside one of those ships once, with Steve Hiller back in the War of ’96, and they had barely escaped with their lives.

  On top of the destroyer’s presence and condition, Levinson was also astonished to see that somehow it had been powered up. Lights glowed through ports in the superstructure, and along the landing petals. A broader, brighter illumination fell from the circular weapons port on the bottom of the main hull, bathing the grassland and buildings below in chilly blue light.

  “How did they get the lights on?” David asked.

  “We didn’t,” someone said from behind them.

  David turned to see Dikembe Umbutu himself. Son of a warlord, perhaps a warlord himself. Educated in England, he had found his way home during the invasion and arrived in the middle of his father’s brutal war against the aliens who had landed this city destroyer in what was then the frontier of the northeastern Congo.

  Surviving that war, and his father’s madness, he had matured into a respected—perhaps even revered—leader of his people, yet he still wore the twin machetes that had been his trademark armament during the conflict. David wondered at that—Dikembe clearly had access to alien armaments, but he chose the primitive route. It was a powerful statement to be sure, but not a statement David could ever imagine making.

  He much preferred the lab and the keyboard to the battlefield. On the other hand, that was a choice Dikembe had never been able to make.

  According to the reports, the elder Umbutu had been driven insane by telepathic contact with the aliens—lending credence to Catherine’s theories—and had turned his revolutionary movement into some sort of death cult, believing that humans and aliens were divided halves of a single whole organism. Unfortunately, that organism could only be reintegrated by killing the human part. Nobody knew how many of his people had died in Umbutu’s crusade. Dikembe himself had been marked for death and cast into a pit where he suffered a long series of visions related to the aliens.

  However, their telepathic intrusions seemed to have affected him differently than they did most humans. The people of this breakaway territory believed Dikembe had a powerful connection to the invaders—that much David had been able to learn from afar, but he didn’t know how much of the belief was justified.

  He hoped to find out on this trip.

  Dikembe walked up next to them and stood, contemplating the sight of the gigantic ship. His presence was commanding, and would have been, David thought, even without the machetes. There was a certain magnetism born leaders possessed. Dikembe Umbutu had that quality.

  “It happened on its own, two days ago,” Dikembe said. David waited for him to reveal more, but the man remained silent.

  Two days ago, David thought. That would be twenty years, almost exactly, since he had discovered the signal corruption in Earth’s satellite network, and figured out that the aliens were counting down to an attack. Coincidence?

  He didn’t think so, but they had to know more.

  It occurred to him to wonder where the accountant—Rosenberg?—had disappeared to. As quickly as the thought flitted across David’s mind, it was gone. There was a puzzle in front of him. An unexplored frontier in his expanding effort to learn everything he could about the aliens.

  Why hadn’t he gotten to Umbutu sooner?

  5

  To the accompaniment of the classic rock his father had loved, Jake Morrison eased his tug over the blasted surface of the Moon, keeping his speed low in unison with the other five tugs in the group.

  They looked like giant metal frogs, with nearly spherical main hulls flanked by long jointed legs. These were actually used as arms while in flight, to catch and hold whatever the tugs were hauling at the moment. They turned back into legs when the tugs landed, sitting on the gripping claws like they were feet with toes splayed wide.

  Right now the tug formation was closing in on the Moon. The excess heat from the tug’s engines at full load was turning the interior into an oven, even though it tended to lose a lot through the bubble of windows that formed the front of the cockpit. Due to the temperature, Jake had departed from the standard dress code, stripping down to a wife-beater. He’d even considered taking his hat off, but he liked the hat.

  He felt exposed without it.

  They were carrying a brand-new energy cannon from one of the city destroyers back on Earth, and had been en route for the last four days. Now they were cruising through the final approach to the ESD lunar base, in the Sea of Tranquility not too far from the original landing site of Apollo 11, back in 1969. As a matter of fact, Jake was low enough that he could just pick out the American flag planted by Armstrong and Aldrin. The much larger and newer Chinese flag flew nearby. The Moon wasn’t just an ambition anymore. It was an outpost of human civilization—and human defense.

  The tug’s radio crackled.

  “Morrison, what’s your position?” It was one of the Chinese engineers responsible for the cannon’s final installation, getting jumpy now that they were so close to completing the project. Jake turned down the music enough to answer.

  “Seven miles and closing,” he said. He cut the connection and muttered, “Of the slowest trip of my life.”

  His co-pilot, Charlie Miller, woke up at the sound of the radio. He’d been snoozing on one of the benches at the back of the passenger compartment.

  “Three hundred and eighty thousand klicks in four days isn’t slow,” he said. “It’s peaceful.” That was just like Charlie. Find the bright side.

  Jake wasn’t feeling it, though. “Remember when we were kids, and we thought we’d be the best fighter pilots in the world? Now I’m flying a forklift. On autopilot.” Dreams don’t always die hard, Jake thought, but sometimes, they do die.

  “Hey, cheer up,” Charlie said. “Your dreams almost came true—and there’s worse things you could be doing than towing a half-trillion dollar weapon.”

  There were a lot of better things too, Jake thought.

  “Yeah, well, I need a little more stimulation.”

  He left the autopilot to handle the final approach to the cannon emplacement site at the edge of the Moon Base complex. Th
e ship didn’t need him at this point, and neither did the engineers. Let them handle it. Jake was a glorified mailman. Moving aft, he sat in the rear-facing turret bubble and tried not to sulk.

  Charlie dropped into the seat next to him. “Do you want to play name the constellation again?” he asked, a little too enthusiastically.

  “I’d rather open the airlock and watch our heads explode,” Jake grumbled.

  Charlie gave up. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  The Moon Base drew nearer as the six tugs maneuvered the immense cannon into position. The base was built around a central tower with spokes radiating out to smaller structures. The command center was in the tower, which enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the lunar plain for miles in every direction. At the end of the main spoke, longer and wider than the rest, sat the turret assembly built to support the cannon.

  Because the Moon was tidally locked to Earth, always showing the same face to its parent planet, installing the heavy cannon at the base would ensure that it was always covering any threat that might approach. There were plans to build another base on the dark side of the Moon, facing out into deep space, but for now ESD resources were engaged here. They already had other defense bases under construction on Mars and Rhea. The Chinese were in charge here, the Russians on Rhea, and the French on Mars—but the administration and executive authority of Earth Space Defense rested with the United States. Specifically the Army.

  Jake and Charlie knew the crew of Chinese engineers and military officers would be on edge inside the command center, so they had to stay on their toes, even though the tug was on autopilot for the moment. Jake switched the radio to the base command channel, holding the frequency open per regulation.

  It wasn’t the job Jake had envisioned for himself. He’d always wanted to be a pilot, and after the War of ’96 he’d made it his mission. After his parents died in the war, Jake found himself in an orphanage, trying to stand out in some way that would get him into a better school. That’s how he and Charlie had ended up friends. Charlie was kind of a runt, and Jake had stepped in to bail him out when he got in trouble with some bullies at the orphanage.

  Turned out Charlie was kind of a genius, too, and after that he helped Jake study, getting him into a pretty selective tech school. That led to a new problem.

  He couldn’t just leave Charlie in the orphanage—the kid would never stay out of trouble on his own. Jake worked it out so he and Charlie could live together near the school, which was on the outskirts of the Area 51 alien research complex. It was the least he could do. They’d been like brothers, together ever since, their friendship growing closer even when Jake’s nascent flight career had gone down the toilet.

  That train of thought led to Dylan Hiller, and Jake didn’t want to think about Dylan right then. Or Patricia.

  “They’re in position, sir,” he heard a tech say. Commander Lao must have arrived in the command center to oversee the final docking operation.

  Jake didn’t like Lao, and the feeling was mutual. Lao thought Jake was a failure, a slacker, and Jake thought Lao was a petty tyrant. They had to work together, though, and Jake needed the job. Plus he was flying. He had to keep that in mind. Maybe he wasn’t flying the new generation of hybrid fighters, but he was in space. It wasn’t all bad.

  The tugs got the cannon into position.

  “Initiate uncoupling sequence,” Lao said.

  An engineer got the process started. “Tug One… disengage.”

  One by one the tugs cut loose and drifted away.

  Jake disengaged the autopilot and got ready for his turn to pull away from the turret mount. He put the thrusters into a gentle reverse, holding the tension in the linking arms that extended from the tug’s hull to the armature of the cannon. His command console beeped and the engines thrummed, holding the cannon steady while the engineers in the command center figured out whether the cannon was in the right place.

  Just like the mail truck it was, the tug beeped when you put it in reverse. Jake itched to fly something else, like he’d been trained to do. But he’d made his bed, and he had to lie in it—at least for now. He hadn’t really given up. It just seemed like it most days.

  When it was their turn, Jake and Charlie’s tug cut loose, nice and smooth, their crane arms opening up just like they were supposed to. Their tug drifted back and then Jake held it steady a short distance from the cannon mount.

  “You know, I didn’t have to follow you up here,” Charlie said, as if he’d been reading Jake’s mind, which sometimes Jake thought he could.

  “Yes, you did,” Jake said. “You get lonely without me.”

  Charlie watched the cannon as another one of the tugs pulled away.

  “I was the youngest valedictorian in the history of the Academy,” he responded. “I could’ve been stationed anywhere. San Diego would’ve been nice. Beaches, surfing…”

  Jake snorted. “You never surfed a day in your life.”

  “But I’m a fast learner, and I’ve got great balance. Like a cat.” Always looking on the bright side, Jake thought again.

  He didn’t feel like looking on the bright side.

  “Cats hate water, Charlie,” Jake said.

  Over the tug’s radio, they heard Commander Lao say, “Seal the locks.”

  Jake and Charlie watched as giant clamps started to close in around the base of the cannon. All the tugs but one held their positions a short distance from the turret mount, with Jake still close enough to brace the tug’s crane arms against the cannon if that was necessary. Sometimes the clamps shifted things as they tightened, and at least one tug had to stay attached to keep the cannon from moving too far. If they’d set the cannon down a little crooked or off-center, or if it moved too much while the engineers and techs were setting the clamps, they would have to start the whole process over again.

  Until then, all they could do was wait. Jake tried not to think of Patricia. Or Dylan. Or all the things he could have done differently.

  6

  The emergency klaxon blared angrily. Rhea Base personnel filed into a tug, jamming themselves together in its small cargo space after the passenger compartment was full. Commander Belyaev was at the controls.

  Outside, the ripple grew into a giant distorted cloud, a hole in space that sucked in everything around it. Base equipment and building material tumbled away from Rhea’s surface in a cloud of ice crystals and dust, whirlpooling up into nothingness. Smaller asteroids and other fragments collided on their way in, releasing flashes of heat that disappeared as quickly as Valeri saw them.

  None of them knew what was happening. Was it a black hole, suddenly born out of nothing? It didn’t look right—or at least it didn’t look like what they had theorized a black hole should look like. It was irregular, for one thing, seeming like a tear or a wound in space-time rather than a clean circular singularity.

  But what, then? What had caused it?

  That was a question for the scientists to wrestle with later, Valeri thought. When he’d seen the drifting ice crystals at first, he’d thought it was strange. When he’d felt the lightness in his step on the way back to the base, he’d thought it was his imagination. Then when he’d seen the ripple in space he hadn’t known what to think.

  As it grew, he started to understand—deep in his gut, where real intuition lived—that something very bad was about to happen. He just hoped they were going to live. They still hadn’t been able to communicate with any of the other human bases in the system. No one knew what was happening to them.

  Would they ever know? The tug would get them back to Earth, but it would take a long time, and they didn’t have enough room for supplies. So even if they got away from this maelstrom, unless they could reestablish communications, they were going to be in real trouble.

  He forced himself into the front part of the passenger area, trying to peer out of the window and get a look at the distortion. All of the seats were filled and people were jammed throughout the tug, holding onto what
ever they could grab.

  “Hurry!” Belyaev shouted. The ship shook as he fired the engines, trying to hold it steady against the vortex’s increasing gravitation pull. “Prepare for immediate takeoff!”

  The last cosmonaut was in, and the tug’s airlock slammed shut. Belyaev lifted off in a storm of flying construction materials mingled with pieces of ice and stone from Rhea’s surface. They banged off the shuttle’s hull, none of them hard enough to do much damage, but Valeri jumped every time. It was easy to die in space.

  He thought of home. He thought of Kiev, and Natasha. He wanted to have children. Right then, he wanted to go back to Earth, put his feet on the ground, and never get on an airplane or a spaceship again. These last few hours had been enough adventure for a lifetime, and it wasn’t over yet.

  The ship bucked and shuddered. Belyaev held it steady for the moment. Sparks shot from conduits in the walls behind the pilot’s chair. The tug was built to haul heavy loads, and it had enough power to escape the gravity wells of any planet in the solar system—but the engines were straining, and they weren’t getting much farther away from the hole.

  Below them, the entire base tore apart as it was uprooted from the surface. Modular structures that had held living quarters, machine shops, the greenhouse… all of them tumbled past the ship and broke into pieces as they accelerated into the distortion. Valeri watched a table soccer set spin by, along with a hydroponics bay with fresh tomatoes still sprouting from its mesh. The transformer he had been working on shot past, followed by the crane from the construction site, a seven-meter beam still attached to its hook assembly. Someone’s bed, someone else’s footlocker. All of it now space debris, and space itself rippled around the vortex.

  Incredulous, Valeri saw the nearest of Saturn’s rings sprouting a tail of debris, drawn by the gravitational pull of this new wound in space. Whatever the phenomenon was, its power was incredible, far beyond his ability to fully comprehend. His mind returned to the idea of a black hole springing into existence, even though he knew it wasn’t possible.