Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization

by Alex Irvine

  “We’re locked on,” General Adams said from Area 51.

  The president nodded. “Engage.”

  From the Umbutu feed, Jake heard the woman pleading.

  “This is a mistake! Please! They’re trying to communicate with us!”

  She had a French accent, and that struck Jake as strange for some reason, though he didn’t know why. It was a weird thing to notice under the circumstances, but little details like that always stood out to him.

  “This is a mistake,” Levinson said. “Let’s take a minute here to think this through—”

  “Shut him off,” Secretary Tanner ordered from Area 51. Man, was that guy an asshole, Jake thought.

  A second later, Levinson’s feed went black.

  Outside, the Moon Base’s cannon spun up, and the familiar green light started to coalesce at the end of its barrel. Jake got a chill seeing it. Even though he knew human beings were in control, he could never see that shade of green, that particular way the energy built and intensified, without remembering the alien invasion.

  That was why they had the cannon, though, and all the other ones like it that would soon be strung all the way out to Saturn, and maybe even farther than that. Humanity had taken charge of its own defense, turning the enemy’s weapons to human uses—and this was going to be the first proof that nothing like the War of ’96 would ever happen again.

  “Fire!” Lao commanded.

  A burst of green energy flared out and crackled across the miles between the cannon and the ship, faster than Jake’s eye could follow. It hit its target almost dead center, just above the luminescent blue line that ran around its midsection. The impact was silent in the vacuum of space, but Jake filled in the sound on his own, remembering what it had sounded like on old videos of the destroyers unleashing their weapons on Washington, D.C., New York… and Los Angeles.

  The spherical ship spun out of control, tumbling and trailing bits of wreckage as it veered away over the bleak landscape of the Moon. Some of them spun down slowly to raise plumes of regolith as they hit the surface near the cannon and around the base. Others scattered behind the falling ship, which was still glowing in different-colored patterns. It disappeared over the Moon’s horizon, and a long silence held in the command center…

  Then everyone burst into cheers.

  It had worked! Earth Space Defense was live, and viable. The aliens couldn’t just waltz through a wormhole and flatten cities anymore. Planet Earth wasn’t to be messed with. Jake felt the pride of the occasion, and the huge relief of knowing that the next alien invasion would end in the shattered wreckage of the invading ships, instead of the burning ruins of the world’s great cities.

  Cheers came over the feed from Area 51, too. General Adams leaned into the frame, raising his voice over the celebration.

  “Commander Lao. Status report.”

  Lao studied the initial readings coming in from the sensor arrays on the far side of the Moon.

  “It crashed into the Van de Graaff Crater,” he reported. “We’re not picking up any signs of life.”

  Amid the cheers, President Lanford looked somber. “Let’s hope to God we did the right thing,” she said.

  Her jubilant Secretary of Defense leaned over to her with a grin Jake thought was a little… unseemly. Yeah, that was the word.

  “You just guaranteed reelection,” he said jubilantly. “Let’s make a statement to the press.”

  President Lanford sighed. There was an insight Jake hadn’t expected to have. The ship had barely hit the ground on the Moon, and Tanner was already doing political calculations. Lanford wasn’t like that, was she? Jake didn’t think so. She still looked worried—preoccupied with the gravity of the situation and the action she had just taken.

  Then she got down to business.

  “How should we handle Rhea?” she asked.

  “Let’s keep it classified until the Russians notify next of kin,” Adams suggested.

  There were still backslaps and handshakes and hugs all around, both on the Moon and in Area 51. Charlie had an arm around Jake’s shoulders, and even though he wished he hadn’t seen the political stuff, Jake really felt the spirit.

  Yeah! They’d shot down an alien spaceship!

  And it hadn’t been the fancy cowboys and cowgirls of Legacy Squadron, either, Jake thought, tossing a look over toward Dylan and Rain and the rest of them. They were sitting on the ground with him, and their fighters had never gotten out of the hangar, and the best part of it was that Jake Morrison knew that he had made this happen. If he hadn’t taken the chance to get his tug under the falling cannon and drive it back into place, the command center would be in pieces, and the cannon would still be lying in the wreckage. How would it have fired then?

  He glanced over at Charlie, and saw Charlie thinking the same thing. That’s right, partner, Jake thought. We did this. Without us, this doesn’t happen. And even though we’ll never get the credit, we know that it was us humble tug pilots, washouts from the big-shot pilot school, who saved the world this time.

  Hell, yeah.

  One of General Adams’s officers interrupted the celebration, inserting himself into the group between Adams and Tanner.

  “Director Levinson is asking to be patched through.”

  President Lanford nodded. They still had all the feeds live in the Moon Base command center, and a moment later Levinson reappeared. Jake thought he looked pissed, but—he wouldn’t have noticed this if he wasn’t so close to Charlie—also hungry for the new revelations the alien ship might hold. Scientists, man.

  “Madam President,” he said. “We need to send a team up to investigate the wreckage. We need to know who we just shot down.”

  Tanner shook his head. “There are no signs of life. The threat has been neutralized. We can send a team up, but David needs to be in D.C.”

  “Can we not make this political?” Levinson snapped. “I need to go up there and get answers! Elizabeth… please.”

  “You’re talking to the president,” Tanner said in a huff at Levinson’s use of her first name. Jake wondered how long they’d known each other.

  President Lanford held up a hand.

  “Tanner, it’s fine. We’ll declare it a no-fly zone for the time being. David, you can lead a team up there after the celebration.”

  Her decision made, President Lanford walked away out of the frame. Jake watched as Tanner, visibly gloating, leaned into the camera.

  “You heard her. I want to see you next to us tomorrow, wearing your best smile. Understood?”

  “You want to see my best smile?” Levinson echoed. Then his feed went black.

  “Levinson?” Tanner said. He looked over at General Adams. “Did he just hang up on me?”

  “That’s affirmative, sir,” Adams said. He kept his voice steady, but Jake thought he detected a little bit of satisfaction. General Adams had a reputation for being a straight shooter, a fair and careful leader who had no patience for bullies because bullies didn’t consider what was best for the unit, or the team. They cared about themselves.

  Defense Secretary Tanner was exactly that kind of bully, and David Levinson had called him out on it.

  Suddenly inspired, Jake realized that if Levinson really wanted to get over to Van de Graaff Crater, there was a way to make it happen. He turned and started working his way through the crowded command center toward the door. Looking puzzled, Charlie followed him.

  26

  Patricia and Agent Travis watched the coverage of the president’s announcement from Whitmore’s bedroom. Every network on Earth, it seemed, carried the announcement live.

  “Today, at 11:19 central time,” she said from a hastily constructed podium outside the Area 51 command center, with the rows of cannons forming a powerful backdrop, “Earth’s Space Defense program repelled an alien attack on our planet.” She didn’t get much farther after that, as the room exploded with reporters’ questions, and the networks all cut that initial sound bite out to use it as a
lead-in to their own coverage.

  Patricia flipped through all the channels and landed on Fox, where the anchor recapped the president’s speech over footage of cheering crowds all over the world.

  “…The president confirmed the successful use of the Moon’s defense cannon,” the anchor read, continuing to narrate over clips of what looked like a worldwide party. Times Square looked as if it was New Year’s Eve, a rippling sea of humanity celebrating human strength and the joy of knowing that they were safe from a repetition of the War of ’96. The same scene repeated itself all over the world. Red Square, Tiananmen Square, the Champ de Mars… Patricia got a little chill, remembering her father’s speech twenty years before in which he had called for human unity in the face of the alien threat.

  Now they were seeing it.

  Cutting back to the studio, the Fox broadcast settled on the anchor, who couldn’t resist a little quip.

  “It seems that Independence Day has come one day early—”

  Whitmore shut the TV off.

  “It wasn’t them,” he said in the silence that followed.

  Patricia was wary about this topic, knowing how apt her father was to fall into one of his fugues. “You can’t know that for sure,” she said gently. It would be better for all of them if he could feel secure. When he got worried, that made his episodes worse.

  Also, she was sure it had been them. How likely was it that another alien race had chosen the twentieth anniversary of the War of ’96 to show up? The coincidence was too hard to believe.

  “Sir,” Travis said, glancing at his watch. “It’s time for your meds.”

  “I don’t need any goddamn meds!” Whitmore snapped. Then he lapsed into silence, sitting on his bed and staring off into space. It struck Patricia how old he looked, how far removed from the powerful figure who had led, not just the United States, but the entire human race through the War and its aftermath.

  “Can you give us a minute?” she asked Travis.

  He left, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “You shouldn’t be wasting your time with a crazy old man,” Whitmore said when they were alone. “You should be with Jake.”

  “He’s on the Moon, remember?” Patricia reminded him. She did want to talk to Jake. She felt bad about the way their last conversation had ended, and on top of that she wanted to know everything about what the cannon shot had looked like from the Moon Base. Jake had been in a front-row seat, and Patricia was a little bit jealous of that.

  “Then you should be with the president,” her father said.

  She sat by his side on the bed and smiled. “I am with the president—and you’re not crazy.”

  He was visibly struggling not to fall into his visions again. She knew the expression on his face—that haunted anticipation that made him look even more haggard than worry and long-term lack of sleep. It got worse late at night, like now, when he was tired from the day. She hoped he would sleep tonight.

  “I’ve seen it in my dreams,” he said softly.

  “That’s all they are,” Patricia said. “Just dreams.”

  “No, Patty, they’re coming back,” he said, and he was fully present again. He looked her in the eye and added, “And we won’t be able to beat them this time.”

  She thought of all the drawings he’d made over the years, the circle with a line through it. He had seen the ship in those dreams, and he had been correct. The ship shot down over the Moon had looked just like that. Realizing this, Patricia grew uncertain. If her father’s vision of that ship had been true, was he also right that the ship was different—and that the real menace was still out there?

  Could that be?

  Watching her father lost in his thoughts, Patricia felt the celebratory mood ebb away, replaced by a foreboding she didn’t want to feel but suddenly could not shake.

  Tomorrow was Independence Day.

  PART THREE

  JULY 4

  27

  Albert Lemieux paused in his work to take in the peak of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system, looming over the horizon to the east of the Earth Space Defense base he had been building for the last three years.

  It was a sight he never tired of seeing, because the mountains reminded him of home. He had grown up in Grenoble, hiking and skiing the Alps, taking the cable car up to the old Bastille fort and the caves that riddled the mountainsides there, imagining he was a bandit hiding out from the King’s soldiers. That sense of adventure had never left him.

  He had taken to the skies as a pilot, then to space as an astronaut, and after surviving the destruction of Paris during the War, Albert had joined the newly formed Earth Space Defense the moment it had been internationalized. Through the years he had worked on successive generations of spacecraft designed at first for near-Earth operations… then Moon landings and return… and then, at last, voyages to Mars.

  When Albert saw Olympus Mons, he imagined future generations of children growing up on its slopes the way he had grown up on the slopes of the Chartreuse Mountains. The aliens had tried to destroy Earth, but instead in their defeat they had given humanity a great gift. They had left behind the technology that unlocked space, and now Albert was living the life of his dreams. Mars!

  Even though he wasn’t flying now, he still felt the sense of adventure. Three years on Mars hadn’t dulled Albert’s sense of the marvelous. He was millions of kilometers from home, building a defense outpost that would oversee this part of the solar system the way Grenoble’s Bastille had once overseen the Isère River. He was part of the grand enterprise of space exploration, and if that meant he spent some of his days leveraging pieces of steel and polymer into place, Albert had no problem with that whatsoever. He loved what he did.

  Today he was part of a crew tasked with finishing the clamp assemblies on a turret mount that one day would hold a cannon identical to the one that yesterday had shot down the alien vessel approaching the Moon. Like every other human being in possession of a computer, Albert had seen the video, over and over, hardly able to believe his eyes. The reappearance of the aliens gave urgency to his work, but the success of the defensive action gave him confidence that the human race would repel any new full-scale invasion. The aliens would find that the human race of 2016 was much better prepared than the human race of 1996—and after all, hadn’t they won in 1996 even without the benefit of the aliens’ own technology?

  Humanity stood on the edge of a new golden age. Albert felt privileged to be part of it.

  He thought again of the brilliant green flare and the explosion when the cannon blast hit the alien ship, and he got goose bumps inside his space suit. He wanted to watch the video again and feel the fierce joy that he had felt when he saw it the first time. Instead, he climbed back up into the open driver’s platform on the crane he operated every day, and swung its arm around so the rest of the crew could attach a huge hydraulic joint for the last of the clamps. In another week or so, the turret mount would be ready.

  The delivery of the cannon was scheduled for August 1.

  Then any new aliens would have not just the Moon, and the orbital satellite cannons, but Mars to contend with. By New Year’s Day of 2017, Rhea Base would be online, giving humankind a defense presence beyond the Asteroid Belt.

  Albert wondered if the aliens on board the ship shot down last night had been able to send a signal home. The scientists at Area 51 were still trying to understand how it had appeared out of space. The working hypothesis was via a wormhole, but as far as Albert knew, no scientific team had salvaged wormhole creation technology from any of the alien ships. That wasn’t entirely surprising, since ESD guarded the details of its research quite jealously until they were ready to release them to the public.

  But people were people. They tended to talk, and although Albert had conversed with the Russians who stopped on their way to Rhea, and the Chinese on the Moon while Albert was there on his way to Mars—and the American staff coordinating the base construction from Area
51—he had never heard a whisper concerning wormholes.

  Maybe that technology would turn up when ESD investigators got a look at the crashed ship on the far side of Earth’s Moon. Albert hoped so. That would mean he could live to see humankind, not just spreading into the solar system, but beyond. Into the stars! Was he too old to sign up for that? Not a chance.

  In any case, if the aliens had sent a message back, Albert hoped it had been simple.

  Steer clear. They were ready for us.

  Because we were, Albert thought proudly, and we get more and more ready every day.

  A shadow passed over him. That was odd. There were no transports scheduled to arrive near this time, and in any case their landing paths never took them over the construction site. Albert couldn’t look up at it. He had the hydraulic joint on the end of his crane arm, and it was a delicate operation to get it into place.

  The shadow did not disappear.

  Uneasy, Albert realized that only something massive could be causing it. Either of Mars’s moons—Deimos or Phobos—would have passed by now. So what was it? The crew on the turret mount looked up. So did Albert.

  When he saw what was casting the shadow, his unease turned to terror. Reflected in the visor of his helmet, a green glow began to build.

  28

  On the morning of July 4, Independence Day, Milton Isaacs showed up early for his rotation because he had a gift for Brakish. He’d been working on it for some time, and had finished in time to bring it in on the big day—the celebration of twenty years since the decisive battle in the War of ’96.

  The occasion was a somber one for Milton, because every anniversary of the war also marked another year that Brakish had remained in a coma, all but lost to him.

  He produced the gift with a flourish, even though he knew Brakish wasn’t looking. It was a scarf. A silly thing, maybe, but he had brought Brakish so many plants that the hospital room was starting to look like a greenhouse. Also, Isaacs recently had taken up a variety of different arts and crafts activities to pass the time he spent alone. He was now a competent potter, an enthusiastic woodworker, and when he looked at the scarf he thought maybe he had a little talent for knitting, too.