Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (12 page)

Despite its dilapidated condition, it stayed in the air long enough to get the three of them across to the joint where the nearest landing petal bent to become nearly horizontal. Even with that head start, they’d had a long way to go before getting anywhere near the main hull of the ship. That was where Dikembe said the entry point was.

They could look out over miles of the surrounding savanna, with the lights of human settlements revealed as tiny pinpricks against the vast landscape. It was an amazing experience, David had to admit. Like climbing a mountain, only the mountain was made of an extraterrestrial alloy, and instead of a summit they were looking for a way into an alien ship. What would they find?

He privately worried that some of the aliens might still be alive inside, although he knew that was practically impossible. After President Whitmore had destroyed the mother ship twenty years ago, most of the aliens had died in the crashes of the other ships, and the rest were killed in the long series of ground battles that followed. Dikembe and his father had fought one of the most prolonged and bitter of those wars. If anyone had left aliens alive, it wasn’t going to be them.

Still, David was nervous. Ahead of him, Dikembe and Catherine nimbly jumped over a crevasse at the juncture of one of the enormous landing petals and the main body of the ship. David trailed behind. He was starting to feel some serious vertigo. He didn’t think he could just jump across that gap. He knew he would fall. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he could take another step.

“Come on, David,” Catherine called to him. “We don’t have all night.”

“This is not safe,” David said. “We should definitely be, um, tied to something.”
Or back on the ground
, he thought. What had he gotten himself into?

Dikembe waited as Catherine tried to help David work through his sudden paralyzing fear.

“You’re not going to fall,” she said. “Look, I’m right here. Dikembe’s right here. Get across this last little gap and we’re home free. See?” She pointed across the expanse of the city destroyer’s upper hull. There was an opening there, a broad doorway. Inside they would be safe, David thought.

Unless there were still aliens.

He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. There was no climbing back down, not at this point. He had to go forward so they could get inside. And to go forward, he had to—

With one lunging step, he cleared the gap and got his balance on the far side. Catherine caught his arm.

“Okay,” she said. “See, I knew you could do it.”

If only she’d been that encouraging when they were lovers, David thought. But that was unfair. Just his nervousness talking.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

* * *

It was another hour or so, once they’d made their way into the ship’s interior, before they reached the cavernous command center of the vessel. David had been inside several of the crashed destroyers, and he still had vivid memories of the trip he’d taken with Steve Hiller up to the mother ship in 1996. So he knew the way.

When they got to the command center, however, seeing it alive, powered up and waiting for orders, he had chills. And not the good kind. This was a great opportunity for scientific discovery, but he also had a bad feeling that when he learned the reason for the ship being powered up, he wasn’t going to like it very much.

All around them, lights oscillated in complex patterns. A background hum of released energy filled the air. David walked up to a console and examined the displays. What he saw there both exhilarated and frightened him. Exhilarated because it confirmed something he had been wondering about for twenty years. Frightened because that confirmation meant that maybe the War of ’96 hadn’t been the final word in human–alien interactions.

“My God,” he said. “It’s the same pattern. The distress call came from
this
ship.”

Dikembe and Catherine peered at him as if he was speaking another language, and he was familiar with that look. He got it a lot, particularly when he let his mind run, and the free associations came out of his mouth like a conversation he was having with himself. He stopped long enough to explain.

“When we destroyed the mother ship twenty years ago,” he said, “we detected a burst in the X-band frequency, directed toward deep space.”

“A distress call,” Dikembe suggested.

Right
, David thought.
Coming from this ship.
One of the few that had not been damaged in its fall from flight, or destroyed by Earth’s forces after David’s virus had crippled the alien fleet’s defensive shielding. A distress call, yes.

But what had it said? What was it saying, even now?

Relying on his knowledge of the aliens’ information structures, David tapped in a command, getting access to the communications log. A holographic image was spawned above the display, a huge sweeping image of the solar system, with the planets animated and rendered in precise detail. He, Catherine, and Dikembe watched as Earth spun past them, complete with continents and oceans and the swirling white of cloud patterns. David wondered whether he was seeing the Earth’s weather as it had been twenty years ago, or whether he could match these cloud patterns to weather service data from today.

It was entirely possible that the destroyer’s systems, upon awakening, had once again made contact with Earth’s satellite network, just as the invaders had twenty years before. Another detail of the animated image also gave him pause. Earth was rendered not as a solid globe, but as a translucent sphere. Below the surface of blues and greens, the Earth’s core appeared a brilliant, pulsating red.

There’s a reason for that
, he thought.
Nothing the aliens do is accidental.
He thought of the hole in the ground, miles below their feet, and wondered again what the aliens had really been after when they started drilling the shaft.

“And it looks like someone picked up the phone and answered,” Catherine said.

David nodded. It did indeed look like that. This ship had sent its distress call and then shut down. Only an answering signal would have powered it back up, which meant that the aliens were still out there. They were still communicating with their ships across whatever immensity of space separated Earth from their home system.

Which meant in turn that David had some phone calls to make. And the people on the other end of those calls probably weren’t going to like what they heard.

It was bright and early on the morning of July 3 when Dylan Hiller and the rest of Legacy Squadron made their approach to the Moon. The flight from Earth had gone flawlessly—not a single hitch. The new fighters were beautiful machines, handling equally well in atmosphere or vacuum.

Along the way they’d done a quick series of flight tests to get final data on performance and maneuverability. Everything checked out as close to perfect as human engineering could make it. The Moon loomed in front of Dylan as he led the squadron into their orbital insertion and landing protocol. He radioed ahead to the Moon Base, knowing Commander Lao would be on edge awaiting the fighters’ arrival.

Lao had his entire career wrapped up in the lunar outpost and its role in ESD’s planetary relay system. If Dylan knew the man, the hangars and facilities would be spotless and ready for whatever the squadron needed. Not only was he an excellent leader—if a bit stiff—he had a keen sense of the fact that he represented China and its people to the world.

“This is Legacy Squadron,” Dylan announced. “We’re on final approach. Requesting permission to land.”

“Permission granted,” Lao answered immediately—just as Dylan had expected. He’d probably been standing next to his communications console for the last hour, awaiting the call. “Welcome,” Lao added almost as an afterthought. He struggled with the niceties of diplomacy.

Dylan led the squadron into a loop around the base, just so the photographers and the base crew could get a good look at the fighters. He was proud of how they looked, and he wanted his people to know their work was appreciated. Taking the long way around was his way of saying hello.

He also wanted to get a look at the big cannon, which was the base’s primary reason for existing. It loomed over the stark landscape near the central command tower, its barrel angled up and away from the horizon. At the moment it was pointed more or less at North Africa, but from what Dylan understood it had full 360-degree coverage of the space between Earth and the Moon, with an effective range of hundreds of kilometers.

Part of him wanted to see it in action, but he also knew that if they ever had to use it, that would mean another war. Earth didn’t need that. They’d barely made it through the last one.

He steadied the fighter into its final approach, feeling the anti-grav engines readjust to the counter-force of a planetary body. They continuously readjusted their thrust and lift to account for the fundamental behaviors of gravity. Since the pull decreased with the square of distance, it had picked up quite a bit in the last few thousand kilometers as the Moon’s influence took over from the zero-g interval after Legacy Squadron had left Earth’s gravitational field.

The hangar had designated spots for each of the fighters, and as Dylan had expected, it was in perfect condition. Not a mote of dust anywhere to be seen, except what the fighters kicked up and brought in with them on their landing approach.

Each of the ships set down as gently as could be. He ran a system shutdown and waited just long enough to make sure it checked out. Then he pulled off his helmet and popped the cockpit open. The air was dry and smelled faintly of machine oil and cleaning products.

He swung himself out of the fighter, noticing that the base had Earthlike gravity. That was a useful bit of tech they’d taken from the aliens. A long-term presence on the Moon was made a lot easier by normal gravity. If they’d had to put a base there in one-sixth gravity, there could be serious consequences for the health of the crew and officers.

As his boots hit the floor, Dylan looked around and saw the other pilots disembarking, as well. Several of them had never been up here before, and even those who had were taking in the progress Lao and the crew had made in recent months. The base was just about fully online.

At the moment, however, most of the ground crew had abandoned their posts to swarm around the pilots. Dylan signed an autograph here and there, and posed for some pictures, but he noticed one difference right away between the Moon and Earth. Down at Area 51, he was one of the main attractions. Not here. This was a Chinese base, run by a Chinese crew and Chinese officers, and as far as they were concerned Rain Lao walked on water.

Dylan didn’t understand a word of Chinese, but he could tell adoration when he heard it. Rain looked a little embarrassed by the attention, but he could see she enjoyed it, too. And why shouldn’t she? All of them had worked hard their whole lives to get where they were. They’d earned everything they’d gotten. Legacy Squadron didn’t have any pilots who weren’t the best of the best, no matter what their last names happened to be.

He passed her on his way into the base proper.

“When you’re done being a superstar, meet us for the debrief.”

She shot him a look, but was overwhelmed again by the attention and couldn’t find a quick response. That wasn’t like her. Usually she was among the sharpest at coming up with stinging replies.

Cutting through the chatter, Dylan heard Commander Lao’s voice. In English, no less.

“Do I get an autograph too?”

“Uncle Jiang!” Rain ran over and embraced him. The ground crew’s response was quite a bit different, though. All of a sudden they all remembered they had somewhere else to be.

Dylan moved on, too. Let Rain have her moment. He would have to meet with Commander Lao soon, but it had been a long flight. He wanted to stretch his legs a little first, and let the initial excitement die down.

* * *

Commander Lao looked his niece up and down, amazed at how far she’d come. Her youth had been troubled, and he had feared for a while that she would fail to live up to her potential. His fears, it seemed, had been groundless, but in this rare instance Lao was perfectly happy to be proved wrong.

“You look more and more like your mother,” Lao said, as the crew started working on the fighters.

Rain rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing a girl wants to hear more than that.”

He nodded at the other pilots. “You holding your own with these cowboys?”

“Please,” she scoffed. “They’re the ones who need to hold their own with me.”

“Where’s Captain Hiller?” he asked.

Rain glanced around. “Maybe the mess hall,” she suggested. “That’s where most of the pilots are heading.” After the flight, they were hungry and in need of some time sitting around doing nothing.

He nodded, and gestured for her to lead the way.

* * *

Jake knew Legacy Squadron had landed, but he hadn’t felt like watching the fighters come in. It was too hard to see them, and know that he should have been up there with them.

He was good enough. Everyone knew that—but you couldn’t cross Dylan Hiller and make it through the program. That was just a fact of life. Another fact of life was that the last thing in the world Jake felt like doing right then was watching everyone celebrate the son of a hero.

So he took a carton of Moon Milk from a vending machine and sat down to look at his lunch. Maybe he would even eat it. He was still deliberating when Charlie rushed up to him.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said.

Jake gave him a look, like,
Where else would I be?

“I’ve got good news,” Charlie went on, ignoring the look.

“What is it?”

“The pilot China sent is my future wife.”

Jake gave him another look.

“Seriously,” Charlie said. “I think my heart exploded.” He put a hand on his chest as if to make sure. “She’s perfect. Her eyes, her hair, it’s like our spirits were communing…” He stopped talking, and Jake saw him tracking something over near the mess hall entrance.
Great
, he thought.
Just great.