Independence Day Resurgence - The Official Movie Novelization E-Book

Alex Irvine

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Twenty years after the events of the first film, the international community recovers and builds up Earth's defenses using technology salvaged from remains of the alien forces. However, the aliens were able to send a distress signal before their final defeat, which results in a new task force of alien ships coming to Earth and threatening the human race once more...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Alex Irvine

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: July 1, 2016

Part One: July 2

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Part Two: July 3

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Part Three: July 4

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Independence Day: Resurgence: Official Timeline

Also Available from Titan Books

Also Available from Titan Comics

DON’T MISS A SINGLE PART OF THEINDEPENDENCE DAY SAGA

The Complete Independence Day Omnibusby Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich, and Steven Molstad

Independence Day: Crucibleby Greg Keyes

Independence Day Resurgenceby Alex Irvine

The Art & Making Of Independence Day Resurgence

Independence Day: Dark Fathomgraphic novel by Victor Gischler and Steve Scott, Rodney Ramos, Alex Shibao, and Tazio Bettin

Independence Day: The Original Movie Adaptation graphic novel

OTHER NOVELS BY ALEX IRVINE

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

Pacific Rim

Batman: Arkham Knight – The Riddler’s Gambit

Iron Man: Virus

Transformers: Exiles

Independence Day Resurgence™ – The Official Movie NovelizationPrint edition ISBN: 9781785651311E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651366

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: June 201610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party web sites or their content.

TM & © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Violet Sue, born on New Year’s Eve

PROLOGUE

JULY 1, 2016

Valeri Fedorov had grown up with his eyes on the stars.

As a boy he had studied the history of space exploration while his friends were playing hockey and soccer. As a young man he had studied engineering and joined the Russian Air Force, distinguishing himself as a pilot and studying at night to prepare himself for applying to become a cosmonaut. His hero was Yuri Gagarin, and when he had felt the crush of liftoff for the first time in 2011, he felt like he was fulfilling Gagarin’s dreams, as well as his own.

Now, five years later, he was on Rhea, one of Saturn’s moons, and as far from Earth as any human being had ever been… but instead of flying, he was trudging across the moon’s hostile surface toward an electrical substation, trying to figure out why the power in the command center kept going out.

As he walked, Valeri surveyed the landscape, looking for any sign of something that might have caused the outage. There were no recent meteor impacts. The base was built along the lip of a giant crater, and the crater walls showed no sign of recent slides or collapses. At first they had suspected damage to some of the equipment from a micrometeorite, but unless it was really very small it would have registered on the base seismometers. Thus he would have to abandon that theory and inspect the equipment to see what it might tell him.

They had emergency power from shielded generators, but that wasn’t enough to keep all the lights on, and it sure as hell wasn’t enough to keep the Rhea station warm. So Valeri and his crew, another dozen cosmonauts with bruised dreams and bruised knuckles just like him, were out in the near vacuum of Rhea’s surface, freezing their asses off and trying to get the lights back on.

There had been several strange power surges of unknown origin over the past few days, perhaps related to Saturn’s electromagnetic sheath, or maybe a passing wave of particles from the sun. Valeri didn’t know. It wasn’t his job to know. He wasn’t a scientist. He was a trained pilot and engineer, a cosmonaut, reminded that most of space exploration was far from glorious. It was hard work, turning wrenches and fixing machines constantly under assault from the extremes of vacuum and cold.

Despite all that, Valeri loved it.

He had a girlfriend back on Earth, and someday he would settle down with her, but today he was building humankind’s dream of space… and keeping the human race safe from a repeat of what had happened in 1996.

Valeri had been just a boy then, still spending all his time playing hockey and fishing, and then at night looking up at the stars. The aliens had destroyed Moscow, Kiev, and St. Petersburg, but they had not reached Petropavlovsk when their mother ship was destroyed. Because of that, Valeri was alive to go to space and curse the balky machinery here on Rhea.

The power surges were making his life hell and slowing down the construction of the Earth Space Defense base they were supposed to be building.

“You on vacation out there?” one of the techs radioed from inside.

“Shut up,” Valeri said. He didn’t have much patience for people sitting inside where there were air and survivable temperatures, complaining about the pace of work on the moon’s surface. At least Valeri and his team didn’t have it as hard as the construction crew working on the base itself. The cranes and arc welders had their own fuel cells, so power interruptions didn’t give them any time off. The welders sparked now as a crew member held a ten-meter-long steel beam in place, extending the base’s frame toward what would be its final shape.

The armaments were still in transit from Earth. When the base was complete, the Earth Space Defense force would reach to Saturn. Heavy gun turrets engineered from alien technology would ring the base, making Saturn the outermost point in the defense architecture. Other bases were under construction on Mars and on one of Jupiter’s moons. Valeri couldn’t remember which one. Jupiter had too many damn moons.

Rhea’s minimal gravity made it easy to move once you had the hang of how to jump and control your landings without losing your balance. Valeri had figured it out during his first posting off Earth, back on the Moon. Rhea’s gravity was so light you could practically throw a rock over its horizon. He’d had to adopt a sort of slow-motion walk, not trying to jump, because each normal step would launch your body into a slow arc that could cover tens of meters.

He reached the substation and opened an electrical panel. He saw a lot of black streaks and knew immediately what the issue was.

“I found the problem,” he said. “The power surges blew out most of the fuses.” The substations were supposed to be shielded, but apparently their protection wasn’t as good as the thirty centimeters of lead that sheathed the emergency generators.

“Get the heat back on before we freeze to death,” the tech responded. “This is worse than Siberia.”

Siberia was nice in the summer, Valeri thought. He had gone fishing there a few times before joining the cosmonaut corps. Maybe when he rotated back to Earth, he would take a trip there again. The lakes, the endless forests… a marked contrast from what he was looking at out here.

He had to take off the whole panel to replace the fuses. Where was his wrench? He’d had it a minute ago. Ah. There it was, on the ground.

Must have dropped it, he thought. As he picked it up, though, Valeri noticed a strange phenomenon. Tiny particles of ice floated up from the surface, drifting higher. Like a slow motion reverse snowstorm.

It wasn’t unusual for small vibrations to kick up little mini-storms like this. A passing vehicle or a launch shook up the surface for a radius of several kilometers—but there was nothing like that going on at the moment. Feeling a strange sensation, Valeri turned in a slow circle to make sure. The only thing he saw was the welding crew, levering another beam into place. That shouldn’t have caused this, and it certainly shouldn’t have caused what he was feeling—it was as if gravity was starting to disappear around him.

A pang of fear went through Valeri at the thought of floating away from Rhea. He had done space walks before, but he didn’t have the gear for one now, and—

Stop it, he told himself. There’s nothing wrong with gravity. What could affect it, after all?

He looked up then and saw a glowing, pulsating mass in space between Rhea and Saturn. The disturbance was… difficult to describe. It was circular, or perhaps spherical. The boundary between it and normal space was hard to determine because it rippled and pulsed, like a convection current in water, but with color.

What could cause something like that? Valeri was a trained engineer, and had learned quite a bit of physics and astronomy during his years in space. None of his education had prepared him for this sight.

“Command, are you seeing this?” he radioed.

There was no answer. Valeri looked over toward the base and saw that the lights inside were flickering. Another power surge? Was it from the ripple in space? Valeri had never seen anything like it. The energies coming from the ripple had to be intense to affect the power supply even through the heavy shielding.

A thought occurred to him. If the power supply was being affected, what were those mysterious energies doing to his body through the minimal protection of his space suit?

Valeri decided the substation repairs could wait. He looked around and saw the other members of the crew reaching the same conclusion. They dropped their tools and started back for the relative safety of the base. The construction cranes and tractors powered down as their operators broke off work. All around them hung fine particles of ice, drifting slowly and incredibly upward.

Valeri followed, stepping carefully because he was still seeing the ice particles lifting around him, and he was suddenly and irrationally afraid that if he tried to move too fast, he would float away with them.

* * *

Commander Piotr Belyaev stomped into the command center as the lights flickered again. The area was still under construction. It was airtight and heated—at least theoretically—but the computer systems weren’t fully installed yet, and the furnishings were still minimal. The temperature, he guessed, was somewhere around minus twenty Celsius. He wore a parka and extra socks under his ESD-issue boots.

“What is it now?” he demanded as he entered. The power problems were slowing construction, and that in turn was slowing preparations for the installation of the gun turrets. They were on their way from Earth, and Belyaev was going to catch hell if the gun emplacements weren’t finished by the time they arrived.

“Look,” the closest technician said. He pointed toward the command center’s large bay window. Belyaev walked closer to see what the latest problem might be.

The window was partially iced over, but enough of it remained clear that he could see the disturbance occurring between Rhea and Saturn’s rings. The rings themselves looked like a road from this perspective, curving away around the vast arc of the planetary body.

The disturbance partially obscured the rings. At its edges they appeared warped and shimmering, like the distant surface of a road on a hot day back on Earth. It appeared as if space itself was rippling, and colors flared around the phenomenon—which Belyaev guessed was approximately a kilometer across.

It was growing rapidly, and seemed to be taking on a more definite shape, though he couldn’t tell for sure. He had never seen anything like it, and his brain seemed reluctant to interpret the images fed into his eyes. One thing was certain, however. There were huge energies there, radiating outward and washing over Rhea and nearby smaller moonlets. The monitors in the command center detected remarkable amounts of radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Belyaev guessed that if he had neutrino and plasma monitors online, they, too, would be registering substantial energies.

“Call it in,” he ordered. Earth Space Defense protocols dictated that all unusual events had to be reported to the United States Army command and control headquarters. All nations of the world contributed to the ESD, but the United States had taken the lead in the integration of alien technology, and therefore were the de facto leaders of the ESD. In some ways this rankled the other participating nations, but it also made their jobs easier. When something unusual occurs, Commander Belyaev thought, let the Americans handle it. They wanted the problem, they could have the problem.

“We tried,” a nearby technician answered. “Our long-range communications are down.”

Impossible, Belyaev thought. They were on the Earth-facing side of Saturn at this point in Rhea’s orbit. Only empty space lay between the base and Earth’s orbital satellite network, speckled here and there by orbiting rocks. How could communications be down?

Occasionally a solar storm or intense fluctuation in the Van Allen belts disrupted communications, but those disruptions never lasted more than a few hours, and they never occurred across all frequency bands. The ESD had built a great deal of redundancy into its outer-planet communications systems.

“This cannot be,” he said. “Try the EHF band.”

“There’s too much interference,” the technician said. He could see that Commander Belyaev didn’t believe him. “Listen.” The technician flipped a switch, routing the long-range satellite communications through a speaker system in the command console.

All they could hear was white noise. It wasn’t the ordinary white noise, however—the kind that came from the background radiation of space. It seemed to have a pattern, to pulse and fluctuate just as the visual disturbance did. Something about the rhythm of this noise gave Belyaev a deep-rooted sense of unease—a feeling in the pit of his stomach like his ancestors must have felt when they saw an eclipse.

He and the entire Rhea Base team were in danger. Of that he was certain. If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain how he knew it, or what the danger was, but all of his survival instincts were on high alert.

Small objects began shifting and floating away from the table tops where they had been resting. Was the ripple in space interfering with gravity? It would have to be something tearing at the fundamental fabric of space-time. How was that possible?

That was a question for the scientists. Belyaev was a soldier. All he cared about at the moment was that he and his crew were more than a billion kilometers from home, and now they were cut off behind a wall of white noise and the unraveling disturbance over Saturn’s rings.

PART ONE

JULY 2

1

Dawn broke over the Rockies. General Joshua Adams sat in the back of a Marine helicopter, irritated at his abrupt summons but reconciled to his duty. He was a career military man, and had done his part to battle the initial invasion that had come to be known as the War of ’96. Since then he’d worked for the past twenty years on the integration of alien technology into existing human military hardware. The Earth Space Defense systems were at least partly his baby, and he was a proud father.

Even so, he hadn’t been happy when the request had come in from the research site at Area 51. They needed him pronto, they said. No explanation available over unsecured channels. So he had gotten up from the breakfast table, climbed into the chopper, and here they were speeding over the salt flats south of Salt Lake City, on their way to New Mexico.

His wife was still at the bed and breakfast, as far as he knew. He also knew he would hear about this later, when she got things wrapped up and went back to their home just south of Area 51. Janine was an Army wife, and knew what came with the territory, but she also wasn’t shy about letting him know when he was putting the work before the family.

“It’s one thing to save the world, Josh,” she’d told him once when they were arguing. “It’s another to convince yourself that every time you sign a report you’re fighting a war. You need to be able to tell them apart.”

She was right, too—he had a tendency to lose himself in his work, and thanks to Janine, he could fight it better. Adams had learned a long time ago that listening and assessing made a good general. Any idiot could point to his stars and bellow orders. A real leader made sure his subordinates understood why the orders were necessary, and made it clear that he trusted the people around him to carry them out—or propose better ideas if they had them.

Janine had a lot of ideas, and they were often good ones. Adams wouldn’t have climbed the career ladder so quickly without her, and both of them knew it.

“We’re two minutes out, General,” the pilot informed him. Adams nodded even though the pilot couldn’t see him. It was a distracted reflex. His attention was occupied by the scene below. They crested a pass between two mountains, revealing a sight Adams never got tired of seeing.

Spread out over miles of the salt flats, and still looming large enough to be part of the horizon from Area 51, was the wreckage of one of the alien city destroyers.

In flight, each of the city destroyers had blotted out the sun over a large metropolis—in more than a hundred of those instances, they were the last things citizens ever saw. New York, Washington, D.C.… Four of America’s largest cities lay in ruins by the time the sun set on July 2, 1996. Fifteen by the end of July 3.

Fifteen still, on July 4. The same was true on a larger scale worldwide. London, Berlin, Paris, Bombay, Shanghai, Moscow, Lagos… the list went on, and would have been much longer were it not for the heroism of President Thomas Whitmore and the pilots who had flown with him. Because of their courage, the devastated wrecks of three dozen city destroyers lay scattered across the world, monuments to the dangers that came from space and the resilience of humanity in fighting them.

The destroyers’ landing arms—petals, the scientists called them, because of the way they had unfolded from the craft before landing—were each larger than three aircraft carriers lined up nose to tail. Or bow to stern, if you were a Navy man… which Adams wasn’t. The main body of each destroyer was fifteen miles in diameter, a circle containing huge fighter hangars, labs, facilities for growing the various organisms the aliens had domesticated and engineered for their own use, command and control rooms, and a seemingly infinite number of other inscrutable devices that would keep Area 51’s scientists busy for decades.

Scattered across the salt flats, the wreckage still held some of the incredible menace of the ship in flight, when it had seemed impossible that it could be destroyed. Adams had been a staff officer during the invasion. He’d coordinated surveillance and intel for the joint command that oversaw the pilots who flew to their deaths attacking the city destroyer, and nobody had been happier than him to see it go down when that lunatic crop duster had flown his jammed missile right up the barrel of its main weapon.

Russell Casse, that was his name. Adams tried to take a lesson from that moment. He would never have let Casse near one of his jets, if the fate of the planet hadn’t been at stake. The truth was, he’d been inclined not to anyway. And then Casse’d come through, sacrificing himself in a manner as heroic as any career serviceman. You never knew about people.

In the aftermath of the War of ’96, when the Army had led the war against the surviving aliens, Adams had seen enough combat to put him on the track to the stars he currently wore on his collar. His mission in the Atlantic had been one of the toughest—he hated being undersea even more than he hated outer space. Still, it had been a success, and results were all that mattered.

He’d spent the next twenty years coordinating efforts to reverse-engineer alien technology and put it to use, and that in turn had put him right in the middle of the founding of the Earth Space Defense initiative. He was no-nonsense and demanding, because the work required it, but he was also smart enough not to think he knew everything. That meant he was good at putting the right people in place, and he had taught himself to listen to them even when they spouted crazy theories.

After all, as far back as the 1970s some of the scientists had voiced theories about what would later be the alien invasion.

If more people had listened then…

But that was hindsight. Pointless. What mattered was today, and what ESD could do to keep the people of Earth safe—which was why he was on this chopper, instead of lingering over breakfast with his wife. Not many people on the planet knew as much about the aliens and their technology, and it all began when the city destroyers came crashing down to earth. He had flown over this one a hundred times, and to him the sight of the monumental wreckage would always mean one thing.

Victory.

Thousands of workers were breaking it down, and as the chopper skimmed over the wreck, many looked up. One of them even waved. Adams didn’t wave back.

Recovery teams worked around the clock, loosely divided into two different specialties. Inside the vast spaces of the destroyer, dedicated teams of technicians and scientists investigated the ship’s systems. The aliens apparently used genetically tailored organisms for a number of tasks, which kept an entire department of biologists and geneticists busy. Extraterrestrial computing systems were built on completely different principles than Earth’s, and had spawned a whole new science of mind-based computing.

Even now, after twenty years, scientists were in the depths of the ship, learning more about how those systems worked. Their initial results found their way to the research and development wing of the new Area 51, where applied scientists and computer engineers hybridized the technology and built it into new generations of military hardware.

The structural and materials engineers, on the other hand, had different interests, and for them, teams recovered huge intact pieces of the ship’s hull and mechanisms. Military contractors had designed transport platforms specifically to move those pieces from the crash site to Area 51, where a battalion of engineers waited to document them and take them apart, piece by piece, analyzing each component in an ongoing effort to understand and utilize the alien technology.

The invasion had left terrible destruction in its wake, and hundreds of millions dead—but it was also a gift, in a way. Because of it, Earth knew what was out there, and knowing enabled them to prepare for when they encountered it again. Adams had made it his life’s work to guide that preparation.

The city destroyer fell away behind them and the chopper followed the main approach road from the crash site to the new Area 51. Not for the first time, Adams reflected on how Area 51—once the focus of so many conspiracy theories—had become exactly what the most wild-eyed kooks of the 1950s had believed it to be. The nerve center of Earth’s investigation of alien technology.

In old photographs, the Groom Lake facility was just a few buildings behind a fence. It had grown to include runways, hangars, several small repair and manufacturing facilities, and laboratories. For decades the government had denied its existence. Until the aftermath of 1996, they had continued to deny its true purpose—which had always been to investigate, analyze, and attempt to use bits of extraterrestrial technology. The spy planes and stealth technology were all part of that, the tip of the iceberg that eventually became visible to the public. Yet for every B-2 that thrilled spectators at an air show, there were a dozen other projects that only a few people on Earth knew about.

Then, after 1996, Area 51 had exploded into a small city of its own, built alongside a huge complex of research facilities—the best in the world. Crashed alien fighter craft, pieces of unidentified technology from the alien vessels, even a few surviving invaders themselves, all had been brought here. Now Area 51 was one of the largest military installations on planet Earth. Thousands of military and civilian workers lived and worked there. Manufacturing and testing facilities were getting close to good enough to reproduce alien technologies.

All of it existed for one purpose.

When the aliens came again, Earth would be ready.

And they would come again. Adams knew it. They’d made contact once, and gotten a bloody nose, but any race that would traverse the great spaces between the stars would possess the kind of determination that a single setback couldn’t overcome. Adams had studied military history his entire adult life, and there was a truism. The conqueror didn’t give up after his first effort failed. The aliens would come back, and when they did, they would be pissed.

The chopper flew toward the helipad next to the fighter hangar. As it swung around to orient itself for landing, Adams could see the destroyer again, a few miles away. He remembered watching it burn after it crashed to the ground.

That crazy drunk crop duster…

His final missile jammed in his jet’s own launch bracket, and he’d flown it straight up the aperture of the destroyer’s main weapon assembly. Pure guts.

At the time Major Adams had been attached to the Area 51 R&D wing, but he hadn’t known all of its secrets. What he had known was that new technology kept appearing, along with orders to integrate it into existing fighter jets and other military hardware. He’d heard the rumors, of course, knew that Area 51 held secrets to which his security clearance did not entitle him—but when he’d learned the full truth, he’d been astonished.

Area 51 had been doing alien research since 1947.

Incredible.

Once he’d recovered from the surprise, Adams had applied to join the accelerated alien research projects. He’d seen some combat when the survivors from the city destroyer came boiling out in a last murderous attack, but most of his career had been, and was, dedicated to turning the aliens’ technology against them. Against whatever else might be out there among the stars.

All enemies, foreign and domestic, the oath said. After 1996, Adams had mentally added extraterrestrial.

Now he was one of the officers in charge. Using the alien materials, science, and especially the anti-gravity propulsion systems, humankind had reached out into the solar system. There were bases on the Moon, Mars, Rhea, and others were in the planning stages. Humanity had taken a weapons lesson from the aliens, as well.

Cannons based on the city destroyers’ main weapon were the next step in human defense. Dozens of them were lined up at one end of Area 51, in various stages of construction. Dozens of others ringed the Earth in geostationary orbits, linked to the command center here in Nevada. Still more were on the way from Earth to the space-based installations on other planets and moons. Before Adams retired, he wanted to be able to look at a map of the solar system and not find a hole through which an alien aggressor could get close to Earth—not without humanity knowing about it ahead of time and having the capacity to react.

That would be a legacy worth leaving.

Near the rows of cannons, next to the research complex, a large red cross painted on the roof marked out the hospital named for President Whitmore’s first lady, Marilyn, who had died during the War of ’96. Adams had met the president only once, and admired him as much as he admired any man on Earth. It was sad to hear about the mental decline Whitmore had experienced in recent years.

The president’s daughter, Patricia, would have been a good pilot, following in her father’s footsteps, but she’d left flight school to be closer to him, back in D.C. She’d landed on her feet, though, and was an assistant of some kind to the new president, Lanford.

Solid woman, Adams thought. Better than her predecessor, Bell.

The hospital in which Marilyn Whitmore had died was now a world-class research and medical facility. Here again, alien research had given humanity new insights. The invaders were so much farther along the biotech learning curve that even after twenty years, Adams knew the human race still had a long way to go to catch up. Even so, new advances were saving lives. Most of that research was centered here, because most of it was based on classified material and couldn’t be shared with other medical facilities. Maybe someday, Adams thought, but not quite yet.

The chopper hovered for a moment as the ground crew cleared away from its rotor wash, and General Adams wondered again what had lit a fire under the staff.

He would find out soon.

2

Dr. Milton Isaacs took a break from his rounds in the Marilyn Whitmore Hospital to check in on Brakish. There weren’t many patients in the hospital, since it was on the grounds of the alien research facility at Area 51, and outside of the occasional workplace accident or bout of the flu, the local population was quite healthy.