Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (25 page)

“What are you suggesting?” Zuberi said. “A coup?”

Dikembe didn’t answer that. He didn’t need to say it aloud, and Zuberi didn’t need to hear it. It would only make things harder on the both of them. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered it, but he kept hoping that things would somehow get better. For a while it almost seemed like they would. His father showed moments of clarity, became more susceptible to reason for a time. But that had been an illusion. Things were getting worse. The voices in his own head, quiet for so many years, were whispering again. It was happening to others, especially his father, who now sometimes spent weeks in seclusion and at other times went on sudden tours of the country, dressed in uniform, draped in ornaments created from alien bones and exoskeletons.

It was getting worse, and Dikembe realized that it was time to stop putting it off.

Something had to be done.

Patricia expected her father to answer the door the way he always did, but instead she found herself smiling at Agent Vega.

“Hey,” she said. “Is Dad here?”

“Yes, Ms. Whitmore,” the agent replied. “He isn’t up yet.”

“Isn’t up?” she said. “It’s eleven o’clock. He’s usually up before six.”

“He’s been sleeping in a little more often lately,” Vega said.

“Well, I’ll surprise him,” Patricia said. She put down her bags and went back to his room. The curtains were drawn, and the light was dim.

Shock stopped her in her tracks.

“Dad?” she said.

He was sitting up in the bed, staring off at nothing. For a second she was six years old again, and he had just wakened from another nightmare—but it was much more than that. His hair was nearly completely gray, and his face was so stubbly he must not have shaved in three or four days. His room—always spare and neat, the product of his military background—was a mess.

He turned toward her slowly.

“Marilyn?” he said.

Patricia froze, her throat tightening. Marilyn was her mother, and she had been dead for sixteen years. She didn’t know what to say.

Then the look on his face changed as he understood his mistake.

“Dad—”

He put his hand to his forehead.

“Munchkin?” he murmured. “Patty?”

“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “You must be tired.”

“You’re so much like her,” he said. He looked confused. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on leave for two weeks, remember?”

He nodded, but it was as if he was still half asleep. “Yeah,” he said. “God, it’s good to see you. Come give the old man a hug.”

After the greeting she sat next to him on the bed.

“What’s going on, Dad?” she asked.

“These damned meds,” he muttered. “Half the time—”

“Meds?” she said. “For what? I haven’t heard anything about this.”

“Well, you know, I sort of hoped it would go away.”

“Why don’t we get you up and get you some coffee, and you can tell me about it?” she said.

He nodded. “Alright.”

“I’ll go get the coffee started.”

* * *

He showed up half an hour later. He’d put on a robe, but he hadn’t shaved. In the light streaming through the windows he looked even worse than he had in the darkened room. He looked old, and lost, and fragile.

Faded.

It scared the hell out of her.

He sat down and flashed a reasonable facsimile of his famous crooked smile.

“So how is flight school?” he asked.

“No, Dad,” she said firmly. “We’re going to talk about you first. What meds?”

He rubbed his forehead with his fingers.

“Nothing is really helping,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think some of it makes it worse.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

He sighed and looked at his finger as he scratched it in a circular motion on the table.

“I’m, uh—they won’t quite use the word psychosis around me, but some of the drugs are… about that. And depression. I checked.” He looked up from the table, and his eyes had a sort of pleading. “I’m not crazy, Patty,” he said. “I’m not. But they’re in my head, and I can’t get them out.”

“They?” she said.

“The aliens,” he said. “The goddamn aliens. In my head—and not just when I’m asleep, not just when I close my eyes. Sometimes it’s like they’re projected from my eyes onto the wall, onto other people’s faces. There are other things I see, or think I see, that are hard to describe.” He bent toward her. “You remember when you were little?”

“The nightmares,” she said. “They went away.”

“Slowly,” he said. “I was a little shaky for a couple of years, but I managed it. I was okay, and it got better. I almost forgot about it. But now it’s all come back, and I don’t know why. Neither do the doctors.”

“Dad…” she began. “Since when? When did it start coming back?”

“A few months ago, a year. I’m not sure,” he said. “It was little at first, like a cricket in my brain, but now…”

“So when I came home last time?” she said, and he nodded.

“It comes and goes,” he said, “but when it comes, it always comes a little stronger.”

“Why have you been hiding this from me?” she asked.

“You’ve got enough to worry about,” he said. “I know how rough flight school can be. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Sometimes I wish there was.”

As he talked, he seemed to be getting better. His eyes became more focused, his expression more like what she was used to. He asked her about flight school again, and she answered as best she could through the cloud of distraction. When he came to the topic of Dale, she took a deep breath.

“Yeah,” she said. “About that. That’s kind of over.”

“Since when?” he asked.

“A few months ago,” she said.

“So now you’re hiding things from me?”

“Sure,” she said. “You should be used to that. The things I don’t tell you—”

“Could fill a shoebox,” he finished, smiling. “I’m sorry, Patty. I’m sorry I’m not one hundred percent for your visit. I really have missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” she said. “The breakup wasn’t that long ago. I thought I might as well wait to tell you in person.”

“For the record, I never liked Dale,” he said. “No ambition. I mean, you don’t have to want to own the world, but having a goal of some sort would be nice.”

“Well, apparently he was ambitious enough to maintain several girlfriends at once,” she said.

“You want a little accident should happen to him?” her father said, in his best Vito Corleone impression. Which was terrible.

“Nope,” she said. “Moving on. Besides, my new ride is a bona fide killing machine, so if the mood strikes me—
pow
.”

“So is there a new guy?” he asked.

“No. Every other guy I know right now is a pilot,” she said. “You know how that is.”

“Not really,” he said. “Not a lot of women pilots back in my day.”

“Well, it’s not a good idea, flight school romance,” she said.

“So there
is
somebody,” he said.

“What?”

“You made the face,” he said. He sounded fine now. It wasn’t so bad. Whatever was going on with him, he would snap out of it. He always did.

“I know what face you’re talking about, Dad, and I did not make it. I haven’t made that face since high school.”

“No, I’ve seen it since,” he said. “When we were out in Nevada, for the test flight…”

She realized with a start he was about to say something about Jake, and she knew she would blush. He didn’t, though. He trailed off, and his eyes became a bit vacant, the sparkle suddenly gone.

“Captain Hiller,” he murmured. “He died there.”

“He was a colonel, Dad,” she corrected gently.

“My God,” he said. “They got to him, somehow.”

“Dad?”

“The aliens,” he murmured. “I always knew they would get their revenge.”

“It was an accident,” she said. “A problem with the fusion containment.”

“What about David Levinson? Is he…?”

“As far as I know he’s fine,” Patricia said, her own spirits beginning to flag. “He’s the director of the Earth Space Defense, remember?”

“I asked him to do that,” Whitmore said. “We needed to unite the world around a common goal.”

“You did,” she said.

He shook his head. “It isn’t done,” he said. “They’re out there. We have to be ready.” He looked up. “Patty, David has to be warned. They got Hiller. Now they’ll come for him.” His voice was rising, edging toward hysteria. She put her hand on his.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll let him know. We’ll be ready. Did I tell you about the new fighters? They handle like a dream—like nothing you’ve ever flown before.”

Her talking seemed to calm him down, so she kept going. Finally he got up and kissed her on the head. “Let me shower, clean up, Patty. We’ll go out somewhere. That Italian place you like, maybe.”

The last thing her dad needed at the moment was to be in public. “I’m tired, Dad,” she said. “Long flight. Why don’t we have sandwiches for lunch, then order in for supper? Maybe watch a little Letterman tonight.”

He smiled faintly. “We watched Letterman the night before they came. I don’t remember who the guests were. Good thing he was on vacation at his place in Montana,” he said. “That sounds good, Patty.”

“Feel free to shower, though,” she said. “And a shave wouldn’t hurt you either.”

* * *

She cornered Agent Vega the next day.

“Who knows?” she demanded.

He fidgeted a little.

“Just me and the other agents,” he said. “The house staff. His doctors.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And whoever they blabbed to.”

“Secret service doesn’t ‘blab,’ ma’am,” Vega protested.

She stepped a little closer.

“Agent Vega,” she said, “I was more or less raised by the secret service. I have nothing but the highest respect for you, but all of you are human, and humans talk. I know, because I’m one too. From now on, I need to know what happens here. What meetings he has and with whom. Any public appearances he might have scheduled, anything like that. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am, but with all due respect, you’re not going to be here all of the time.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m going to hire some sort of chief of staff, someone who can make the minute-to-minute decisions.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Vega said. “Our job is to protect him, and not just from bullets.”

“Can you honestly tell me you don’t feel understaffed?” she asked. “That you have this all under control?”

He pursed his lips, and after a few seconds shook his head.

“No,” he said.

She nodded. “You’ll vet whoever I hire. Maybe a retired agent? Let me know if you think of anyone.”

“I’ll ask around,” he replied.

* * *

“Holy crap, Dylan,” Jake breathed. “We did it.”

“Come again, Saber Two,” Control said.

Jake cleared his throat. “Sorry, Control, that was just me sneezing.”

“What he means to say,” Dylan cut in, “is that we’ve achieved orbit.”

“Very good, Saber One. Proceed toward training course.”

Jake glanced off to his right, where Dylan’s sleek fighter was a shadow against the larger shadow of the Earth, visible only by its running lights. The Earth wasn’t entirely dark, though—here and there were glowing patches, like distant jumbles of Christmas lights. He wondered what it would have looked like in 1995 when New York and Mexico City, Beijing, Mumbai had still been down there.

He switched to their private channel.

“Just to clarify,” Jake said, “holy crap, Dylan, we’re in space.”

“Yeah,” Dylan said. “We are that. Patricia is going to be pissed off. Our first run upstairs while she’s on leave.”

“She’ll get over it,” Jake said. “Once we explain—over and over—how awesome it was.”

“Okay,” Dylan said. “Let’s focus on the mission now. No more small talk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said. “I don’t see anything yet. Do you?”

“Nope,” Dylan replied.

Jake continued to marvel at the blaze of the heavens. An eye-hurting light appeared on the Earth’s horizon, and his cockpit glass adjusted.

“Sunrise,” he said. He watched the bright point of the sun spread a crescent of blue, green, and white on the rim of the world.

“I’ve got something,” Dylan said.

“Coming from where?”

“Where do you think?”

“Those sneaky bastards,” Jake said. “Yeah, I see them now.” There were four of them, and they were coming straight out of the sunrise, making it impossible to spot them visually—but visually wasn’t the best way to see things up here anyway. They had instruments far more sensitive than the human eye.

“Let’s get turned,” Dylan said. “Otherwise they’ll be all over our tails. Nice and easy, just like in the simulator.”

It was nothing like the simulator. The bad guys weren’t pixels, they were drones programmed to behave like alien fighters. That was space out there, as well, and a really long fall if anything went wrong, as it had for the Chinese pilot a few months earlier.

“I’ve got a lock on one,” Dylan said.

“I’ve got the one on your three,” Jake said. He fired a burst, watched it stream into the rising sun. A stutter of green light from Dylan crossed his.

“Hits,” Dylan said. “Shoot, there are two more coming from behind us.”

“Your call,” Jake said.

“Go get ’em. I’ll deal with these.”

The wings of their craft were useless in space, of course, but the anti-gravity drive wasn’t, especially with a gravity well as big as the Earth right below. Jake’s craft whipped up and around. The attackers behind him were below instead, and closing fast on Dylan.

“Yee-hah!” Jake cried as he dove toward the planet, firing his energy weapon. One of the enemies was rocketing straight at him now. Jake strafed the one on Dylan’s tail and then went into a tight turn, trying to avoid the simulated green death streaming by. Then they had passed each other, so near that Jake suspected they were about a meter away from causing the automatic safety gear to kick in. The ESD wasn’t in the business of losing expensive spacecraft in training exercises.

Jake turned hard and kicked on the fusion drive, at the same time breaking and turning with the AG thrusters, reversing his course almost instantly. The acceleration compensators didn’t quite absorb all of the g-forces, so for a moment he felt as if he had an elephant sitting on him. As the spots behind his eyes cleared, he saw the bogie coming back down his throat.