Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (31 page)

Patricia was out there, but Whitmore couldn’t think of her right now. He had to stay focused and steady. He had to make sure the queen took the hook all the way into her mouth, so when he gave the tip of the rod a little twitch, there would be no way for her to spit it out.

* * *

It turned out Dylan did have an idea, and it was even crazier than Jake might have expected. They arrowed down the face of a mountain, up over another line of peaks, and then through a gap in the foothills.

Ahead of them lay the city of Denver, half crushed under a city destroyer that had fallen in the act of extending its landing petals twenty years ago. Some of them were farther deployed than others, so it sat at an angle, like an awning over the city from Lakewood all the way out to Aurora, and Commerce City down to the Denver Tech Center.

“Rain! Head under the destroyer,” Dylan called into the comm. “Let’s give ’em a tour of Denver.”

“You want to fly under that thing?” Charlie’s voice was almost a squeak.

“Why? You scared?” Rain needled him. He shut up. No way was he going to admit to her that, yeah, he was scared. Not when he knew they were so close to having a real date.

He just had to live to see it happen.

The two fighters arced under the wreckage of the city destroyer and the devastated ruins beneath. A lot of people still lived in Denver, but not right under the destroyer because nobody knew how long it would stay balanced as it was—partially on its few landing petals and partially on the tops of Denver’s tallest buildings. Millions of tons of alien ship balanced over the city like a cosmic sword of Damocles.

Jake watched the ruins go by. He’d never been there before. Maybe he would come back sometime and be a tourist.

The alien fighters followed them, still hot on their trail, but in the more confined airspace Jake had what the brass liked to call a target-rich environment. He got to work making it target-poor.

* * *

“For Christ’s sake, Dad,” David yelled as he ran across the salt flats flailing his arms around like one of those inflatable dummies he’d seen outside cell-phone stores. “I can’t be that hard to see!”

He kept running, and a minute later the bus screeched to a halt. Right after that, Julius piled out, a delighted expression on his face.

“It takes the end of the world to get us together?! Come give me a kiss already!”

“Uh, Dad. Not now,” David said, looking at his hand-held monitor to track Whitmore’s progress and the queen’s course, as well.

“You’re a lot taller than I imagined,” a teenage girl said.

Julius beamed at David. “You’ll be happy to know I made a few acquaintances. Fans, if you can believe it.”

“I’m a little busy right now,” David said, not looking up from the monitor.

“Always working,” his dad griped. “You and I are going to have to talk.”

“I said not
now
,” David snapped. “Look behind you!”

Julius looked back. So did all the kids. There was the queen’s ship, looming over the salt flats, headed right their way.

“Oh,” Julius said. “I see.”

Dylan and Rain raced through the maze-like ruins of downtown Denver, alien gunships in hot pursuit.

“Focus all your firepower on the bottom of every skyscraper in the Mile High City!”

Ooh
, Jake thought.
Good idea
. “You hear that, Charlie? Let’s blow some shit up!” The two of them blazed away at the lower floors of the tallest buildings, while Dylan and Rain took them through eye-popping turns, staying just ahead of the alien ships. The weaponry tore through concrete and steel, gouging big pieces out of the buildings… and then it started to happen.

Their lower floors undermined, with the incalculable weight of the city destroyer pressing down on them from above, the buildings started to collapse. The gigantic destroyer tipped down.

The fighters’ engines ratcheted up to a scream as Dylan and Rain redlined them to get out from under the falling vessel. They made it by scant meters, shooting out into open sky as the destroyer pancaked the deserted ruins below it—and eliminated the last of their pursuit.

“Pretty good idea,” Jake said when he’d gotten his heartbeat back under control.

“Not too bad,” Dylan agreed. They cut west again, and hoped they would get to Area 51 in time.

* * *

As if Whitmore had invoked her, all of a sudden there Patty was, in a fighter of her own, matching his speed.

“You didn’t even say goodbye,” she said.

He didn’t bother to deflect it or beat around the bush. “You wouldn’t have let me go.”

“You should have let me do this,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

Not quite
, he thought.

“You already saved the world once,” she continued with tears in her eyes. “You shouldn’t have to do it again.”

“I’m not saving the world, Patty,” Whitmore said. “I’m saving you.” He took a long look at his daughter, remembering her as a little girl in the Area 51 hospital a few miles behind them. All grown up now. “It’s good to see you flying again. Your place is in the air.” He was savoring the moment with her when the tug jerked and its controls stopped responding. Whitmore pulled at them and felt the shudder of some invisible force. The alien fighters veered off.

“I’ve lost manual control,” he said. “She’s locked onto me! Patty, go!”

Ahead of them, a hatch slid open in the underbelly of the queen’s ship. Patricia held her position—then Whitmore’s head snapped back and his eyes lost focus for a moment. Before she could react, he turned to look at her.

“She’s in my head,” he said, his eyes haunted. “She knows it’s a trap!”

The alien fighters that had left them alone when the queen’s tractor beam locked on the tug now angled in again, raking the tug with blaster fire. Whitmore got control back as the ship’s doors started to close.

“Can you get me to the target, Lieutenant Whitmore?” he asked, with a look through the cockpit window. His voice was rich with confidence and pride.

* * *

Patricia steeled herself for what she knew was coming. There was nothing she could do. She knew what
he
would do, and she knew why, but she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Her mother, Jake, now her father…

But if there was anyone whose life had prepared him for this moment, and the ultimate sacrifice he was about to make, that person was Thomas Whitmore.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Whitmore gunned the tug forward and Patricia kept pace, clearing a path through the swarming alien fighters. Ahead of them the doors kept closing, but the queen had bit hard enough on the hook that they were going to make it.

“It’s your time now, Patty,” he said as they approached the doors. “I love you.”

It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do, but Patricia peeled away as her father piloted the tug through the closing doors, making it with scant feet to spare.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said, not knowing whether he could hear her. Her fingers itched on the firing stud at the end of the jet’s control stick—but that would be wasted. Her father’s life would be wasted, too, if she didn’t get out of there.

She banked away and accelerated out of the shield zone, following the rest of the pilots who had survived this far. The split second she cleared the shield area she heard David yelling.

“Now! Now! Activate!” And then he added, “Dad, get the kids to cover.”

Kids?
Patricia wondered what kids were doing out there.

Behind her, the shield generators rumbled to life, and the dome spread over the empty desert landscape. Inside it hung the queen’s ship… and inside her ship was Thomas Whitmore.

* * *

David watched, holding his breath as the queen’s ship approached the shield perimeter. The ship hit the shield barrier, and the energy of the interaction crackled out in every direction.

“Come on,” David said under his breath. The shield wouldn’t last forever. “Do it, Tom. Do it.”

* * *

Whitmore turned on the tug’s lights. All of them. In the darkness he saw two enormous legs moving nearby, straight and hard like those of an insect. Then he saw the rest of the queen as the tug was slowly lifted up so that she and the ex-president were at last face to face.

Two malevolent black eyes rested behind a ridged, pointed snout that fanned back into a dark brown frill. Her claws also looked like those of an insect, and each was far larger than his entire body. Tendrils whipped in the darkness behind her.

She was huge, and yet, somehow, she didn’t seem as big as his nightmares.

“Recognize me? You’ve been in my head too long,” Whitmore said.

There was a jolt, and even the queen staggered a little. That was it. The ship must have collided with the shield’s perimeter—Levinson had activated it, and it had held. The rest was up to him. The queen looked away, as if receiving some kind of data from her ship, then back to Whitmore, and he took the chance to rub it in a little.

“That’s right,” he said, holding up his right hand. In that hand, he held the manual firing control for the fusion bombs. He thought he saw a look of understanding, and felt the wave of her rage in his brain. “On behalf of the planet Earth, happy Fourth of July!”

He hit the trigger.

* * *

The salt flats lit up with a blinding light. The fighters’ cockpit windows polarized to save the vision of their pilots, and so too did the exterior windows of Area 51.

David Levinson, who hadn’t been at all certain the shields would hold, ducked and covered, just like the boys of his generation had been taught—then looked up just as the roiling force of the explosions dissipated. A moment later the shield did, too.

“Son of a gun did it,” David said. Whitmore had sacrificed his life, but the plan had succeeded.

“Do we have confirmation, Levinson?” Adams said from the command center.

For once in his life, Levinson was willing to draw a conclusion before the data was all reported. The dust cloud inside the shield area was beginning to settle, but nothing could have survived that blast.

“I think it’s safe to say she’s a goner, Mr. President!” He heard cheers from the command center, and then cutting through them came Catherine’s voice.

“Sir, if she’s dead, then why are her fighters still attacking us?”

* * *

David turned to his father and wrapped him in an emotional embrace. The odds against this reunion were almost beyond calculating. He’d won the lottery surviving two alien invasions with his father still alive. This time in particular, it seemed to him a miracle that Julius had made it through the Gulf tsunami, and then managed to get all the way from Texas to Area 51 just in time… with a bunch of school kids.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Fans!” Julius answered brightly. “This is Sam, my navigator, her brothers, Felix and Bobby…” Julius introduced the rest of the kids and even the dog while the boy named Henry got out his phone and turned around so he could take a selfie with the queen’s destroyed ship in the background.

Then his expression went from smug to confused.

“Excuse me, mister,” he said. “Um, is that supposed to happen?”

David turned along with everyone else to see the alien queen, rising out of the churning plume of dust and smoke. She stood upright, two hundred feet tall, partially encased in a dull gray exoskeleton that actually seemed to
merge
with the bony brown carapace of her body. She towered hundreds of feet over the top of them, vaguely resembling a gargantuan praying mantis, the green outline of a shield flickering around her.

Suddenly Catherine’s question made sense.

“Shit, she has her own shield,” David said. It looked to be damaged, but had held enough for her to survive. Instead of celebrating, then, they had to finish the job—and the first order of business was to get these children out of her way. “Okay, back on the bus, kids. Everyone on the bus!”

They all scrambled back toward the bus. Daisy, the littlest of them, dawdled, looking around. “What about Ginger?”

“Really, the dog?” David sighed. “I guess we have to get the dog.” Scanning the area, he saw the tiny terrier barking at the queen. Daisy had already spotted her. She made a mad dash over, scooped up the barking Ginger, and sprinted back to jump on board while David argued with Julius over who should drive.

“Out of the seat, Dad!” David said, shoving his way in front of Julius. “If you drive then we might as well walk!”

“That’s what we’ve been saying all along,” Bobby grumbled.

The alien queen, each of her steps yielding a small earthquake, stomped out of the shield perimeter, crushing one of the flatbed trucks. As David got the bus started and moving, one of the campers cried out.

“Sir, it’s chasing us.”

“Maybe we should play dead, like when a bear attacks you,” another of them suggested.

“Does that look like a bear, stupid?” a third kid said.

He heard Catherine’s voice then, coming from the monitor he still carried.

“We’re detecting movement, David.”

Driving like a maniac, with the kids bouncing around in the back, David swerved to avoid one of the queen’s legs. She moved incredibly fast, especially compared to a secondhand summer-camp school bus.

“Yup! Lots of movement!” he agreed, stomping on the gas and hoping they could somehow avoid being crushed before they got close enough to Area 51 for Adams to bring the destroyer cannon to bear.

Adams chimed in over the comm. “David, six minutes to Earth’s core breach.”

The bus roared across the salt flats. Whitmore’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain, David thought. The queen was damaged, she was wounded. They just had to find a way to finish her off.

In the next six minutes.

The interior of the isolation chamber was filled with a holographic constellation of schematic drawings, star charts, blueprints for machinery beyond human comprehension. It spilled out of the sphere faster than any of them could keep up, but Okun knew what some of it signified, and he knew that with these revelations, humankind stood on the brink of a new golden age.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” he said, to the room at large.