Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) Read Free Page A

ordered the drinks from a young woman with purple hair wearing a railroad engineer’s cap.
    “So what brought you to Weymouth?” Hailey asked when he returned.
    “Yesterday I was in Oxford,” he replied. “Now I’m trying to return home.”
    She nodded. He thought she would ask him if his home was Africa, as if it was a country instead of a continent. He got that a lot.
    She surprised him.
    “Why Oxford then?” she asked.
    “School,” he said.
    “Oh,” she said, dipping her finger in the foamy head of her beer. “College man. What did you study?”
    “Art,” he said. He took a drink.
    “Art,” she repeated. “Every parent’s dream, right? An art major at an expensive school.”
    Dikembe smiled.
    “My father did not approve,” he admitted. “Drawing and painting aren’t fit pursuits for a man, especially an Umbutu man. I finished my degree two years ago, but I could never quite bring myself to go home. I’ve been working up to a gallery exhibition…” He trailed off, realizing.
    “What is it?”
    “Well,” he said. “My studio was actually in London, in Earl’s Court. I was just visiting a friend in Oxford.”
    “Lucky you,” she said. “Best visit you ever made.”
    He thought about the paintings, two years of work…
    “Sure,” he said. “Lucky me.”
    “And you choose to go home now?” she said. “Why the change of heart?”
    He gestured at the television, although at the moment it displayed only static. “Why do you think? I should have returned a long time ago. Now I may have waited too long.”
    She took a lingering sip of her beer, looking thoughtful.
    “I came over here to go to school too,” she said, “but it didn’t turn out to be my thing. I ended up working on yachts instead.”
    “Yachts?” he said. “That must be interesting.”
    “It’s a living,” she said. “The travel is fun—I’ve been a lot of places I never imagined I would see—and the owner is almost never on board, so we’re pretty much left to do our own thing. I’m still young, footloose. Surrounded by luxury, even if it doesn’t belong to me. Yeah, it’s kinda cool.”
    “Why own a yacht if you’re not going to be on it?” Dikembe wondered.
    She shrugged. “He’ll call and say, ‘Take the boat to Marseilles.’ Or Sydney, or wherever. Then he’ll fly in, throw a big party on the yacht for his very important guests, and then fly out, leaving us to clean up and have a few parties of our own.”
    They had a few more drinks. She told him about working for a Russian mobster and he told her about growing up on the savanna, and for a little while they almost forgot what was happening in the world around them. Yet it crept back in. Dikembe mused that his handful of paintings weren’t the greatest loss to culture.
    “The Louvre is gone,” he said. “The British Museum. The Prado. The Met. MOMA.”
    “The house I grew up in,” Hailey countered. “The World of Coke. My parents, maybe.” She sighed. “The two of us, tomorrow or the next day, if things keep going this way. They’re beating the hell out of us. What do they want?”
    “I don’t know,” Dikembe said. “Maybe they just don’t like cities.”
    “We’re never going to get this off our minds with that thing on.” She waved at the television. It was now replaying footage of London going up in flames.
    “What do you suggest?” he asked.
    “There’s booze on the boat,” she said. Her expression was somewhere between shy and artful. He wasn’t sure which was affected.
    * * *
    Lao Lei climbed into the cockpit of the Shenyang J-8, familiarizing himself with the controls as quickly as he could. He had trained and flown somewhat more modern jets, most of which were now piles of wreckage near the ruin that was once Beijing.
    “That’s okay,” he said to the plane. “You and I, we’re going to be friends.” He started through his checklist, just as the others in his squadron were doing.
    Lu, one of the ground crew,