Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (24 page)

Everyone was staring at the projection screen.

David turned his own attention that way.

“Houston,” he said, “we’ve had a problem.”

“Screw this,” Rain muttered under her breath. She engaged her engines and fired herself toward Heng like a bullet.

“
Chang’e…
what are… doing?” Control demanded.

The communications were already breaking up due to the ionization caused by her entry into the atmosphere. Heng’s fighter was engulfed in white flame. She saw he had somehow managed to turn belly-down—which was a good start—but the angle was too steep, and his craft was beginning to yaw dangerously. If he spun, it was all over.

The comm crackled again, this time unintelligibly.

Rain plunged on, her ship tremoring as if it was having a seizure. The force field automatically tripped on, but it caused too much wind resistance so she overrode it until she managed to overtake Heng, and then pass him. By that time they were at twenty kilometers above sea level.

She flipped the force field back on and began to decelerate, knowing that what she was doing was more or less insane. But it was the only thing she could think of.

Heng’s ship hit her, much harder than she had expected. His craft glanced off. Everything started to spin, and for a moment she had no control at all—she didn’t know where the horizon was. Finally she was able to kill her rotation, and saw that he was still above her.

This time she managed to ease up under him and start putting on the brakes—with his ship piggybacked on hers.

There was no way she was going to be able to kill their velocity in time. The AG thrusts weren’t powerful enough to decelerate two ships, not at the speed they already had achieved, and not with the ground so near.

Fifteen kilometers.

Ten…

Seven…

Her instruments were going crazy.

Then her right AG thruster went dead.

“Well, that’s not perfect,” she murmured. “Heng? Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said. “What the hell?” His voice was staticky, but the most intense part of the ionization was behind them.

Her other thruster cut out.

“Time to use your wings,” she told him. “Get off my back.”

“Copy,” he said. “For the record—you are the craziest person I’ve ever known.”

“I really want that beer,” she said.

He lifted off of her, and she immediately engaged her rudder and wing-flaps and banked, hard. The idea was to kill more of her speed by using the atmosphere—sort of like running switchback down a steep slope rather than straight down it—but they were already so near the surface it was anyone’s guess how this little jaunt would end.

She banked again, cutting a long “S” shape through the sky, scanning the terrain below for someplace to land, but all she saw was mountains, coming up fast.

One kilometer.

She turned hard to avoid spattering against a peak, and then hit a column of air. She felt momentarily weightless as the craft dropped, uncontrolled, for twenty meters before slapping back against a thermal. She dodged another cliff side and saw treetops coming up fast.

This is going to hurt
, she thought. It seemed like the time to eject. What that would be like at this speed, she didn’t know. Besides, that would be sort of like losing.

Then she was past the trees, and land like a table top appeared. She pulled up her nose, full flaps. This time her landing gear didn’t break right away—instead she hit tail-first so the AG units took the hit and broke off. She skipped, came down on the gear.
Then
they broke. The
Chang’e One
plowed a furrow through the short grass and came to a stop.

Dots dancing before her eyes, Rain desperately checked the fusion containment and found that it had shut down quietly. After the explosion that killed Steven Hiller, that part of the plane was arguably the safest, at least in theory.

“Heng?” she said.

Nothing.

She looked around, and across the plain, maybe two kilometers away, she saw a huge column of smoke rising.

“Heng, do you copy?” she said, urgently.

“Yeah,” he finally replied. “Had to eject. I’m hung up in some trees. You?”

“I’m well,” she said. “My ship has seen better days.”

“Where the hell are we?” he asked.

She checked her instruments.

“North America,” she said. “Montana, I think.”

Off in the distance, she saw what she thought might be a herd of buffalo.

Her comm crackled again.

“Captain Lao?” It was Control. By the sound of it, the signal was bouncing off a satellite.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m on the ground and unhurt.”

“I’m patching Commander Lao through,” Control said.

She quickly snatched off her headphones and held them a few centimeters from her ears as Uncle Jiang went off furiously for about two minutes, seemingly without taking a breath. When he settled down a little, she put them back on.

“… multi-million dollar vehicle!” he said, then there was silence.

“Commander Lao,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in French Guiana?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I’m on my cell phone.”

“Are we being broadcast, sir?”

“No,” he said. “Right now it’s a private line.”

“Then I love you, too,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m still having trouble with landings, but I think you’ll agree I did better this time.”

He sighed audibly enough that she could hear it.

“There are choppers on the way to recover you and Heng,” he said. “Say nothing of your insubordination, do you understand? And try to stay away from reporters until we’re ready.”

“Yes, Uncle Jiang,” she said.

“And just for the record,” he said, “what you just did was perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Also the bravest.”

“Thank you, Uncle Jiang.”

“It was not a compliment,” he said.

But she could almost sense the faint grin on the other end of the line.

* * *

“Drilling?” David said.

He glanced around the room, from face to face. There were exactly four people present. One was a man named Lucien Ondekane, a refugee from the National Republic of Umbutu. Another was a South African intelligence field operative, a young woman named Molly DeBoer. Number three was Secretary of Defense Tanner, and David made four. Tanner had summoned him from a discussion on quantum uncertainty and AG fields, just as it was getting interesting. That was after everyone calmed down about the Chinese pilot, and things started rolling along back on schedule.

He hadn’t seen the French woman again, and he felt rude for having left her hanging. He had checked the program and saw she was speaking, but her presentation conflicted with his schedule.

As for his current discussion, it was… kind of interesting. Probably more interesting than whatever psychobabble an attractive—well, a ridiculously attractive—psychiatrist had to offer.

Ondekane started speaking in French, and DeBoer began a running translation.

“He says the ship didn’t crash, that it landed. They fought the aliens for ten years…”

“Yes, yes,” David said. “We know all of this. Skip to the drilling.”

She said something to Lucien, who nodded and started again.

“Once it was over, they found a huge hole in the ground, so deep that they couldn’t see the bottom, so deep that the monsoon rains didn’t fill it up.”

David frowned. “That’s… not typical. Ask him if he knows why.”

Lucien wasn’t sure. “There are many rare and precious metals in the region,” he said.

“Sure,” David said, “but that can be said of many of the other locations as well.”

“Maybe their primary weapon misfired,” Tanner suggested.

“No,” David said. “Think about it. New York, London—more than a hundred cities they fired their primary weapon upon. Nowhere did it dig a hole. It wasn’t designed that way. Their primary weapon was meant to do what it did—depopulate huge swaths of urban area. Reduce cities to rubble. Unless…”

“Unless what?” Tanner asked.

“Maybe it was set on stun.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Maybe the primary weapon was a multitasker. We only saw one setting. After all, in no other ship was the weapon intact. It’s how we beat them, by blowing them up.”

“Or maybe that ship was just a one-off,” Tanner said. “Maybe it had a different mission and a different tool set.”

“We’re pretty sure it’s the same ship that took out Lagos and Kinshasa,” David said. “So it did the other thing, too. You see what this means. We’ve got to get in there.”

“We’ve been trying diplomatically for years,” Tanner said. “They refuse.”

“Maybe it’s time to get undiplomatic,” David said.

“I’ll take it up with the president,” Tanner said, “although I don’t really see the relevance. We’ve got their cannon, we’ve put their technology to good use. We have a base on the moon and soon we’ll be on Mars and the moons of Saturn. It doesn’t matter what they were doing a decade and a half ago. What’s important is that we stop them from doing anything at all if they come back.”

“There’s something here we don’t know,” David said. “What we don’t know very certainly can hurt us.”

“Like I said,” Tanner replied, “I’ll take it up with the president.”

Lucien suddenly started speaking again, quietly, his tone flat and hopeless. DeBoer stared at him, listening but saying nothing.

“What?” David asked.

“He says do not go there,” she said. “It is a place of evil spirits and madness, and if you go there you will only be infected by it. You will let it loose on the world.”

* * *

Dikembe swept his gaze over the troubled ground, wishing not for the first time that he could simply get in a jeep and drive away, leave his country, go someplace and paint for the rest of his life. As a question of practice he could, of course, do that, but he knew if he did he could never come back.

For years he had been flattering himself that he was making a difference, that he was the one person standing between his father and the people. He had helped the starving, in many cases aided those without hope of survival, enabling them to escape into nearby countries. Now he was starting to doubt that he had had any effect at all.

The problem, in a sense, was
uchawi
.

In England, speaking to a young literature major, he’d made the mistake of translating the word as witchcraft, following the practice of English anthropologists of the last century. Witches, he was stridently informed, were merely women who held to the pre-Christian beliefs of the land, who worshipped nature or the Great Mother and such. It was the Patriarchy that named them witches and attributed evil doings to them, trying to keep women in their place.

So perhaps it was a problem with the word, and the freight it carried in the English and not the concept. The fact was, people all over the globe believed that sickness and misfortune weren’t naturally occurring things. If you became ill or died suddenly it was because someone—or something—was practicing
uchawi
against you. This was a belief that was still strongly held by many of his people, even in the face of modern science and medicine.

His people were not at all unique in this regard—even people in the most technologically advanced countries like the United States had faith healers or relied on mystical explanations for traumatic events. Yet here, the deep-rooted belief in spirits and sorcerers of ill will had become all mixed up with the aliens. When somebody was sick, or acted badly or did anything that conflicted with the tenets undergirding his father’s brutal regime, they were said to be infected by one of the thousands of alien spirits that now dwelt in the dark recesses of the land.

Killing them all, it seemed, had done little to decrease their influence.

Such things were happening elsewhere as well. He had lately read a book by a French psychiatrist, in which she theorized that contact between humans and aliens showed a residual effect. She had interviewed and studied the transcripts of conversations with people from all around the world—any place human and alien had come face to face. She conjectured that part of this residual contact was the absorption by humans of alien semiotic structures, of the symbols by which they understood and negotiated the universe.

The author, Catherine Marceaux, had applied on three occasions for a visa to enter the Republic of Umbutu to conduct her studies amongst his people. His father, of course, had denied the visas.

Some clear-thinking people believed that co-opting traditional superstitions was a thing his father had done with foresight, in a clinical, calculated move to validate his rule. In reality, Dikembe had been forced to admit years ago that his father was quite mad. He surrounded himself with seers and charlatans, protected himself with magical charms. He saw enemies even in the faces of children.

The place Dikembe stood now only made that all the more clear.

“How many?” he asked Zuberi.

“Around a hundred,” his old friend replied.

Dikembe felt numb. The bodies had been thrown into a wide, dry creek bed, and from the looks of it a bulldozer had then pushed dirt over them. Whoever had done it was either stupid or didn’t care—when the rains came, most of the dirt had washed away, so that now one could see the shapes of corpses here and there, exposed arms and legs. Vultures had been picking at what they could reach, and in fact vultures had led hunters here, men hoping to find a dead elephant or giraffe from which to scavenge.

Instead, they had solved the mystery of the missing village. It was not the first mass grave Dikembe had seen, but it was the largest.

“How can this go on?” he asked himself.

“How can we stop it?” Zuberi said.

“We stand up to him,” Dikembe said.

“You could do that,” Zuberi said, “for all it would accomplish. But if I were to say a wrong word, they would start with my wife, and then my children, and they would do it in front of me. You understand that, don’t you? I’m risking far too much in even showing you this.”

“Surely…” Dikembe said. “Surely there must be those even inside of his guard who understand that he is mad, who can see the ruin he is driving us to.”