Levinson hypothesizes that, if they kill the supervising Queen, her forces will cease drilling and retreat. The ESD learns that the aliens exist in eusociality and that one of their colossal Queens is commanding the invasion. Whitmore interrogates one of the aliens held in captivity from the war, who have recently awoken from a 20 year catatonic state. The mothership lands over the north of the Atlantic Ocean, destroying cities on the Eastern Seaboard, and begins drilling a hole through the bottom of the ocean floor to harvest the Earth's core for fuel, which will destroy Earth's magnetic field in the process. The debris falls all over Europe, where the tug manages to escape before heading on to Area 51. The space tug is caught in the mothership's gravitational pull, which lifts objects from across Asia. An alien mothership 3,000 miles (4,800 km) in diameter suddenly emerges and destroys Earth's planetary defenses before approaching the planet. Against ESD's orders, pilots Jake Morrison and Charlie Miller pick up Levinson, Marceaux, Umbutu, and Levinson's accountant Floyd Rosenberg on a space tug, and they head for the wreckage, where they recover a container. Levinson believes that it belongs to another extraterrestrial race that might be benevolent and urges the world's Security Council not to attack, but they vote to shoot it down regardless. Brackish Okun (who awakens at Area 51 after a twenty-year coma)-all of them once telepathically linked with the aliens ever since their personal encounters with them-have of late been receiving strange visions of an unidentifiable spherical object.Īn unidentified spherical ship, with a technology different from that of the aliens who attacked 20 years earlier, emerges from a wormhole near the ESD's Moon defense headquarters. Aboard the ship, they discover that the alien occupants sent a distress call to their home planet before being defeated. Catherine Marceaux and warlord Dikembe Umbutu, who leads him to an intact alien destroyer.
In the provincial African state Republique Nationale d'Umbutu, ESD Director David Levinson meets with Dr. The world is preparing to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their survival after the invasion. The Area 51 base in Nevada has become the ESD Headquarters. The main defense force utilizes equipment salvaged from the remains of the alien forces and operates military bases built on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea. Twenty years after a devastating alien invasion, the United Nations has set up the Earth Space Defense (ESD), a global defense and research program to reverse-engineer alien technology and serve as Earth's early warning system against extraterrestrial threats.