Contents
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Independence Day: Official Novelization
Dedication
Independence Day: Silent Zone
Dedication
Prologue: The Battle Continues
1 A New Roof for Project Smudge
2 Recruiting Fresh Blood
3 Arrival at Area 51
4 The Y
5 Into the Stacks
6 Roswell
7 Interview with an Alien
8 The Bikini Connection
9 Mrs. Gluck and Her Daughter
10 Disappearing Act
11 A Death in the Family
12 Chihuahua
13 The Mogollon Cave
14 The Okun Era Begins
Independence Day: War in the Desert
Dedication
1 The Attack Begins
2 Retreat
3 Meetings
4 A Much Too Crazy Plan
5 Counterattack
6 Victory Party
7 “Into the Ship”
8 A Good Old-Fashioned Turkey Shoot
9 An Oasis Town
10 Ugly Weapons
11 A Roadside Encounter
12 Back to the Oasis
13 To the Camp
14 The Raid
15 A Very Close Encounter
16 Into the Hills
Coming Soon from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Independence Day: Resurgence
The Official Prequel (May 2016)
Independence Day: Resurgence
The Official Novelization (June 2016)
The Complete Independence Day Omnibus
Print edition ISBN: 9781785652011
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652028
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: March 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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 websites or their content.
™ & © 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 the 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.
Special thanks to
Elizabeth “Little Bit” Ostrom
and Dionne McNeff
for their invaluable assistance.
The sea of tranquillity was an eerily still wasteland, a silent crater-shaped outdoor tomb of ashes and stone. Two sets of footprints were etched into the powdery gray soil surrounding the landing site, each one as freshly cut as the day it was made. On the horizon, a curved sliver of the bright earth was rising into the sky, the vivid blue of its oceans a stark contrast to the colorless valley. Hammered into the lunar surface were the sensor rods of a seismometer, a square box capable of detecting the crash of a sea-sized meteor at a distance of fifty miles, and on the far side of the camp, an American flag waving proudly in a nonexistent breeze. The entire site was littered with debris: scientific experiments and the cartons which had carried them, the unused plastic bags used to gather soil samples, and a handful of commemorative trinkets. This equipment, carelessly scattered around an area the size of a baseball infield, had been imported by the astronauts of Apollo 11, the first two humans to set foot on the moon. When they left, they jettisoned everything deemed nonessential for the ride back home. Armstrong and Aldrin had taken one giant step for man, and left behind a ton of garbage for moonkind.
Their decades-old footprints marched fifteen paces out toward the horizon in every direction before turning back to the center of the camp. Seen from high above, they formed a pattern in the sand like a large, misshapen daisy. At the eye of this flower stood the gleaming Lunar Landing Platform, a four-footed framework of tubes and gold foil which looked like a jungle gym on a hastily abandoned campground. Marooned deep in a sea of silence, the spot had the creepy aspect of a long-ago picnic which had come to an abrupt and terrifying end, as if there had been no time for the visitors to pack up their belongings. Only enough time to turn and run for safety. Nothing, not a single grain of sand, had moved in all the years since the earthlings’ departure.
But something was beginning to change. Gradually, an infinitesimal churning began to engulf the area. For many hours, it was nothing more perceptible than the disturbance caused by the fluttering of a moth’s wings at a distance of a thousand paces. But it grew steadily, inexorably, into a tremble. The electric needles inside the seismometer skittered to life. The machine’s sensors shot awake and began to scream their warning to the scientists on earth. But the moon’s extremes of heat and cold had disabled its radio transmitter within days of it first being planted. Like a night watchman with his tongue cut out, the small device struggled hour after hour to sound the alarm as the rumbling grew. A single grain of sand tumbled down the edge of a footprint, then another, and another. As the quaking blossomed into a deep rumble, the stiff wire sewn into the bottom seam of the American flag began to wobble back and forth. The footprints began to shake apart and disintegrate in the vibrating sand.
Then a vast shadow moved across the sky. It passed directly overhead, eclipsing the sun and plunging the entire crater into an unnatural darkness. The moonquake intensified as the thing moved closer. Whatever it was, it was much too large to have been sent from earth.
*
The rocky flatlands of the New Mexico desert could feel as alien and inhospitable as the moon. On a dark night when the moon was new, this was one of the quietest places on the planet: a thousand miles of blood-red desert, its clay hills baked hard and smooth. At one o’clock in the morning on July 2, jackrabbits and lizards, drawn by the warmth of the pavement, were gathered on a thin strip of asphalt in a valley where a dirt road snaked its way out of the foothills and down to the main highway. The only discernible movement came from the incredible profusion of insects, a thousand species of them that had adapted to this harsh environment.
Where the dirt road ran up toward the crest of some hills, there was a wooden sign half-hidden in the sagebrush. It read “NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION, SETI.” Those who followed the road—with or without permission—to the top of the rise were rewarded with a spectacular sight. On the other side were two dozen enormous signal-collecting dishes, each one well over one hundred feet in diameter. Precision-built from curved steel beams painted white, these giant bowls dominated a long narrow valley. Because the moon was new, the only light on them was the red glow of the beacon lamps attached to the collector rods suspended over the center of each dish. The beacons were a precaution against curious or hopelessly lost pilots hitting the equipment with their planes and tangling themselves into the steel beams like flies caught in the strands of a spiderweb.
SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, was a government-funded, NASA-administered scientific project and the field of giant radio tele
scopes was its primary laboratory. Far from the noise pollution that blanketed the cities, scientists had erected this mile-wide listening post to search for clues that would help solve a riddle almost as old as human imagination: Are we alone in the universe?
The telescopes picked up the noise emitted by a billion stars, quasars, and black holes, sounds that were not only very faint, but mind-bogglingly old. Traveling at the speed of light, radio emissions from the sun reach the earth after a delay of eight minutes, while those coming from the next nearest star take over four years. Most of the cosmic noise splashing into the dishes was several million years old, with a signal strength of less than a quadrillionth of a watt. Taken together and added up, all the radio energy ever received by earth amounted to less energy than a single snowflake striking the ground. And yet, these giant upturned steel ears were so exquisitely sensitive they could paint detailed color pictures of objects far too dim and distant for optical telescopes to perceive. They twisted slowly in the moonlight like a field of robotic flowers opening to the faint moonlight.
Tucked between these giants was a pre-fab three-bedroom ranch house which had been converted into a high-technology observatory. A skyful of data was gushing down into the telescopes, zipping along fiber optic cable into the house where it was sliced up, sorted, and analyzed by the most sophisticated signal-processing station ever built. All of this technological wizardry operated under the control of a master computer monitoring the entire system, which meant guys like Richard Yamuro had very little to do.
Richard was an astronomer who’d made a name for himself with his work on “the redshift” phenomenon associated with quasars. Six months out of graduate school, he’d landed a position at the prestigious Universita di Bologna in northern Italy. When SETI called two years later to offer him a job, he’d leapt at the chance to exchange his swank downtown apartment for a tiny cabin in the arid backcountry of New Mexico.
SETI was founded in the early sixties by a handful of “crackpots astronomers,” who just happened to be some of the world’s top research scientists. Their idea was simple: radio is a basic technology. It is easy to send and even simpler to receive. Its waves travel at the speed of light, effortlessly penetrating things like planets, galaxies, and clouds of gas without significant loss of strength. If an advanced civilization were attempting to communicate with us, these scientists argued, they would never be able to cross the infinite distances of the universe. The only realistic way to establish communication with earth would be to send a radio message. After years of lobbying in Congress, SETI won the funding for a ten-year exploration of the skies over the northern hemisphere. Under the guidance of NASA, the small staff had set up two other installations, one in Hawaii and the other in Puerto Rico. If intelligent life existed somewhere in the universe, the small band of SETI astronomers were the people most likely to find them.
Richard had pulled the overnight observation shift, which in most jobs would be the least attractive, but among the handful of scientists stationed in New Mexico, it was the most sought-after time to work. At four A.M. the nightwatch commander could override the scanning system and use one of the large telescopes for his or her own projects. Which meant Richard still had two hours to kill before he had anything interesting to do. In the meantime, he was brushing up his golfing skills. Going down to one knee, he pictured himself lining up his birdie putt on the eighteenth green at Pebble Beach.
“The entire tournament comes down to this one final shot,” he whispered like a television commentator. “Yamuro’s left himself twenty feet from the hole. Normally, that would be no problem for a golfer of his amazing skills, but he’ll be putting across the roughest, most wicked section of turf, the uneven stretch of green called ‘the walkway.’”
“That’s exactly right, Bob,” he murmured, becoming the second announcer, “it’s an almost impossible shot. The pressure is really on Yamuro at this point. It’s a make or break situation, but we’ve seen him come through situations like this a hundred times before. If anyone can do it, he can.”
At the far side of a room jammed with expensive electronic gadgetry, he’d laid a crinkled paper cup on its side. The golfer got to his feet and took a series of practice swings as the huge imaginary crowd looked on in perfect silence. Then he lifted his eyes to survey the scene. He glanced toward the tall narrow machine nicknamed “The Veg-O-Matic” for its ability to slice and dice the random noise of the universe into computer-digestible morsels. In its place, he saw his family biting their nails as the tension mounted. His mother, a grim expression on her face, nodded her head to show her son she believed in his ability to sink the putt, thereby bringing honor and glory to the Yamuro name. The golfer looked behind him and spotted a familiar face. “Carl,” he said solemnly to an autographed photo of the popular astronomer Carl Sagan mounted on the office wall, “I’m gonna need your help with this one, pal.”
At last, Yamuro stepped up to the ball, brought his club back, then, with a crisp and confident stroke, sent the ball sailing toward the hole. It moved unevenly over the worn spots in the office carpet until it reached the paper cup and clipped the edge of it before rolling off to one side. He had missed the shot! The golfer collapsed in agony to the floor. He had failed himself, his army of fans and, worst of all, his mother. While he was down on both knees, clutching at his heart and trying to find the words which could express his feelings of sorrow, the red phone rang.
The nightwatch commander’s heart jumped into his throat. The red phone was not an outside line. It came directly from the master computer and was the signal that something unusual had been picked up on the monitors. Leaving his club on the floor, Yamuro snatched up the phone and listened carefully to the computer’s digitally sampled voice reading off a string of coordinates. Blinking red lights began erupting all over the main control board.
“This isn’t really happening,” he muttered as he wrote down the time, frequency, and position coordinates of the disturbance onto a pad of paper. When the red phone rang, which it very rarely did, it meant the computers in the next room, the ones sorting through the billion channels of shrill, random bursts of space noise, had detected something out of the ordinary, something with an intentional pattern. With a sense of dread and a rising pulse rate, Yamuro slipped into the chair at the main instrument console and reached for the headphones. He slipped them over his ears and listened, but heard nothing unusual, only the usual hiss and crackle of the universe. Protocol, at that point, called for him to alert the other scientists, some of them sleeping in their cabins scattered around the grounds. But before he became a member of SETI’s False Alarm Club, Yamuro wanted to check it out more carefully. It was probably nothing more than a new spy satellite, or a lost pilot calling for help. He punched some numbers into the keyboard of the computer and took over manual control of dish number one. Reading the input data, the scope swiveled back to the exact position it had been in when the disturbance began.
Then he heard it. Startled by the sound, he jerked backward in his chair, eyes the size of pancakes. Over the usual popping, fizzling background noise, he heard a tonal progression coming through loud and clear. The resonant sound oscillated up and down inside a frequency window known as the hydrogen band. It sounded almost like a musical instrument, an unlikely cross between a piccolo and a foghorn, and vaguely like a church organ in dire need of a tuning. It was like nothing he’d ever heard before, and he recognized it immediately as a signal. Slowly, something like a shocked smile crossed his lips and he reached for the intercom.
Ten minutes later, the small control room looked like a high-tech pajama party. Sleepy astronomers in robes and slippers crowded around the main console, taking turns with the headphones, all of them talking at once. By the time SETI’s chief project scientist, Beulah Shore, came stumbling through the darkness from her cabin, her staff was already convinced they’d made contact with an alien culture. “This is the real thing, Beul,” Yamuro told her.
Shore looked
at him dubiously and plopped herself down in a chair below a poster that read “I BELIEVE IN LITTLE GREEN MEN,” which she herself had posted. “This better not be one of those damned Russian spy jobs,” she grumbled as she slipped the headphones on and listened with no visible change of expression. Two things were running through her mind: This is it! We’ve found it! There was no mistaking the slow rising and falling of the tone for anything accidental. But at the same time, her scientific training and her need to protect the project forced her to be skeptical. There was already a buzz of excitement among her coworkers and she had seen the ruinous effects of disappointment set in after previous false alarms.
“Interesting,” she allowed, poker-faced, “but let’s not jump the gun, people. I want to run a source trajectory. Doug, get on the phone to Arecibo and feed them the numbers.”
Arecibo was a remote coastal valley in eastern Puerto Rico, home to the largest radio telescope in the world, one thousand meters in diameter. Within five minutes, the astronomers there had shut down their own experiments and wheeled their big dish around to the target coordinates. On a separate telephone line, high-speed modems transferred the data feed instantaneously. As the results of the Arecibo scope came over the line, the normally polite scientists jostled one another for a first look at the printout as it came spitting out of the machine.
“This can’t be right,” one scientist said, puzzled and somewhat frightened.
Yamuro tore the page from the printer and turned to Beulah. “According to these calculations, distance to source is three hundred eighty five kilometers,” he said in confusion. Then he added what everyone in the cramped room already knew, ‘That means it’s coming from the moon.”
Shore walked over to the room’s only window, pulled back the curtain a few inches and scrutinized the crescent moon. “Looks like we might have visitors.” Then, after a moment of reflection, she added, “It would’ve been nice if they’d called first.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 1
