Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (18 page)

“Holding things up?” David sputtered. “No. It’s called ‘proceeding with caution.’”

“Too much caution, in our estimation,” Tanner said. “The problems with the cannons have been worked out. Why is this taking so long?”

“Because this is more complicated,” David said. “Anti-gravity does funny things at the quantum level, and that has an effect on all of the systems—including the power source and the reliability of the fusion containment shield. And there isn’t a person riding on a cannon. If one of them becomes unstable and goes bang, it has a force field to contain it.”

“The Chinese have flying dreadnoughts,” Strain said. “We’re starting to look bad.”

“You want a fighter that can’t break the sound barrier, I can give you that right now,” David said. “And since when is this about national pride? This is an international effort, yes?”

“You have plenty of other responsibilities—”

“Not like this,” David said. “You at least have to give me oversight. If you rush this through just for the sake of publicity, someone is going to get killed. Again.”

“Levinson,” Tanner said ominously, “I seem to remember hearing that you were offered the directorship, back when. You didn’t want it. That means you’re not in charge—you’re part of a chain of command, and that chain of command is telling you to step away from this. Now.”

“You can’t—”

Tanner glanced at his watch. “That’s your ten minutes,” he said. “Have a nice flight home.”

* * *

Dikembe pushed the jeep to its limit, banging along the unpaved road, hoping an axle didn’t snap. A small herd of wildebeest darted from his path, and a few vultures flapped heavily from the limbs of an acacia tree. Up ahead he saw the border outpost, and a cluster of human figures.

He laid on the horn.

When he pulled up a moment later, he saw with relief that everyone in the little group was still standing. They—and the armed soldiers pointing rifles at them—turned at his approach.

“What is this?” he demanded. He recognized some of the men held at gunpoint. They were residents of a nearby village. He didn’t have time to count them, but there were fewer than a dozen of them.

“They were trying to desert the republic,” one of the soldiers said. “We have standing orders concerning such matters.”

“Sir,” one of the men said. “We were not leaving. We were hoping to get work in Kisangani, to provide for our families. We planned to return. We would never desert the republic.”

“I know you,” Dikembe said. “Guillaume, is it not? You were with the army. You were there that day when we broke them.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, “but I was injured. I still serve in the reserves, but I have no pension and no work. They say there is work in Kisangani.”

“Not for you, traitor,” one of the soldiers said.

“Yes, and you?” Dikembe said. “What is your name?”

“Mosi, my prince,” the soldier replied.

“What nonsense,” Dikembe said, waving it away with the back of his hand. “I am not a prince, not by any stretch of the imagination.”

Mosi looked chagrined.

“Sir,” he began, “your father—”

“Yes, I know,” Dikembe sighed. “Did you fight with us that day, Mosi?”

“No, Prince. I was only twelve.”

“It’s a miracle you weren’t drafted anyway. Mosi, these men are heroes of the state and have done nothing wrong. Release them.”

“We are under orders to execute runaways,” Mosi said.

“I am aware of that,” Dikembe said. “But look at them. They are your countrymen, your people. Their fathers and yours were in cradles together.” He drew his sidearm. “And if that’s not enough, I’m telling you, stand down. You will have to shoot me before you murder them.”

Mosi stood strong for a moment, but then he sighed and signed for his men to lower their weapons.

“We will suffer for this,” he said. “We may die ourselves when your father hears what happened here.”

“That is why no one will speak of this,” Dikembe said. “That is why my father will never know.”

He turned to Guillaume and the rest.

“You men come with me,” he said, and he walked a short distance away. The men followed.

“You saved our lives,” Guillaume said, after they were out of earshot of the soldiers.

“You were lucky,” he said. “I was listening on their radio band. You must be more careful.”

“I cannot watch my children starve,” the man said.

“I understand that,” he said. “I will have some supplies brought to your village. After that, I will see what can be done.”

* * *

After seeing the men back to their families, Dikembe returned home, the hollow growing in the pit of his stomach.

Much had changed in the last eleven years, and none of it for the better. His father had done what he said he would. All of the border crossings now proclaimed the territory as the Republique Nationale d’Umbutu. Dikembe himself had been drafted to design the flag, which depicted the stylized head of an alien with two machetes thrust through it, against a star and a red background. Two such flags fluttered on his jeep.

The house—the place where he had grown up—was now the statehouse of Umbutu, and had been suitably painted to proclaim it so. This despite the fact that the old central government had attempted reconciliation several times. Aid organizations offering to provide medicine and food were turned away as well. Each day seemed to bring less hope than the last. Dikembe thought that things would get better once the aliens were all dead.

Instead they had gotten worse.

He found his father in his room, fully dressed in his military attire, lying on the bed.

“My son,” Upanga Umbutu said. “Come rest with me.” It seemed as if his father had aged several decades in the space of one. His hair was grayer, the lines of his face set deeper, but it was more than that.

Reluctantly Dikembe got up on the bed and lay on the brightly patterned coverlet. A ceiling fan beat overhead, pushing the hot summer air around the room. His father took his hand.

“Do you remember?” he said. “When you and Bakari were little, how we would lie like this in the heat of the afternoon, one of you on each side of me?”

Dikembe did. Back then, his father had been a busy man, always working, often gone for many days at a time to the capital or some hot spot. When he was home, however, he always took an hour to rest with his boys. They might talk of their day—more usually they took a nap—but he remembered how protected it had made him feel, how loved.

“I’m not a little boy anymore,” Dikembe said.

“I know,” his father said, “but sometimes I need my little boy. Both of my little boys.”

Dikembe was silent, thinking. Quiet moments with his father were few these days. Should he merely receive it as a gift, or look at it as an opportunity?

People were hurting. His people.

“Father,” he ventured after a moment. “It’s been a year since the last of the aliens was killed. Isn’t it time we rejoined the world?”

His father closed his eyes, and Dikembe wondered if he would ignore the question.

Then his lids fluttered open.

“That world is not for us,” his father said. “None of them are to be trusted. That is all so clear to me. This is our place. We must protect our people.”

“Our people are starving,” Dikembe said. “Some are being executed for trying to find work.”

“For deserting their country,” his father said. “Disloyalty cannot be tolerated. We must be strong. We must face them down, these monsters that killed my Bakari.” It wasn’t the first time his father had said something like that, but it stirred a bit of horror in Dikembe, because he feared what it meant.

“They are dead, Papa,” Dikembe said. “All of them.”

“They are not,” his father said. “They live on, inside and outside of our borders. They may look human, but they are not.”

It was too much. Dikembe started to rise, but his father gripped his hand harder.

“I have heard rumors,” he said, “that my son has been interfering with the work of the Home Guard.”

So he knew, or thought he knew. Dikembe had always been aware that it would only be a matter of time before his activities were noticed by the old man.

“You made me a general after the war,” Dikembe said. “They are under my command, are they not?”

“To be clear,” Umbutu said, “they are not. They answer only to me—as do you. Do you have plans to usurp me, son? Is this what all of your scribbling has brought you to?”

“No,” Dikembe said, feeling a chill pass through him. “I have no such intentions. You are my father.”

“You would not be the first son to murder his father for his own gain,” the old man pointed out.

“I wish you could not believe such a thing about me,” Dikembe said softly.

His father sighed. “I don’t, of course, my dear boy,” he said. “I’m sure you would not have the stomach for it.”

* * *

“So this is what you learned at Oxford?” Zuberi asked, glancing around the cluttered little room Dikembe thought of as his studio.

“It helps me clear my mind,” Dikembe said. “You know what I mean. I’m trying to draw the things they forced into my brain.”

“Why relive that?” Zuberi said. “I was tortured only a tenth as much as you were, and I do my damnedest not to think of it, ever.”

“That doesn’t work for me,” Dikembe said. “I think I’m hoping if I draw these things enough, I will eventually get them out of my head. But I have to get them
right
, you know, exactly right—and that hasn’t happened… yet. So I draw on. I think it keeps me sane.”

Zuberi, gazing at the alien symbols and paintings, some of which were so abstract as to be inchoate even to Dikembe, seemed skeptical—until his eye rested on one particular sketch. It was one of the simplest, a circle with a line through it.

“My God,” Zuberi said. “What the hell is that?”

“I call it
Fear
,” Dikembe said.

“It’s disturbing as hell,” Zuberi said. He turned away from it.

“I know,” Dikembe said. “But why?”

* * *

Whitmore greeted her at the door. He looked well enough, a little older, and a lot more relaxed.

“Connie,” he said. “It’s good to see you. Come on in, have a seat. Irene will bring us a little lunch.”

They sat at his kitchen table. The maid brought coffee.

“David doesn’t know I’m here,” she said.

“Is that such a good idea?” he said with a little smile. “Considering.”

“No, this is more about his pride,” she said. “I don’t want him thinking I’m trying to fix things for him.”

“What
are
you doing?” Whitmore asked.

“I’m trying to, uh… fix things for him,” she said. She explained the nature of the problem, and the former president listened without much comment until she was done. By then, chicken salad sandwiches had appeared on the table. As they ate, Connie noticed a picture on the wall.

“Wow,” she said. “Is that Patricia?”

Whitmore nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Seventeen. Can you believe it? She’ll be attending the ESD Academy next year.”

“Dylan, too,” Connie said. “That’ll be nice. To have someone you know in a new place is always a good thing.”

“Sure,” he said.

“And you—you’ve been keeping busy,” she said.

That was true. It was the rare day that Whitmore didn’t appear publicly in some capacity, whether lecturing crowds about the importance of the ESD or acting as a sort of ambassador, celebrating the achievements of the organization around the globe. In some ways he was still more the public face of America and the global alliance than President Jacobs or anyone else in the current administration.

“I like to stay busy,” he said. “This place gets a little lonely if I just sit here, and there’s so much left to do.”

“They say you keep pushing back against the idea of a presidential library.”

“Of course,” he said. “That’s an exercise in vanity. We’ve got kids in the country without enough to eat. I’m turning donors toward funding schools and existing libraries, and if they feel the need to stick my name on them, fine. But if I’m to have a legacy, I want it to be that we’ll never be caught flat-footed again.”

He took a breath.

“Sorry, sometimes I forget when I’m talking to an old friend. Connie, I’m not sure I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I always thought you were cut out for something big, and you’ve proven it. You’ve become a real power to reckon with on the Hill.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“This thing with David,” he said, “I don’t know how much help I can be. Jacobs is the sitting president, and I can’t be seen to get in his way.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything public or overt,” she said, “but you know David. He’s usually right about these things. You may not be in office, but you still have a lot of influence.”

“And you want me to use it.”

“Yes,” she said. “For David. He’s earned that.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. I’ll poke around quietly, drop some hints, have a conversation or two. I can’t promise anything, though. What you have to understand about me is that what I do these days isn’t really politics. It’s more like cheerleading, and I enjoy it—God knows I enjoy it more than backroom deals and trying to wrangle votes from Congress. I was never really cut out for that.”

“Yet you did it,” Connie said. “You’ll certainly go down in history as one of the greatest presidents.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The president who saw three billion people die on his watch.”

“No,” she said. “The president who brought us all together so it can never happen again.”

“I hope that’s true,” Whitmore said. “I really hope you’re right. Not about how I’m remembered, but—”

“I know,” she said.

Before Rain became a resident of the Gobi Desert, she had imagined that all deserts were hot. This might have been because she’d paid little attention to geography lessons when she was younger, and possibly because the image her younger mind had summoned at the word “desert” was the Sahara.

The Gobi was high desert, and in the winter it could be very cold indeed. Depending on the winds, it could be cool even in summer, but on this late day in April it was unseasonably warm, nearly eighty degrees as she walked the dusty path from the school toward the apartment she shared with her Uncle Jiang. She stopped to slip off her shoes and dangle her feet in the cool water of the Ruo River, and gaze off at the scruffy hills west of town.