Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (7 page)

“Commander!” an amazed engineer said. “The locks are reengaging!”

As the cannon settled back into its vertical rest position, Jake slowed the tug and let it go. The bent and overtaxed crane arms still stuck out forward from their mounts. Jake eased his grip on the thruster controls. His hands were cramped.

Charlie sat back in his chair, pale as a ghost but looking relieved. He started to get his composure back. Good old resilient Charlie.

“Was that stimulating enough for you?”

Jake chuckled. “I didn’t think that was gonna work.”

A huge metallic
thunk
reverberated through the tug as the cannon locked into place. All of the clamps were tight, the cannon was on center. The crisis was over.

Jake eased the tug back around to head for the landing pad and the hangar. It was going to need some serious repairs. Ordinarily denting up a tug like this would be a firing offense, but Jake figured he might catch a break, since he’d just saved the lives of everyone in the command center. Even Commander Lao might stop giving him a hard time.

At least for a couple of days.

President Thomas Whitmore woke up screaming. He sat bolt upright in bed, feet tangled in the sheets, sweat dripping into his eyes and soaking his beard. He sat wild-eyed and gasping, looking around, gradually coming back to himself and realizing he was awake in his bedroom in his house in Morristown, Virginia.

It wasn’t 1996—it was 2016.

He wasn’t in the Oval Office anymore. He was a
former
president, an old man now, haunted by memories and vulnerable to nightmares—and obsessed with a truth that hovered just out of reach on the other side of the visions that plagued his sleep.

He rubbed at his face and wiped away the sweat. Normally when he woke up from these nightmares he just wanted to be by himself, but this one was different. This time he’d awakened with a sense of purpose. He had to tell someone. There was no time to waste.

Whitmore got up and started moving. He looked at his desk as he passed it, momentarily lured by the chaotic piles of sketches and drawings he’d made over the years. The circle, the line cutting through it, in a thousand variations. The symbol he’d seen in a thousand dreams. Were they dreams? Or were they messages of some kind? Deliberately sent? He believed they were, but from where?

That was the problem. Whitmore knew his psychic link with the aliens had scarred him. It was a wound. Wars caused wounds, but he also believed—and Tom Whitmore had never been a man to fool himself or sugarcoat anything for anyone—that he could see the shape of the wound, and get outside of it. Understand at least
most
of what was going on in his mind.

Even if he couldn’t figure out how to say it out loud, to people he was sure wouldn’t understand.

Was
he getting closer to understanding what it meant? It was in the aliens’ mind, that symbol, stronger than almost anything else. Burning like a beacon, like some kind of totem that they called out to. The alien mind was a strange and labyrinthine thing. If they never touched your mind, you never understood that—and if they did touch your mind, you were never the same.

Whitmore wasn’t the same.

What was he thinking about? The symbol. Those dreams were back, and more intense than ever. Things like that happened for reasons. Causes had effects, and vice versa. What was the cause here? Whitmore had a bone-deep, gut-deep, feeling that he knew—but he had to be sure.

He formed a plan, but it was really only the beginning of a plan because sometimes it was hard for him to hold long to-do lists in his head. He had to go, and he had to go quickly. If Agent Travis had heard Whitmore’s scream, he would be coming to check on him. That was the downside of still having Secret Service protection. They never really left you alone, they never let you do what you wanted to do. But Whitmore didn’t have time to deal with Travis.

He’d given a speech, a long time ago. Twenty years ago, was that right? About that. He’d tried to bring people together, focus them on a common menace. He’d given the speech not because he thought it would help the men live, but because he thought it might help them die better.

That had been a time for a speech. He’d been president. Sitting president. Now he was just an ex-president. No speeches. Nobody would care if he gave a speech.

This was a time for action.

* * *

Agent Travis took the stairs two at a time, heading up from the kitchen—where he’d been debating whether to have an afternoon cup of coffee—to the second floor where the president’s bedroom was.

Travis had been on Whitmore’s detail for almost four years now, and it wasn’t unusual for the president to wake up like this. The problem was that sometimes when he had nightmares, he took off into the neighborhood. The old pilot wasn’t what he used to be. His mind was going, and he was sinking into all kinds of crazy visions that followed him from sleep into the waking world.

If he wasn’t what he used to be, though, he was still crafty, quick, and real, real determined. Physically pretty spry for a guy his age who had been through what he’d been through. It took a lot to keep up with him sometimes, and it took a particular kind of patience because the Whitmore detail wasn’t like a lot of the other assignments. The service occasionally took pride—when nobody else was listening—in the fact that they’d only ever lost one president. Compared to some of the others out there now, Whitmore didn’t hardly have any enemies at all.

The brass didn’t think his safety was a high-level risk anymore, especially since his mental problems had become more or less an open secret. For whatever reason, people got a lot less likely to assassinate public figures who were unwell.

Being on the Whitmore detail was less a security operation and more a babysitting job, but Travis didn’t mind. He was proud to serve the man who had spearheaded the resistance in the War of ’96, and destroyed the alien mother ship. Not every agent could say that.

Most other Secret Service agents liked the active presidential detail, because it made you feel like you were defending the free world. Travis thought it was just as important to defend and protect those who had already served. As far as he was concerned, President Whitmore was a living monument to the best of American ideals and values.

But he was also frustrating, and Travis was frustrated again when he banged his way into the president’s bedroom and found it empty. Bedding twisted up and flung aside, bathrobe not hanging on its hook. Where was he? Travis noticed a breeze moving the curtains by the bedroom window. A moment later he noticed Whitmore’s cane leaning against the sill.

The window was open.

“Not again,” he groaned, and he ran out of the room. Why didn’t Patty just nail that freaking window shut?

Ten seconds later he was outside, in the front yard of Whitmore’s immaculate colonial house. He ran to the street and looked up and down. Quiet houses, someone just turning the corner walking a dog, sounds of a television through someone’s open living-room window.

No sign of the ex-president.

“Shit,” Travis said. He got out his phone and made a call.

The United States Capitol building had been expanded and renovated countless times since George Washington had laid its cornerstone in 1793. Partially destroyed during the War of 1812, it had been completely rebuilt and expanded by 1829. Additional space doubled its size in the years surrounding the Civil War, which was also when the iconic dome was added. A gas explosion in 1898 led to more renovations and structural work. If you knew the inside of the Capitol, you could in a sense trace the growth of the United States as a nation… until the War of ’96.

The destruction of the Capitol had been a powerful psychological blow, and one of the first things President Whitmore did after defeating the alien invasion was begin the rebuilding process. Fragments of the original Capitol were saved and made part of a memorial museum. The entire grounds at that end of the National Mall were redesigned and rebuilt around his vision of a new Capitol, bigger and grander than the old, keeping the stately appearance of its predecessor but adding a new and modern strength. This was the building that commemorated the War of ’96, those who had died, and the resilience of those who had survived and triumphed.

In two days, it would be twenty years since that triumph, and preparations for the anniversary were in full swing. Workers on anti-gravity platforms were touching up the building, rushing to have it completed and ready for the celebration. All over Washington, D.C., people were gathering for parades and remembrances.

Inside a White House conference room, President Elizabeth Lanford was reading the speech she would deliver on that occasion. She always tried new speeches out on her team before reading them in public. Not every president did this, but she liked hearing how they sounded and seeing how actual human beings reacted to the rhythms and the phrasing.

“On this day, twenty years ago, President Whitmore passionately declared ‘We will not go quietly into the night,’” she began. “And we didn’t.”

She ran quickly through the rest of the introduction, outlining progress made in reconstruction and focusing on the beautiful new Capitol building and other landmark structures rebuilt across the country. Then she touched on the enormous undertaking of the Earth Space Defense initiative, with its outposts on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea, and others being planned. Her administration had faced some public concern about the amount of money it had spent on domestic reconstruction, instead of an accelerated ESD program, and one of Lanford’s goals for the speech was to make clear that she thought it was time to move on.

The people of the United States—and all of planet Earth—had poured their energy and resources into defense systems. In Lanford’s mind, they had reached the time when it was appropriate to rebalance that effort and divert some of those resources into reconstruction of the cities. It was a fine line to walk, and she needed to make sure the speech would inspire, reassure, and deflect criticism all at the same time.

“Make no mistake, the defense of our planet will remain a priority for this administration,” she said, coming to her conclusion, “but your voices have been heard. We’ve all sacrificed enough. The time has finally come to put the people first again.” With that Lanford shuffled her notes back together and looked to her aide and trusted speechwriter, Patricia Whitmore.

“Great speech, Patty.” It was true. Whitmore had grown up around politicians, and knew how to strike the right rhetorical tone. Her father had possessed the same gift, in his damn-the-torpedoes way. In Patty it was a bit more nuanced, but she still knew how to connect with people. Lanford was glad to have her on staff.

“Thank you, Madam President,” Patty said.

Then Secretary of Defense Reese Tanner, predictably, weighed in with his own concerns. “I have to disagree. It’s too premature to announce the defense cuts, and I would strongly advise you remind the people that you lost your entire family in ’96—”

No
, Lanford thought. She would not do that. This wasn’t about her. It was about the world putting itself back together.

“Three billion people died, Tanner. Everyone lost someone.” She looked over the rest of the team, not wanting Tanner to feel singled out. He was surprisingly thin-skinned for someone who had spent his life in and around the military. “We’ve been living in fear for the last twenty years. It’s time to change the narrative. The people deserve a little good news. Let’s give it to them.”

One of her aides popped into the conference room.

“Madam, Captain Hiller has arrived.”

Excellent
, Lanford thought. A perfect way to end the meeting before there was too much back and forth. She was going to give the speech, one way or another, and if the rest of the team didn’t have a chance to air their grievances beforehand, they would have to support it once it was given.

“Thank you,” she said, signaling that the meeting was concluded. “Send him in.”

The door opened again and Dylan Hiller walked in, looking quite dashing in his Air Force dress uniform. He didn’t have the swagger or boisterous humor for which his father had been known, but he did possess a quiet confidence that inspired other people to believe in him. It also didn’t hurt that he was quite handsome.

A perfect poster boy for the new ESD flight corps, he was also a genuinely good kid. The world could use a lot more like him. Lanford saw Patricia and Dylan share the kind of smile that only came from years of friendship… and possibly more. She knew they had a bit of a history, dating back to flight school, and she also knew that it was complicated. Stepson of a hero pilot, daughter of a hero president. It seemed like a match made in heaven.

But none of them were in heaven, were they?

Beyond Hiller, out in the hall, Lanford saw the painting President Whitmore had commissioned to commemorate the War of ’96. In that painting, fighter planes and alien craft swarmed the skies over a cityscape meant to represent the ideal of an American city. Towering glass and steel skyscrapers reflected the flash and glare of the aliens’ energy weapons. Missiles streaked through the sky and the upper parts of the painting were dotted with the fireballs of exploding alien craft.

Seeing that painting must hold particular significance for young Dylan Hiller, Lanford reflected. After all, among the fighter jets represented was surely the one Steve Hiller had flown. It was both an honor and a burden to have a stepfather who had become a legend. Everyone knew about Hiller’s heroics during the War of ’96, while his untimely death in 2007 told the story of a man who wouldn’t let risk pass to another, when he could assume it himself.

Dylan could never equal that, and Lanford hoped he wouldn’t try. He had his own path to carve, his own greatness to achieve.

“Captain Hiller. I can’t tell you how proud we are to have you flying our flag up there,” she said. Some of her staff had already left, but Reese Tanner was talking to one of his undersecretaries—and, Lanford suspected, waiting to greet the young rising-star pilot.