Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Whitmore and the others could see how the torn skull and chest of the suit flopped lifelessly from the rigid backbone. The larger animal had been gutted, sliced from navel to forehead, providing a sort of open hood for the creature within,

  Once more, it punched at the window with Okun’s limp body. It was quickly learning how to work the speech organs of the man’s not-quite-dead body. This time the words were clear and loud. “Release me!”

  Whitmore came halfway to the windows. “Why have you come here?” he demanded. “What do your people want?”

  The pulsing, livid crown of the alien’s skull appeared from between the hip sockets of the suit. Black eyes peered over the wall of flesh. Then with an audible slurp, the creature raised up out of the suit’s lower abdomen to face his captors. Its yellow skin glistened in the dim light under a thick slather of clear jelly. Its huge, startled eyes gave it the look of a naturally meek animal surrounded by predators.

  Okun, under the creature’s control, gasped suddenly for breath. “Air. Water. Food. Sun.”

  “Yes, we have all of these,” Whitmore replied through the intercom. “Tell me where you have come from. Where is your home?”

  “Here,” it said slowly, “our new home.”

  “And before here, where did you come from?”

  “Many worlds.”

  “We have enough air and water and sun. We could share them. Can we negotiate a truce? Can your people coexist with us?” There was no answer, but the president persisted. “Can there be peace between us?” A voice behind him suggested that the thing might not understand the word peace, so he tried a different angle. “What is it that you want? What do you want our people to do?”

  The alien answered the question. This time it did not use the humans’ clumsy grunting form of communication. It “spoke” in its natural language, free of sound, gesture, and emotion. Perhaps the sodium Pentothal was taking effect, or perhaps the alien had read their minds and learned he could not escape. It began a high-speed telepathic communication with Whitmore. It was a language of images and physical sensations, a lightning fast download of a virtual reality rocket ride through the alien’s entire memory. The exchange of information was happening faster than the synapses of Whitmore’s brain could fire. The result was that the president fell over backward clutching at the left side of his brain, screaming in pain.

  In a few seconds, he moved through battles on other worlds, learning how the aliens had conquered planet after planet, flying from place to place like a swarm of locusts, feeding on an environment, expanding their population, until its resources were ruined, exhausted. Provisions would be made for the journey to the next feeding ground, and they would all board the mother ship, the temporary hive. All the creatures would sleep during the long journey and awaken famished, warriors ready to do battle for new food. He understood there would be no mercy, that the concept of it was nowhere in the alien’s mind, as foreign to him as it would be for us to spare the lives of roaches. To him, we were vermin, filthy little things that needed to be exterminated. And that was their plan, to wipe humanity off the face of this small planet. The objective of the initial wave of attack would be to exterminate the largest nests of humans, disable their weapons, and establish beach heads, room for the aliens to establish their colonies. Then, for many years, they would live and breed here, developing new tools, until it was time to travel, stronger and more numerous, to the next home.

  “Kill it!” Grey shouted.

  Mitchell and both of the president’s bodyguards spun around and started blasting, shattering the window, squeezing off every round of ammunition they had. The bullets tore into the alien’s delicate white body, smearing him against the shell of his armor like thick glops of paint. The armor-body collapsed backward with a crash onto the wet tiles, both creatures dead. Okun slid down the window and collapsed in a pile.

  “Stand back,” Grey yelled, returning to the president, “give the man some air.”

  Woozy and disoriented, Whitmore lay on the floor breathing hard. When he sat up, he was still holding the side of his throbbing head. “Wanted me to understand… communicated with me. They’re like locusts,” he said. “They travel from planet to planet. The whole civilization moves. After they’ve consumed everything, the natural resources, they move on.”

  As if slowly untangling himself from a strong dream, Whitmore sat on the floor piecing the images together. He wanted to explain it all to the others, but there was only one conclusion to draw from the experience. He stood up the best he could and turned to Grey. “General, coordinate a missile strike. I want a nuclear warhead sent to every one of their ships. And I want it done immediately.”

  Grey looked the president in the eyes to make sure he realized what he was saying. The poisonous fallout from that number of simultaneous explosions would cripple the planet and every creature on it. Satisfied that Whitmore was lucid, he nodded.

  “It’ll take some time, maybe an hour.” Under the weight of this order, Grey started off toward the war room. On the way, he passed Nimziki, who had remained silent until then.

  As Grey passed him, Nimziki smirked. I told you so.

  *

  Steven Hiller was a hero to the horde of people parked outside the hangar. He was also someone they could talk to, a member of their group. The guards outside the hangar were tight-lipped and unfriendly; as far as they were concerned, these campers weren’t welcome. Their orders were to keep the people supplied with fresh water and let them use the bathrooms two at a time, which meant the bushes off in the distance were getting most of the business. It was night when Steve walked out, telling the guards at the gate that he was sent by Dr. Issacs to check on the sick boy. Steve never made it to the Casse trailer. A bunch of people waiting in line to use the restrooms recognized him and walked with him as he disappeared into the thicket of vehicles.

  Steve moved through the trailers shaking hands and answering the same questions over and over again. Was the ET still alive? What were they doing with it? Were there any spaceships coming this way and why couldn’t they come inside? Why were they being made to sit out there like sitting ducks? They made him promise to ask whoever was in charge if they could come inside.

  Steve moved among them, listening and smiling, but he hadn’t come out there to fraternize. His concentration was on a pair of Hueys, fat gray transport helicopters standing outside another hangar three hundred yards from the perimeter of the trailer camp. Steve watched for a few minutes, until he decided they were unguarded. Excusing himself from the conversation, he strode across the tarmac trying to look like he was on official business. He kept expecting someone with a bullhorn to stop him, but to his surprise he made it all the way unchallenged, climbed into the pilot’s chair, and switched the systems on. There was plenty of gas, so he reached for the switch that fired the motor. A split second after the twin rotors, front and back propellers, came groaning to life, Steve had an M-16 rifle pointed at his chest.

  “What are you doing? Get out of there, this minute.”

  The soldier on the other end of the rifle looked to be no older that eighteen. Dressed in camouflage fatigues, his desert helmet fit him like an old wash pail bouncing loosely around his head. Although he was the one holding the weapon, it was clear from the start who was afraid of whom. Steve decided to brazen it out. He reached back and pulled the seat belt forward, locking himself in.

  “Captain Hiller, Marine Corps. I’m going to borrow your chopper for a couple of hours.”

  “You can’t just—” The kid looked around for help, but they were alone. “The hell you are… sir.”

  Steve figured there was a fifty-fifty chance the kid would shoot. He decided to gamble. Reaching up, he switched on the lights and prepared the craft for liftoff.

  “Soldier,” he shouted over the blades, the air knocking the kid’s desert helmet around, “I know you don’t want to shoot me, but if you’re gonna do it, do it. right now, because otherwise I’m leaving.”


  The kid stared unblinking at him for a minute. Without lowering his gun, he yelled, “You’re gonna get me into a world of trouble, Marine.”

  “We’re both in one already.” A jeep was barreling toward them on its way across the tarmac from the main hangar. “I’ll be back in a couple hours and explain everything.” Then the big bird thumped into the air and twisted away to the west.

  *

  News of Whitmore’s decision to launch a nuclear attack spread through the underground scientific complex, plunging the place into a deep silence. Work came to a standstill as people huddled into groups, most of them sitting silently, resigned to their doom. No one was happy with the decision, but neither could they suggest a workable alternative. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  Connie, on the verge of tears, slipped away from the oppressive gloom of the war room, where Whitmore sat drumming his fingernails on the tabletop, while the strike was prepared. She came into the echoing concrete hangar, keeping one eye on the stingray attacker. Through a set of windows, she could see David pacing back and forth in an office lounge, talking to himself. She came up the stairs and into the room to discover he wasn’t talking to himself. He was speaking to a bottle of scotch he’d found in one of the closets.

  “I take it you’ve heard,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “Ah, Ms. Spano, you’re just in time!” His voice was too loud. He was already drunk. Hoisting the bottle into the air, he declared, “A toast! I would like to propose a toast to the end of the world.” He threw back his head and took a long slug of whiskey before handing her the bottle.

  “He didn’t come to this decision lightly, David.” She felt guilty, complicitous in his eyes.

  “Connie, honey, come on! Don’t tell me you still believe in this guy.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “He must be.” David laughed, flopping into a swivel chair and pushing himself in a circle. “After all, you left a gem like me for him. No. Excuse me, not for him. For your career.” David knew how to be nasty, but Connie wanted to explain herself.

  “It wasn’t just a career move, David. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was a chance to make a real difference, to make my life mean something.”

  “And I just wasn’t ambitious enough for you,” David said casually. It was an idea that had crippled him with pain for the last few years, but now it all seemed rather humorous. “I couldn’t get the lead out of my ass and start climbing up the ladder.”

  “You could have done anything you wanted,” she yelled, “research, teaching, industry. You’ve got so much talent.”

  David broke out into a vicious imitation of the familiar voices: “Oh, that David Levinson, so much potential and all he does is work for that silly old cable company. All that brain power going down the drain. What a shame.” That attitude disgusted him. “What’s the matter with being happy right where you are?”

  “But didn’t you ever want to do something more? Didn’t you ever want to be part of something really meaningful, really special?”

  Those last few words mixed with the scotch to punch David square in the solar plexus. He leveled a wounded stare at Connie and told her the plain simple truth. “I felt like I was part of something special.”

  She immediately realized that the whole time she’d been talking about their careers, he’d been thinking about their marriage. She could see that she’d hurt him. He came across the room and took back the bottle.

  “If it makes any difference,” she said softly, “I never stopped loving you.”

  “But that wasn’t enough, right?” he spit back. He returned to his chair and took a good long swig of whiskey.

  Connie suddenly realized why she’d come to find him. She wanted to make peace with a man she still loved. Somewhere in the back of her head she thought they might forgive each other, renounce their anger, and try to find some comfort in one another now that the end of their lives was clearly within sight. But instead, she’d encountered a venomously angry boy. As he did so often with her, David’s way of coping with pressure was to retreat into himself, or his work, or whatever was close at hand and offered escape. Tonight it was a bottle of Johnny Walker.

  She left him there, spinning around in the swivel chair, singing to himself. With tears in her eyes, she slipped out the door, closing it quietly behind her.

  *

  Grey was able to orchestrate the nuclear strike in less than a quarter of the time he’d anticipated. Returning to the war room, he got the good news that military radio and radar capabilities had been partially restored thanks to some quick thinking in San Antonio. The cluster of Air Force bases surrounding the city had scrambled two dozen AWACS into the skies over the United States. The large spy planes, with their trademark radar dishes whirling on top and sophisticated eavesdropping equipment within, took over the job orbiting Comsats had done so reliably for decades. Their multichannel switching relays allowed military personnel to begin communicating once again. One of the first messages they broadcast came from Area 51. There was to be a simultaneous nuclear strike against all the ships over American airspace.

  Within minutes, a quartet of B-2 Stealth bombers was in the air, streaking toward their targets. They flew “dark,” meaning their radar-deflecting systems were up and their radios were switched off, hoping to avoid detection by the city destroyers until they came within striking distance. The president was in the infirmary being examined by Dr. Issacs when word came that the B-2s were airborne. Without hesitation, Whitmore pushed the doctor aside and hurried to the war room.

  “Which target are we going to reach first?” he demanded, barging through the door.

  A soldier turned from one of the monitor consoles. “The ship approaching Houston. Approximate intercept time is six minutes. We can’t say for sure because the B-2s are flying dark.”

  Whitmore thought for a minute before issuing a change. “Wake the B-2s up. I want to make sure we all stay on the same page.”

  The soldier spun back to his console and typed in the code word that switched the B-2s’ radios on automatically. Instantly, the radar scans spotted them and the four planes blipped up on the screens. The Houston plane was easily the closest to its target.

  “All right, here’s what I want,” Whitmore explained to the room, “one plane, one bomb. Let’s see what happens in Houston. Maybe we can hit that one before it arrives over the city. If we’re successful, we’ll go ahead and fire on the others right away.” He looked at Grey, who was scowling over a computer printout.

  “General, has there been any word from our friends?” At the same time he was authorizing the use of an atomic weapon, he was trying to restrain their use by the rest of the world. ICBMs in many locations were programmed to respond automatically to radar-perceived attacks. The last thing the earth needed was a chain-reaction nuclear launch initiated by computers.

  “We have commitments from most of our friends. They’ll wait to see our results,” Grey said. “But I think we’re too late to save Houston.”

  “That’s affirmative, sir,” a voice rang out from the consoles. “The enemy ship is already over the city.”

  The president didn’t flinch. He knew Houston would be lost one way or the other. He sent orders to the other B-2s that they were to hold their fire until the Houston bomb’s impact on the invaders’ ship could be assessed.

  Grey had arranged for observers in armored tanks to position themselves around the perimeter of the expected blast area. One of the San Antonio AWACS spy planes also positioned itself over the Gulf of Mexico at high altitude.

  The people of Houston had wasted no time. With only a few hours of warning, the city was almost ninety percent vacant by the time the ground began to tremble under the approaching ship. The evacuation had turned ugly, causing almost two thousand casualties and countless injuries as escapees were trampled under foot or hit by speeding vehicles. Similar frenzied exoduses were underway in Kobe, Brussels, Portland, Chicago,
and all the other major cities standing in the paths of the great black ships.

  Whitmore called for a moment of silence. After whispering a brief prayer, he ordered the strike with a simple nod. “May our children forgive us.”

  The B-2’s bay doors dropped open, depositing its twelve-foot-long missile into the air. It flew parallel with the batlike plane while the tracking system in its nose cone scanned the horizon and configured its telemetry. A second later, it blasted forward to its rendezvous with the gigantic ship’s protective screen.

  “Payload is deployed,” the pilot reported. He pulled a long U-turn and put distance between himself and the coming explosion.

  Everyone in the war room held their breath, following the bomb’s approach on their radar screens. As planned, the cruise missile approached the shield on the ship’s top side in an attempt to minimize damage to the city below.

  From the AWACS plane, there was a violent shock of ultrabright light followed immediately by the sight of suburban Houston vaporizing, folding and collapsing like tall grass in a sudden wind. The destruction traveled outward in concentric circles at an awesome rate of speed. In a few seconds, the racing explosion was over and the entire area was covered with dense smoke. An immense mushroom cloud gathered and floated higher into the sky. In the war room, the destruction showed up as nothing more than a small patch of fuzziness, an atmospheric disturbance bleeding across lower Texas, but no one felt the loss of innocent lives more than the men and women in that small room. With pained expressions, Whitmore and his staff watched and waited.

  Minutes later, the AWACS pilot broke radio silence. “Unfortunately, it looks like our target is still in the air.”

  The team at Area 51 let out a collective groan. After twenty-four hours of shocking disappointments, this one was possibly the worst. This had been humanity’s last line of defense, its last chance.

  “Yes, that’s confirmed,” the pilot went on, “we’ve got a good look now. Target looks to be in good shape. In fact, it’s still moving in over Houston. Jesus Christ, we didn’t even put a scratch on her.”