Battle for Earth
By
Daniela A. Wolfe
I had been a slave to the Qharr nearly my entire life, but one fateful day everything changed. I joined up with a group of rebels, and through a twist of fate, no one could have ever foreseen, I became the woman I am today…
Author’s Note: This was originally posted as a serial in various-sized chunks on the usual sites.
Although, it’s a bit ‘spoil-rific’ I feel I need to warn people that I do kill off a lot of characters throughout this series. I make no apologies as I believe in staying true to the story even if it means putting my characters through hell.
Thanks to the following people for pre-reading the story and helping with grammatical edits: Beyogi, Maggie Finson, Loki and Zapper.
Battle for Earth
by Daniela A. Wolfe
Copyright 2015, 2021 by Daniela A. Wolfe
Published by Doppler Press
A division of Janglewood LLC
EditorChris Hobbs
PublisherJoyce Melton
First kindle edition February 2021
Cover images and main typography provided by the author.
Image modified and further typography chosen by Joyce Melton
Table of Contents
Prologue
Resistance
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Infiltration
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Downfall
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Coalescence
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Liberation
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Prologue
They came when I was just four years old. The United Earth Defense Fleet had been battling them in the skies above for days and I watched from the safety of our family home in wide-eyed fascination. It wasn’t until I grew older that I finally understood what those bright flashes of light in the night sky had been. Death. Humans ships exchanging fire with the Qharr invaders. The battle was an exercise in futility, everyone knew it except me. I was too young to understand what it all meant.
The Qharr were coming and no one that remained was safe not even my then four-year-old self.
“Jellfree!” my mother, Muriel Briggs, called my name as she appeared in the doorway of my room.
“Come on, honey. It’s time to go!” she called urgently.
I tried to protest, to ask my mother why, but she merely smiled sadly as tears cascaded down her face. She gently reached over to where I was sitting on my bed and picked me up. I started to cry. I didn’t want to go! I didn’t understand why we had to leave. My cries fell on deaf ears as she rushed me out of the house. My father soon joined us accompanied by my older sister, Rebecca. Mother rushed me into the family aerocar, a battered old Ford Vision, and my sister joined me in the back seat. My father, Lloyd, drove and took us out onto the nearest lane speeding into traffic with a velocity that reflected my own terror.
I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew enough to sense that something had my parents and older sibling scared. Neither my sister or I spoke; instead we clung to one another with wide eyes. Our parents offered up reassurances from the front seat, but it was abundantly clear that they didn’t believe a word they said. They told us we were going somewhere safe, somewhere where the Qharr couldn’t find us. Over the last few weeks, I’d heard my family talk of the Qharr, but I didn’t really understand the threat they posed. They kept speaking of invasion, but I didn’t know what that word meant.
My father let out a long string of curses and the car went veering off to the side of the road. I peeked out the window and noted that traffic was so packed it had come to a standstill. The car stalled and floated down to the ground. Becca and I exchanged glances and with faces glued to the window we watched in amazement as all the surrounding vehicles did the same. My parents started to argue, they’d been doing a lot of that during those last few days. One of them mentioned an EMP and while I’d heard that word a lot. I didn’t know the exact meaning. I did know it was some sort of weapon the Qharr had been using against us. Our parents seemed to come to a decision as they both undid their restraints and urged my sister and me to do the same.
Once we were out of the car we started walking. We traveled by foot for what seemed to be an eternity to my child’s mind. I started to cry, my feet were throbbing and I didn’t want to walk any longer. Mother attempted to sooth me, but it was too no avail. Instead of stopping, my father picked me up and put me up on his shoulders. This had always been one of my favorite modes of transportation and my father knew it. I quickly settled down and we resumed our journey through the city streets.
There wasn’t a soul out in the open, and it almost seemed as if the entire city was out stuck in traffic. It was an eerie experience walking through the empty streets and even to this day I remember it quite vividly. Once or twice we caught sight of vague outline of a person lurking in the shadows or group of people moving in the distance, but none of them came close enough to us for me to see them very clearly.
Our long walk came to a very abrupt end after rounding a corner. A large, almost insect like black monstrosity rested in the middle of the street blocking traffic going in every direction. I had no idea what the horrendous thing was, but I later became much more familiar with the god awful things. It was a Qharr J’narr class destroyer, but that was nothing compared to the horrible gray-skinned creatures that littered the street around it.
It was my first glimpse of our conquerors but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. We just stood there for a moment in complete shock, and then my father handed me off to my mother and reached into his jacket producing a phase pistol. We started running in the opposite direction as one of the Qharr called something out and two of them broke into a run behind us. My father shot his weapon haphazardly behind him as we ran, but the shots never landed home and our Qharr pursuers got closer and closer until they were right on our heels .
The shorter of the two grabbed my father’s arm as he reached back to fire and tore the gun out of his hand. My father spun around to punch at the Q
harr with his other hand, but the alien caught his fist with the casual ease of a trained fighter.
We all stopped to watch in horror as the Qharr grabbed my father by the throat and lifted him from the ground.
“Muriel dammit, don’t just stand there! Run !”
We started running again, but I peered over my mother’s shoulder and watched as the Qharr snapped my father’s neck and cast his body aside with casual disdain. I screamed out in terror and I felt my mother’s tears splatter against my neck as I bounced in her arms. She didn’t utter a word, but her weeping was indication enough that she knew my father’s fate. His demise only distracted them for a few short moments before they were right back after us. It didn’t take them long to catch up to us and I think my mother finally realized that fleeing wasn’t doing us any good because she stopped just as they were nearly on top of us.
She calmly set me down then she stepped in front of my sister and me facing the Qharr with both fists planted on her hips and head held high in defiance. “I won’t let you harm my children!” she screamed.
The very same Qharr who had killed my father stepped forward and regarded my mother with a trio of unblinking pale yellow eyes then abruptly he raised his hand and struck her in the throat. Mother gasped for breath and clutched at her neck, but soon collapsed dead to the ground. Becca tugged at my arm screaming at me to run, but I fell to my knees and wrapped my small hands around my mother’s corpse.
“Mommy!”
I’d never known death before, but instinctively my child’s mind knew that my mother was gone. I felt a massive hand lift me up, and I clenched my eyes shut and waited for the Qharr to do to me what he had done to my mother and father, but my death never came. My eyes flew back open and watched as the other alien lifted my sister into his arms. The two aliens carried us off and we began our new lives as slaves…
Resistance
Chapter One
Violet blood splattered my face as I stepped out into the practice yard. I brought a hand up to wipe it off and just barely managed to duck out of the way as the body of a Qharr soldier flew over my head. For a brief moment he simply lay there on the ground, but then he jumped back to his feet and rushed his opponent with his g’th stick whirling in a furious blur of motion. Corrector Duvak Nakyrr blocked the young soldier’s blow and swept his own weapon in a wide arc which his opponent nearly didn’t block in time.
The young soldier knocked the Corrector’s g’th stick out of his hands and sent it flying through the air. The soldier swirled his stick around aiming at the Duvak’s left side. He easily dodged the blow then brought his right foot around in a round house kick that smashed into the other fighter’s chest with an audible thud. The soldier fell backward and landed on his back, giving the Corrector just enough time to retrieve his weapon. The other Qharr was soon back on his feet and the two were once more locked in hand-to-hand combat.
The Corrector was quite short for a member of his race, but despite being both smaller and much older than his opponent he cut through each attack with ease. The two of them battled back and forth for another ten minutes and Duvak managed to knock the young soldier off his feet three more times before finally felling him for the fifth and final time. Duvak coughed and threw his g’th stick off to the side with an almost disdainful flick of his wrists. In the five years that I’d served within the compound I’d only been invited out to the practice yard a few dozen times and even then I doubted I’d seen Duvak duel more than half a dozen times. Never once had I seen him go up against an opponent who even came close to matching him in skill. I might have wondered why he bothered if I didn’t understand the bastards’ mentality. As commander of the facility it was his personal responsibility to make sure that his men received proper training which apparently meant kicking their asses on a routine basis.
I stood silently off to the side and waited for my master to take notice of me. To the Qharr I was just an honorless and lowly human slave and speaking to Duvak without permission was a good way to get myself beaten or, on a bad day, killed. I hated them with every fiber of my being, but if I let myself show that hatred I’d be dead in seconds. I’d seen what our masters did to humans who disobeyed them and I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I played the part of the obedient slave, and did the very best I could to survive. Which had worked out pretty well for me, I was only twenty-eight and had one of the most important jobs a human slave could ever be tasked with.
“Ah, Master Cook Briggs,” Corrector Duvak said his three eyes locked on me halfway across the compound.
I felt rush of hatred and anger as the Corrector studied me. Here standing before me was the one responsible for my enslavement, the same soldier who had carried my sister and I off more than twenty-four years ago, after murdering my parents. As the one who had captured me I’d been given into his care to serve him until the day that I died. For many years lived as his slave, and I had all but given up hope of ever being free, but then I met Kaya and she reawakened my passion and hatred for those grays-skinned bastards. I still served my oppressor as I had for nearly my entire life, but I only did so because I saw no other choice. If the Qharr ever realized that I felt the way I did they’d kill me without a moment’s hesitation.
“Corrector, I am honored to once again be allowed to bask in your presence,” I said, with a bow of my head and fake subservient smile.
I didn’t say a word as Duvak came over to me and placed his massive six-fingered hand on my right shoulder in a Qharr gesture of greeting. I brought my left hand up and lightly gripped it around his second and third digits then withdrew it sliding my open palm across my chest as was expected. Duvak nodded–a human gesture he had picked up from all his years working with our kind–then drew his hand away and coughed loudly.
As I mentioned before the Corrector was actually quite short for a Qharr standing at just a little over 1.9 meters tall, but to a human slave he cut an imposing figure nonetheless. Like all of his kind his skin was a glossy dark gray and had a segmented almost insect-like quality to it. As any Qharr soldier my master had a tattoo extending from his left shoulder in the shape of circle overlapped by the Qharr symbol for unity. There were two arrays of tattoos branching out from the symbol. One extending downward, displaying his exploits in battle with a long array of Qharr characters and the other extending toward his right shoulder showing his rank. He had a thick mop of black hair that ran just past his shoulders. Like humans, our masters stood on two legs, and while their proportions were similar to ours there was no mistaking them for one of us.
“An important day approaches, young Jellfree,” Duvak said, staring at me with all three of his eyes. His lip-less fang-lined mouth seemed to be a frowning, but I knew it was just the natural set of his features.
“If you say it, it is so, great one,” I said injecting the expected amount of reverence into my voice.
“It is so, human, in three days Overseer Jahal Tkyr will arrive to visit the compound,” he intoned pacing back and forth in front of me.
And I understood why the Corrector had summoned me. The Overseer was a high ranking Qharr official and it was customary to greet the arrival of such an official with a feast. As the compound’s head cook I would be expected to prepare a meal appropriate to the occasion.
“I understand, great one, I will prepare a meal that shall bring the Overseer’s praises heaping down upon you.”
Duvak coughed and brushed at my chest with the back of his two middle fingers in an expression of amusement. “Good. I am told that the Overseer is quite fond of canine meat. I have placed a large order of it and it shall arrive on the morrow see that it is prepared in jum’kar juices.”
“Yes, great one.”
The Corrector did not respond instead he stared at me his head titling from side to side as if he were trying to size me up. He coughed again then turned away. “Leave, slave.”
I swallowed hard and quickly scurried out of the practice yard. I don’t know why, but I got the im
pression that Duvak was worried about something. I’d spent a lifetime around the Qharr and I understood them as well as any human could. Duvak had displayed behavior that was odd even by his people’s standards. Something had him on edge and that didn’t bode well for anyone least of all a slave like me.
“Jellfree!” Kaya Brzezinski said spinning around with a large wooden mixing spoon in hand.
A small bit of sauce from the spoon splattered my face in almost exact place where I’d been hit with Qharr blood just a little time before. Kaya was one of the cooks who worked under me, and was one of the most attractive women I’d ever known. Like me, her life was one long sad tale, and I’d heard enough variations on the same story that I could recite hers by heart. About six months ago I found her waiting in my room after we’d both worked a long shift in the kitchen and the two of us had been together ever since.
She bit her lip and stared up at me apprehensively, “What did the Corrector want?”
I wiped the sauce off my face then I reached over to yank the spoon out of her hand and pulled her close. “The Overseer is coming.”
“How long?” she grimaced and reached at empty air as she made several futile attempts to snatch the spoon back out of my roving hand.
“Three days,” I said, spinning the spoon around, and then tossed it from hand to hand before holding it out for her to take.
She yanked it from my outstretched hand and shook it in front of my face. “Three days?! And how, the fucking hell, are we expected to prepare a welcome feast on such short notice!? It would be nice if our Masters would have given us a little more warning!”
“Kaya! You shouldn’t talk like that! What if one of the guards heard you!?”
I loved Kaya dearly, but there were times that I feared she’d get us both killed. She was impulsive and she nearly always spoke her mind. Honestly, I had no idea how she’d survived so long as a slave. Few Qharr were as tolerant as Duvak and even the Corrector had his limits. He’d proven on more than one occasion that he could be every bit as cruel and ruthless as any other member of his race.
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