Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (11 page)

Jasmine went to turn off the TV so Lucas would sleep longer, but she stopped when she saw that it was a documentary retrospective about the hybrid program… and about Steve. There he was, walking through the shimmering heat on the Area 51 tarmac toward the sleek, lethal shape of a prototype fighter. Jasmine couldn’t help herself. She turned up the volume, just a little. She didn’t want to wake the boy up, but she wanted to hear what they had to say about her husband.

“The 2007 test flight of the first ever human–alien hybrid fighter was piloted by none other than Colonel Steven Hiller,” the announcer said. It was right after he’d gotten his final promotion, Jasmine remembered. He’d been convinced they wanted to move him out of his career as a pilot and into a desk job where he could use his clout to help move the program forward on Capitol Hill.

Steve being Steve, he’d said no way. He wanted to fly. If they wanted a poster boy, he would do that, but only when he wasn’t flying. Tensions had heated up when Steve had told the administration that he didn’t think the new hybrid prototypes were ready for flight tests. David Levinson had agreed. Nobody had listened to either of them, so when the test was scheduled, Steve pulled rank and demanded that he be allowed to fly it.

He was hoping they would cancel the test, not because he was afraid, but because he knew how valuable he was to the public perception of Earth Space Defense. Even Steve had underestimated the one thing in the world more stubborn than he was—a bureaucrat feeling political pressure. The test had gone ahead.

On the screen, the hybrid fighter streaked through a wide ascending arc, then accelerated upward at a steeper angle.

“His was a decision that would ultimately cost him his life,” the voice-over intoned.

Wrong
, Jasmine thought fiercely.
It wasn’t Steve. It was President Bell and Defense Secretary Tanner who cost him his life. Steve saved someone else.
She was surprised at how quickly the emotions returned.

“These haunting images are forever etched in our hearts and minds—”

Jasmine held her breath.

The fighter exploded, disappearing in a huge fireball that trailed bits of burning wreckage across the sky. Every time it broke her heart. Every time it was like being there and seeing it when it happened. Again. Again. Again.

Over the last nine years Jasmine had watched the footage more times than she could count—and definitely more than she would care to admit. It was a sore spot between her and Dylan. He wouldn’t watch it again, didn’t want to talk about it.
“Enough is enough,”
he said.
“Past is past.”
All they could do was look forward and live. But he’d had a different relationship with Steve. To Dylan, Steve was the dad whose example he was always trying to match.

To Jasmine, Steve Hiller was the one man she had met in the last twenty years who had looked past what she did for a living, and seen the potential for what she might do with the rest of her life. She’d had him for eleven years. A whirlwind, wonderful eleven years that had passed as if it was a single evening, and now was gone.

Steve was gone.

Nothing could diminish the shock of seeing it again, even though by now she had memorized every detail of the blossoming flames, every individual trajectory of falling debris. Piloting was a dangerous business. She’d known that. Steve had certainly known that—but there was a difference between knowing it and seeing it. That was Steve on the screen, disappearing from this life in a ball of fire.

She turned off the TV and made sure Lucas was still sleeping. She had work to do, and her job was saving lives.

Maybe the past wasn’t always just the past, Jasmine reflected as she walked down the hall toward the next stop on her rounds. Not when she had to live with it every day.

Suddenly she wanted very badly to hear Dylan’s voice.

Dylan Hiller was itchy to fly. He’d had enough of the parade of photo ops and press conferences and briefings and the rest of the stupidity that came with being the public face of Legacy Squadron.

He wanted to get up in the air, feel the power of the new anti-gravity thrusters carrying him higher than any winged aircraft had ever gone. They’d tested the hybrids in the upper atmosphere, and all the way up to the edge of space. They’d done experimental flights out into hard vacuum and then quickly back down. They’d even flown training missions along the Moon’s surface.

Not always with the best results
, he mused wryly.

At every step the designs had been assessed and improved. The new generation of fighters was fully able to achieve intra- and extra-orbital flight. The fuselage and wing design could withstand reentry temperatures at terminal speeds. The anti-gravity thrusters were built into gimbals with limited range because too many moving parts meant they didn’t hold together very well at high speed in thicker atmospheric conditions. That had been a problem in the first vacuum tests, so the new generation had impulse jets at various points along the hull that improved maneuverability in space, where wings didn’t do any good.

Weapons systems also featured the best of alien and human design. Dylan and the rest of the squad had practiced for hundreds of hours targeting air-to-air missiles and alien-derived energy cannons. He didn’t know if he’d ever have to fire either of them, but if the occasion ever arose, Dylan was confident that he had the training and skills to handle it.

After the press conference he’d flown from Washington, D.C. to Area 51, where he and the rest of the squadron were facing their last few hurdles before they could climb into their jets and be gone from the bounds of Earth. By tonight, Dylan Hiller would be on the Moon. That was something his father had never done.

His father’s “legacy”—the word was starting to get on his nerves, but there it was. It weighed on Dylan. He wasn’t even Steve Hiller’s biological son, but everyone assessed what he did by comparing it to what Steve might have done.

Dylan was grateful that Steve had come into his life, and his mother’s. He’d been good for them, and they’d been good for Steve. Family obligations had settled down the wilder cowboy aspects of his personality and centered him around what was really important in life.

That was one reason he’d demanded to take the prototype up in 2007—paradoxically, having people who cared about him made him more likely to risk his life on behalf of other people. Selfishly, Dylan wished he hadn’t done it, but at the same time he was proud of his dad, and he knew that if Steve hadn’t gone up in the prototype, somebody else’s spouse and children would be mourning.

Family life had taught Steve Hiller to be selfless, and Steve had taught that lesson to Dylan.

Leaving the briefing room where a senior ESD official had outlined the parameters of their flight—all for the sake of the assembled reporters—they took a long and photogenic stroll down the wide hallway. Then the photographers scampered ahead of them to catch them coming out of the hall into the main hangar… where nobody in Legacy Squadron had to fake their enthusiasm.

The hangar was filled with hundreds of hybrid fighters, lined up in rows that extended practically as far as the eye could see. Dylan sometimes thought the place was so big it must have its own weather.

The pilots gathered together for another photo op, with the rows of fighters forming their backdrop. Ranks of hybrid craft stretched off into the distance. As impressive as it was, though, Dylan could not wait until the public relations part was done so he could get back to what he did best.

Flying. That was all he wanted to do. Maybe Steve Hiller hadn’t been his biological dad, but he had passed on to Dylan a love for the air and the machines that speared through it.

One of the reporters got tired of following the herd and singled out Rain Lao, who Dylan thought had as interesting a history as he did.

“Captain Lao,” the man said, “China has been integral to the Earth Space Defense program. Anything you want to say to the folks back home?”

Dylan watched, wondering how Rain would handle the spotlight. He was used to the attention, but it gave some people problems. Rain was the young, beautiful daughter of a pilot who’d been killed in ’96 over Wuhan… making her the perfect media fodder. He didn’t know whether she’d had any preparation for this kind of questioning, other than the media relations meetings every member of Legacy Squadron had to attend.

Hearing the question, more reporters gathered around her, waiting for her response. Rain replied in what Dylan recognized as Chinese, and they all waited for their translators to speak.

“It’s a privilege to be a part of a squadron that symbolizes the unification of our world,” one of them said in English.

Another of the pack stayed focused on Dylan.

“Captain Hiller, how do you feel taking off out of a hangar named after your father?”

How do you think I feel?
Dylan wanted to say, but he’d been better prepared than that. ESD had put him through drills about dealing with questions that struck an emotional nerve, and by this point it was pretty much routine. “I’m proud,” he said simply, “but it’s also bittersweet.” He might have said more, but his phone rang.

Not many people had his number, and they all knew he was in the middle of flight prep. That meant it was either a crisis, or his mother. Dylan glanced at his phone and winked at the assembled reporters.

“Saved by my mother.”

“He’s our mama’s boy,” Rain said, this time in English. The press gaggle laughed.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Dylan said, going along with the joke. He walked over to his fighter so he could get a little privacy, and answered the call. “You caught me just in time.”

“Hey,” his mother said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” Right away he could tell there was more to it than that. His mother was good at a lot of things, but hiding her feelings wasn’t one of them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

Which meant something. A particular something.

“You watched it again, didn’t you?” She didn’t answer. “Why would you put yourself through that?”

Because she couldn’t help herself, was the answer. Dylan knew it and he knew his mother knew it. Neither of them was going to say it out loud, though, so instead Jasmine changed the subject.

“They put your picture with the president on the front page,” she said, her tone brightening. “My boy, making a name for himself.”

Dylan wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “You gonna be okay?” She got depressed sometimes and didn’t like to talk about it, but it was real, and he worried.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, like he’d known she would. They’d had this whole non-conversation before. “Just tell me you’ll be careful up there.”

“I will,” Dylan promised. Then he had to hang up because it was time to fly.

Around him, the other members of Legacy Squadron were climbing into their cockpits and running their preflight checks. Dylan did the same.

The new generation of fighters had optimized the interface between the human operator and the alien technology. Much of the aliens’ command and control software was designed along lines suitable for a collective consciousness. Studying and understanding that part of their tech had created an entire new department within the Area 51 complex, and they were just getting to the point of being able to use it efficiently.

An individual operator interacted with the flight systems differently than an element of a hive mind, and those differences weren’t always apparent until a human pilot tried to fly one of the hybrid planes. Twenty years of trial and error had gotten them finally to fully operational status… at the cost of more than a few lives.

Dylan deliberately changed his train of thought. Knowing his mother was still watching the footage of his dad’s last flight bothered him, but he couldn’t help her right then. He had a mission to execute.

He powered up the engines, feeling the thrum of the anti-gravity generators as they came online. The cockpit heads-up display lit up and everything looked exactly like it was supposed to. Dylan called it in, and got permission to take off. He eased the fighter out of the hangar, lifting it just a few feet off the ground as camera flashes popped all around. This was one huge advantage the new hybrids had over traditional thrust-and-lift designs. You could fly them slow if you had to. No need for long runways and the dangerous moments of takeoff and landing.

Some of the reporters followed the planes right out through the hangar doors to the landing pad before ground crews chased them back to their designated viewing areas.

Once he was outside, Dylan amped the thrusters to about half-power and the fighter accelerated, smooth and strong, nose angled up at thirty degrees. When he hit a thousand feet, Dylan really unwound. Four gees pushed him back in his seat—“eyeballs in,” as the old test pilots had said. He broke the sound barrier a few seconds later, and a few minutes after that he was on the edge of space.

The fighter bumped just a little through jet stream-level turbulence, but there was another advantage of the anti-gravity propulsion system. When you weren’t relying on a controlled explosion and linear discharge of thrust, your plane was a lot more responsive to small adjustments in angular momentum. That translated into a much smoother ride in turbulent atmosphere.

Even the limited turbulence didn’t last long, because Dylan and the rest of Legacy Squadron were through the highest levels of the atmosphere less than ten minutes after taking off from Area 51. They flew in formation through near-Earth space, arcing away from their home planet toward the Moon.

This is it
, Dylan thought.
This is what I was born to do.

It was long after nightfall when David, Catherine, and Dikembe reached the upper portion of the city destroyer. They had been climbing for hours, and were miles above ground.

If they’d had to climb all the way from the ground, they never could have made it. Not a human being alive, David thought, could climb fifteen thousand vertical feet in a day, or even ten. Maybe ten, but if that person existed, his name wasn’t David Levinson. Thus it was a good thing that Dikembe had led them back up to the ridgeline between the destroyer and the road. There he’d loaded them into an ancient Sikorsky single-rotor helicopter that must have been left over from a colonial engagement in the 1960s.