Read Online Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) by Greg Keyes - Free Book Online

breeding, planting cocoons in stands of trees and lowland marshes, spreading their own insidious vegetation. The cocoons contained fetal aliens which absorbed the vegetation around them for nourishment.
    Not long after Dikembe returned, the tide had begun flowing the other way. The cocoons were hacked to pieces, the alien flora burned, the perimeter of their occupation pushed steadily back. Now the creatures had been driven back almost to the ship.
    For Dikembe and Bakari, their present mission was to reconnoiter the west, to make certain they wouldn’t have any nasty surprises when they made their final push, which was planned to begin a few days from now.
    But something was wrong.
    Dikembe stepped to the edge of the slope they had just come up, and looked down.
    At first he thought it was nothing, just the wind rustling the grass.
    But it was no wind.
    There were hundreds of them, maybe every single remaining alien, and they were coming from every direction. The mass of them had kept their distance, so he had only sensed the nearer ones. The bait.
    They swarmed up the hill in a constricting ring. It looked as if someone had kicked open a termite mound in reverse. The aliens ran up the slope, and they died by the dozens. Dikembe fired his rifle until it felt like it was going to melt in his hands, until at last a mass of aliens breached their lines, screeching and scrambling over soldiers, the viridian flash of energy weapons everywhere. He dropped his rifle and drew his machetes. Hitting an alien in the middle of the head, he split it open, revealing a smaller, more delicate head inside. He slashed his weapon into it.
    Bakari was behind him, cutting like a dervish.
    The thing to do was to get behind them, cut their tentacles off at the source and then split the unseen seam of their exoskeletons. Dikembe had become quite good at it, but now the press was too great to maneuver.
    He and Bakari managed to rally the remaining men into a fighting square, a formation at least as old as ancient Greece. Those on the front of each line knelt and cut at the aliens’ legs, while the second rank slashed at the horrid, mouthless faces. Still there were too many of them. They plucked men from the square and hurled them back to their comrades behind them. They snapped arms and broke necks. Bodies piled so thickly that footing became first difficult, then impossible.
    Eventually, the square fell apart, and it was Dikembe and Bakari alone, back to back.
    Suddenly, the aliens drew back, leaving the two brothers panting, standing amid the foul-smelling corpses. To his horror Dikembe looked around and saw that everyone else was dead.
    Then he realized that wasn’t true. Two other men still lived. Both were wrapped tightly in alien tentacles. One of them was Pierre, a man from Gara village. The other was Zuberi. Pierre opened his mouth. What came out was a human voice—Pierre’s voice—but with a distinctly alien intonation.
    “You are alike,” Pierre said.
    Two dozen energy weapons were trained on them.
    “We are twins,” Dikembe answered.
    “Don’t,” Bakari cautioned. “Tell them nothing.”
    “Two minds, much alike,” the possessed Pierre continued. “Sons of the leader.”
    “Why aren’t we dead?” Dikembe whispered to his brother.
    “I don’t know,” Bakari said, “but I don’t like it.”
    “The leader must die,” Pierre said.
    Bakari frowned. “I don’t like this at all,” he said. “Are you ready, brother?”
    “I suppose,” Dikembe sighed.
    “I love you, Dikembe,” Bakari said. “I’m proud to die with you.”
    “What do you mean?” Dikembe said, lifting his chin and waving contemptuously at the enemy. “Look at them. They don’t stand a chance.”
    “Of course not,” Bakari agreed. “I’ll see you after, then. You bring the Scotch.”
    Then they charged the aliens.
    They didn’t get far. Dikembe’s mind filled with a thousand voices screaming for him to stop in his tracks. His mind fought,