Battle Won (Space Warrior Adventures #1) - Erin Raegan Page 0,1

of us ignoramuses. They failed.

And we all paid the price for that failure.

We were indeed invaded a year ago—don’t quote me on the timing, you tend not to keep track when you spend your days running for your life.

But like I said, we were invaded. That day, yeah all I could do was sigh. That day was not a good day. A lot of people died. A lot of people got eaten. Yes, EATEN.

White bobble-headed monstrosities dropped down from their lemon-wedged spaceships and chased around all of us helpless little humans. Catching us and eventually eating us. Not so much eventually. You tended to get their teeth in you well before you were really caught. I saw a man go down right in front of me. That creepy alien was like a gazelle, sprinting after the poor guy through the streets. It was maybe a foot from the man when it's head just kind of dropped down and engulfed the guy’s head in its freakishly largemouth. Then, when the headless guy dropped, the alien picked the rest of his body up and carted it off.

I know. Gross.

A whole year we were hiding from these things.

Then they came. They, being the Dahk, the Xixin, and the Kilbus. Strange names to go along with their strange alien features. The Dahk were winged, purple, and the first time I saw one it took me a long time to realize they were not going to also eat us. Then I got an eyeful of the Xixin and with their feline features and saber-toothed fangs and linebacker bulk, I still wasn’t entirely convinced humans were not on their meal plan. The Kilbus were just as unappealing or appealing to the eye as every alien I’d encountered, but it all depended on which Kilbus you were encountering. The Kilbus were like a mashup of dozens of different species. All the outcasts joined together under one ruler. Pirate-y by nature, most of them had a bad habit of sticky fingers when it came to both humans and sparkly things.

Ultimately, all three of those species had one thing in common. They’d come to our planet not to join in on the carnage but to save us from it. They swaggered around town like their shit didn’t stink, declaring how they’d released us from a terrible fate when they took down the carnivorous aliens’ ship.

I didn’t see it that way. At all. They may have defeated the white creepies, but they sent that ship crashing down on our planet. It nearly took out part of the east coast. And as if the immediate damage hadn’t already been bad enough, our planet was now dying from that battle and those that ensued after. It was like the freaking dinosaurs all over again.

The dinosaurs were resigned to their fate though. We were not. No, we had three anxious alien species chomping at the bit to save us once again.

A mass announcement had been sent out to survivors. It took months just to reach my hidey-hole in an underground subway station. I’d been hiding there for nearly six months with eleven other people. An older man, by the name of Wayne, had taken it upon himself to be our unofficial liaison with the nearby Xixin outposts.

The rest of us were perfectly fine with giving him this terrifying job. It proved very useful. We learned the bad aliens were called the Vitat and though their mother ship and queen had been declared persona non grata, there were still Vitat hiding out on earth and the Xixin and the Dahk would be there for quite some time, hunting them down while simultaneously relocating survivors.

I was all for the far more capable aliens taking on the bad guys, but when we learned we were being moved offshore—like to another planet’s offshore—I balked. Like hard.

For a year I’d lived underground. Running and running, always looking over my shoulder. For the first few months, I’d been alone. I’d seen people die from the Vitat, from sickness, from sheer stupidity, and then when things got really dark, I saw men and women take their own lives. At one very weak moment, I’d even contemplated it myself. Things had been bad.

But still, this new horrible world had still been my home. I wasn’t ready to leave it.

But the other survivors I’d been with deliberated and argued and then argued some more. It took poor Wayne telling each of us that there was nothing left for us anymore, no one