Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization by Alex Irvine Read Free Book Online Page B

from the vortex, he kept it at a low angle of ascent. The chunks of the moon flying past them grew to the size of hills. The moon itself was beginning to break apart. Valeri remembered the first time he had seen Rhea, wondering what was inside of it. Was it dead, ice and rock all the way through? Or did the pressures deep inside create heat? Measurements from the surface had been uncertain, and the Russian team had orders to build ESD defense turrets, not indulge their astrogeological curiosity. Valeri had a feeling they might find out shortly, though.
    As the tug turned away, it rolled to the right and he saw geysers erupting through the mile-wide cracks in Rhea’s surface. There it was. Confirmation of a subsurface ocean. The scientifically curious child in him was glad to see it, glad to be in on one of the solar system’s mysteries. The adult in him looked forward to sharing the story over a glass of vodka back home.
    The tug slewed to one side, slamming the cosmonauts against each other. As Rhea broke up, its gravitational pull was lessened and became unbalanced. Suddenly Belyaev was fighting different attractions from different directions.
    He was a superb pilot. He had survived dogfights in the War of ’96, claiming four confirmed alien kills and two other probables. He had flown interplanetary missions, had landed on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea. He had overseen docking operations with an asteroid mining station. Belyaev could fly anything.
    Even he couldn’t fly a ship straight, though, when the very space around it was being torn apart. The tug started to tumble. The groans in its hull turned into screams. Alarm klaxons went off, warning of leaks. Emergency oxygen pumps kicked in. The cosmonauts sat silent, relying on their commander to get them out of this. They could scream, they could thrash around, they could panic… but what good would it do?
    Space flashed by the windows, and then the surface of Rhea as Belyaev shouted orders. The copilot fired impulse thrusters to arrest their tumble, but it was too violent, the forces around them too great. The moon passed through their view again. It was in fragments, torn completely into pieces. Liquid water, freezing rapidly, sped through space toward the distortion. It was one of the most beautiful things Valeri had ever seen, striking in the way the light caught the water in space, and then how that light changed when the water froze…
    Then the tug was shaking too violently for Valeri to see. Belyaev was still shouting and the rest of the cosmonauts held their silence. Abruptly a loud metallic scream from the back of the ship got Valeri’s attention. He turned, and was looking out into empty space. Instinctively he grabbed a handrail. The ship’s atmosphere gusted past him, the cosmonauts screaming now but their voices growing thin as the air fled. Some of them were gone through the hole in the hull, others hanging onto the broken edges.
    More of the ship broke away. Through a hole Valeri could see one of its thrusters. The other had been torn off. Valeri held the rail with one hand and the trailing edge of a suit harness with the other. Whoever had been in that seat was gone now.
    The violence of the spinning began to disorient him, and he realized he had been holding his breath for a long time. He wanted to breathe again, but there was nothing to breathe.
    Belyaev was gone too, the cockpit windows shattered and the two command chairs empty.
    The last thing Valeri saw, as the ship disintegrated around him, was the majestic rings of Saturn, tearing themselves apart.

7
    Jake held the tug steady. Charlie was still rambling about surfing and parties and women and whatever else. He had an active imagination. One of the things he imagined was that he was a ladies’ man.
    “You realize there’s only thirty-six women on this Moon Base?” he said, and Jake was sure it was true. Charlie would know. The question was, how did he know? Had he counted them? Had he hacked