Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (23 page)

“
Chang’e One
.”

She was so absorbed in her instruments, at first she didn’t understand that someone was talking to her over the radio.

“
Chang’e One
,” the voice repeated.

“
Chang’e One
,” she said. “This is Lao.”

“
Chang’e One
, we have a situation. One of our pilots on a low-orbit run has experienced a malfunction. You’re the closest craft to his position. Please divert while we try to determine a fix for his malfunction.”

Rain looked back at the moon and allowed herself a mental shrug. Her craft was named
Chang’e
for the legendary moon goddess, whose story was—at best—somewhat bittersweet. For Rain, Chang’e would have to wait.

“Give me his position,” she said.

She had to begin shedding velocity immediately until she would be able to turn and actively accelerate toward the Earth—which on the face of it, felt a little crazy. She watched her home of twenty-one years wax larger, and then began to kill her speed. AG drive or not, if she overshot and hit the atmosphere, things could get ugly fast.

It took about an hour to find the pilot and manage a trajectory that put her within about twenty meters from and relatively stationary to his H-7. But it was a trajectory, not an orbit—they were already beginning to reenter the atmosphere.

The ship was different from hers only in call sign. All of the fighters were built in America and then painted according to the specs of the countries into whose service they went.

“Pilot,” she said. “This is Lao. What’s going on over there?”

“You tell me,” he said. “My AG thrusters aren’t online.”

“Okay,” she said. “Hang on.”

She maneuvered using small fluctuations in the AG field until she was looking at the dorsal surface of his fighter. She spotted something immediately—a shiny patch and what looked almost like icicles trailing along the hull, back toward the rear of the craft.

“You’ve got frozen coolant coming out of the jacket,” she said. “Something must have punched through.”

“I didn’t feel anything,” he said. “Rain, is that you?”

She recognized his voice. “It’s me, Heng,” she said. “I don’t see a hole—it must have been pretty small. Control, are you copying all of this?”

“Affirmative,” the voice came. “We have his telemetry, but some of his internal systems are down. Can you confirm if the fusion chamber is uncompromised?”

She remembered the horror of watching Steven Hiller’s ship explode. She had shaken hands with him, he had signed her picture. She’d had something of a crush on him.

Since that time, there hadn’t been another accident. If Heng’s fusion component went critical, however, there now might be two more—even with shields up, she might not survive the sheer kinetic impact of an uncontrolled fusion explosion. Heng certainly would not.

She checked the readings, rechecked them.

“Control,” she said. “Fusion containment is uncompromised, but his AG units are fried. I’m getting nothing from them.”

“That’s what we expected,” Control said. “We’re working on a fix.”

“Control, we’re at ninety klicks,” she said. “We’ve already passed the Kármán Line.”

That wasn’t a problem for her, at least not yet, but it meant that gravity was accelerating Heng’s ship toward the Earth, and the atmosphere was starting to put up a fight. She could still easily return to space, but without engines, Heng was about to become a meteor. His shield would help shed the heat of reentry and keep the ship from tearing apart, but the g-forces in the cockpit would be deadly.

Then there was that sudden stop at the end…

“Is there any way I can tow him with my EVA line?”

“Negative,” Control said. “We’ve thought of that. The tensile strength of the cable isn’t great enough.”

There followed a silence in which Rain stared at her controls, thinking furiously. There had to be something she could do. She couldn’t just let Heng die.

“What are the odds?” Heng said softly. “Space is so big.”

“Hey, stay cool,” Rain said. “We’ll think of something.” Her fighter began to vibrate, however, and the heat sensors on the hull were starting to get worried.

“I’m sorry I spoiled your moon trip,” Heng said.

“You haven’t spoiled anything,” she said. “Control? What have you got?”

There was a long pause.

“
Chang’e One
, your orders are to establish a stable orbit.”

“I can’t just let him fall!” she protested.

“Captain Heng, you’re going to make a dead stick landing,” Control said. “We’ll try to talk you through it.”

Rain looked over at Heng, and saw the resignation on his face. Like her, he had run the dead stick simulation over twenty times—landing without power, using only the aircraft’s ability to glide. In simulation, no one had ever managed it, even with a fully functioning computer—not from space, anyway. The velocity was just too great.

“Control, there has to be some other way,” Rain said.

“Captain Lao, achieve orbit. That is an order.”

“It’s okay,” Heng said. “I can do this. I’ll see you on the ground.”

Both craft were bucking now, and their noses were beginning to glow.

“I’ll buy you a beer,” she said.

“I’ll let you,” he replied.

“It’s just like landing a space shuttle,” she told him. Only it wasn’t. The old shuttles came into atmosphere in a sort of belly flop, using their blunt, shielded undersurface to build up a shock wave to protect them from the worst of the heat. They achieved and maintained the right angle using steering jets until they were deep enough in the atmosphere for their wings to become useful.

The H-7s were meant to reenter under power.

And Heng was coming in at a bad angle, anyway.

“Good luck, Heng,” she said softly, feeling more and more helpless as she saw a stream of hot gas begin to form a trail behind him.

* * *

The hybrid transport flew so smoothly that David could close his eyes and imagine he was on a train. It was in essence a middle-sized jet that had been retrofitted with AG drive and an energy-propellant system. It wasn’t capable of space flight, but it made ground-to-ground travel swift and painless.

For people who didn’t mind leaving the ground.

For David, it was still a horror show.

Fortunately the flight from the Center for Alien Technology to the Centre Spatial Guyanais was only about a three-hour jaunt in the company ship. Being the director of the ESD had its perks.

He had been director now for five years, and wished desperately he had taken up the task earlier. If he had, Steve Hiller might still be alive—but he had avoided the responsibility until it was too late.

Tanner and Jacobs had opposed him, of course, but that opposition was never made public, and there wasn’t much of a fight when he pointed out that he could either expose their complicity in rushing to test a design before it was ready, or they could put him in charge. That Whitmore stood with him on the issue hadn’t hurt.

More than a decade of the most intense military spending in the history of the planet had been starting to take its toll on the morale of the average person. They had just seen one of their heroes go up in a fireball of the technology that was supposed to save them, which they were paying for in a hundred ways. The administration needed David Levinson on their side, and they knew it.

Strain was their scapegoat, and he accepted his lot without complaint, resigning in disgrace. It wasn’t entirely fair, but then if Strain had had the guts to fight them in the first place, probably none of this would have been necessary, so David couldn’t work up much sympathy for him.

He took off from a desert and landed in a jungle, or near one, anyway. Like most functioning space facilities on Earth, the site in French Guiana that serviced France and most other European nations had grown considerably over the last decade or so. He had been here only two years before, and hardly recognized it.

Max Martell he easily recognized, however. He was short, dark-skinned, in his sixties with a startling shock of white hair and a mild, even demeanor.

“Director Levinson,” Martell said. “So nice to see you again.”

“Likewise, Max,” David said. “Looks like things are jumping here.”

“We’re doing our best to stay on schedule.”

“I saw the timeframe was looking like, what, three years? That’s fantastic.”

“Phobos in two, maybe three—a functioning defense system on Mars in three to four,” Max said. “I hear the Russians are pushing ahead on the Rhea project.”

“Yes,” David said. “Things are looking up. If the bad guys don’t come back, we’re all going to look pretty silly.”

He stopped when he saw the expression on Max’s face. His wife and two-year-old son had been in Paris.

“Sorry, Max, you know me. Mr. Sensitive. I’ll be as happy as anyone if this all turns out to be for naught.”

“Well, it’s not for nothing anyway, is it?” Max said. “Clean power sources, anti-gravity—carbon emissions are way down. Automakers think that within a year or two they can produce affordable cars with crash shields…” He trailed off, and now it was his turn to look mortified.

David brushed past it. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re doing well. Now let’s go explain that to the people who write the checks.”

If the aliens did come back, and wanted to strike a crippling blow to the ESD, the place to start would probably be the ESD Spring Expo, which was what brought him to French Guiana. Despite—or perhaps because of—the disaster that had cost Steve Hiller his life in the 2007 Expo, the event had continued to grow, becoming truly international. Leaders from the European Union, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia—every major and minor nation engaged in the collective defense initiative was represented, both as a public show of support and engagement and as a practical matter of sorting out priorities.

For David, politics was the least interesting aspect of the Expo, although it was unfortunately what he spent most of his time doing. What he really enjoyed were the presentations, the solid and just-crazy-enough-to-work applications individual researchers and research teams had worked out, hypotheses regarding the aliens themselves, where they were from, what the nature of their last signal was, and speculations about alien civilization in general. The budget for SETI had been quintupled and they had vastly better tools for probing the heavens in search of alien transmissions.

Tantalizing evidence presented itself, was analyzed, and was largely shot down as irrelevant. Even though they now knew beyond debate that humans weren’t alone in the universe, they still didn’t know where the aliens had come from. Space was too unimaginably vast.

In short, it was the largest meeting of space and technology nerds on the planet. About eighty-to-ninety percent of what was heard at the panels was rubbish, but there were always a few moments of real genius, too. The problem that had been the cause of Hiller’s death was definitively solved by a lone mathematician working out the intricacies of the subatomic oscillation in the grown energy source. For him, it had been a purely mathematical problem, something he was working on only because it intrigued him. For the ESD, it was the final breakthrough they had been looking for.

He sat in on a general discussion about progress on the moon base, along with Commander Lao Jiang and several of his project engineers. They had already established a minimal presence on the lunar surface. In terms of power it was already self-sustaining, and within a few months, as the water-mining operation came up to speed, they would be able to produce oxygen through electrolysis.

“On a related note,” Lao informed the audience in his conclusion, “as we speak, one of our hybrid fighters is on a course which will circumnavigate the moon. It will be the first truly long-range test of the craft and their ability to defend the moon base until the cannons are in place.”

“Is it true the pilot is a relative of yours?” a reporter asked.

“I’m pleased to confirm that,” Lao said. “She is my niece. My brother—her father—died on the Fourth, defending the world against the enemy. However, Rain wasn’t chosen for this honor due to her birth—she finished at the top of her class in flight training. I am very proud.”

“And she is only twenty-one, is that correct?” someone asked.

“Also correct,” Lao said.

That opened the floor for a rising tide of questions. Lao linked a newsfeed to the projector, which was updating the progress of the Chinese mission to circumnavigate the moon. David took the opportunity to duck out of the back door and escape the reporters. Inevitably, though, there were a few waiting. He waved them off with a few polite comments, and then, turning to beat a hasty retreat, slammed into someone.

“Oh! Ah, I’m terribly sorry,” he began, reaching to help the dark-haired woman back to her feet.

“It’s okay,” she said, skootching up to her knees so she could pick up a ream of papers she had just spilled from a folder. “I suppose I may have been standing too close.”

“Here,” he said, kneeling. “Let me help you with those.” He collected several of the loose sheets. All seemed to be sketches or paintings of a circle. One looked like a smiley face sans eyes.

They both straightened up as he handed them to her. She was probably in her late thirties, but there was something waifish about her. Her hair was long and brown, her dark eyes large and animated. She looked a bit familiar.

“Director Levinson,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “How do you do?”

“My name is Catherine Marceaux,” she said. “
Dr.
Catherine Marceaux.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Yes. You’re the psychologist.”

“Psychiatrist,” she corrected.

“Sorry,” he said. “You wrote a book or something, didn’t you? On alien behavior?”

“My specific interests are in the interaction between the human and alien psyche,” she said. “I would very much like to bend your ear for a bit. Is this a good time?”

David didn’t get a chance to answer, because the room behind him erupted into bedlam.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and he ducked back into the conference hall. He pushed past Lao, who was furiously barking into a cell phone.