Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization Read Free

President Thomas Whitmore and the pilots who had flown with him. Because of their courage, the devastated wrecks of three dozen city destroyers lay scattered across the world, monuments to the dangers that came from space and the resilience of humanity in fighting them.
    The destroyers’ landing arms—petals, the scientists called them, because of the way they had unfolded from the craft before landing—were each larger than three aircraft carriers lined up nose to tail. Or bow to stern, if you were a Navy man… which Adams wasn’t. The main body of each destroyer was fifteen miles in diameter, a circle containing huge fighter hangars, labs, facilities for growing the various organisms the aliens had domesticated and engineered for their own use, command and control rooms, and a seemingly infinite number of other inscrutable devices that would keep Area 51’s scientists busy for decades.
    Scattered across the salt flats, the wreckage still held some of the incredible menace of the ship in flight, when it had seemed impossible that it could be destroyed. Adams had been a staff officer during the invasion. He’d coordinated surveillance and intel for the joint command that oversaw the pilots who flew to their deaths attacking the city destroyer, and nobody had been happier than him to see it go down when that lunatic crop duster had flown his jammed missile right up the barrel of its main weapon.
    Russell Casse, that was his name. Adams tried to take a lesson from that moment. He would never have let Casse near one of his jets, if the fate of the planet hadn’t been at stake. The truth was, he’d been inclined not to anyway. And then Casse’d come through, sacrificing himself in a manner as heroic as any career serviceman. You never knew about people.
    In the aftermath of the War of ’96, when the Army had led the war against the surviving aliens, Adams had seen enough combat to put him on the track to the stars he currently wore on his collar. His mission in the Atlantic had been one of the toughest—he hated being undersea even more than he hated outer space. Still, it had been a success, and results were all that mattered.
    He’d spent the next twenty years coordinating efforts to reverse-engineer alien technology and put it to use, and that in turn had put him right in the middle of the founding of the Earth Space Defense initiative. He was no-nonsense and demanding, because the work required it, but he was also smart enough not to think he knew everything. That meant he was good at putting the right people in place, and he had taught himself to listen to them even when they spouted crazy theories.
    After all, as far back as the 1970s some of the scientists had voiced theories about what would later be the alien invasion.
    If more people had listened then…
    But that was hindsight. Pointless. What mattered was today, and what ESD could do to keep the people of Earth safe—which was why he was on this chopper, instead of lingering over breakfast with his wife. Not many people on the planet knew as much about the aliens and their technology, and it all began when the city destroyers came crashing down to earth. He had flown over this one a hundred times, and to him the sight of the monumental wreckage would always mean one thing.
    Victory.
    Thousands of workers were breaking it down, and as the chopper skimmed over the wreck, many looked up. One of them even waved. Adams didn’t wave back.
    Recovery teams worked around the clock, loosely divided into two different specialties. Inside the vast spaces of the destroyer, dedicated teams of technicians and scientists investigated the ship’s systems. The aliens apparently used genetically tailored organisms for a number of tasks, which kept an entire department of biologists and geneticists busy. Extraterrestrial computing systems were built on completely different principles than Earth’s, and had spawned a whole new science of mind-based computing.
    Even now,