Protector: The Ballad of Jimmy Fisher, Book One - Earthstrike

The first in a series of five books for Young Adults.

Jimmy Fisher is not the cleverest kid in school. He’s not the fastest, or the coolest by any means, but he’s definitely not a loser either. For Jimmy and his friends Lily, Pete and Eddie, life couldn’t be more normal.
Then he gets knocked out in a snowball fight by a weird looking guy, and everything changes. He starts to have a recurring dream where giant spaceships appear over their little Yorkshire town, but just as the shadow falls he wakes up. Until one day he doesn’t. The invasion is here.
The invaders are the Jhuurdreng Corporation. They are not here to blow us all to pieces like in some megabucks action film, but to build Sol-IIIA, a giant factory out of the entire planet. The people that are useful to them are used to build, and man the facilities. They get a reasonable life: a roof, food, enough shoddy gadgets to keep them amused. Those who are less useful, are not so lucky. The world is on lockdown, unless Sagg Yev, the Jhuurdreng Commissioner says otherwise.
Two days after Earthstrike Jimmy and his family are visited by the weird guy that had knocked him out the previous winter. She’s not a guy at all, but one of a Group of Sisters, from a race called the Q’Sketh, who are part of a resistance to the Corporation across many worlds. PahhNeh tells Jimmy he has something in his DNA which singles him out as a Seeder, with the potential for abilities way beyond those of others. He may well be special even amongst Seeders, something very rare; a Protector.
Jimmy meets, Victoria, Chris and Pangari. The signs of the Seed are in them too. They and their families have been removed to the safety of space, and are living in a vast, living ship that is formed from three of PahhNeh’s sisters.
For Lily, Pete and Eddie safety is a long way off. They had started to exhibit Seed abilities just prior to the invasion, and on the night after the Jhuurdreng landed they attempted to sneak into the power facility that was built on the outskirts of their town.
They were unprepared, and easily captured. They are now being experimented on as the Jhuurdreng try to find the secret of the Seed. For the Corporation this is the Holy Grail, because the Seeders are core of the resistance.
Trying to keep them hidden, even before their capture, the Sisters had planted a masking technique in the teenagers that has managed to close the Seed down in them for now. The Jhuurdreng are left looking for a needle in a hay stack.
Lily Pete and Eddie’s loved ones are also on the Ship Sisters, so their rescue is in everyone’s thoughts, and as Seeders they are also invaluable to the resistance, but such a rescue is unlikely to be successful until Jimmy and the other Seeders are able to help the Sisters, and that means the Seeding must have started to reveal their abilities.
The process is long and complicated. Pangari, and Vic exhibit first, accessing an unusual energy source, but expressing it in different ways, both life giving and life threatening. For what seems like forever Chris and Jimmy show no signs at all of any change, and their frustrations spill over into arguments and fights. The time passing is especially tough for Jimmy, who can’t stop thinking about his three best friends being tortured in Sagg Yev’s labs.
Eventually though all their abilities develop, and the rescue begins, but with all they’ve already been through, the dangers that still await Jimmy Fisher and his friends make this seem like they are only at the start, and when it comes to defeating the Jhuurdreng that’s pretty much the truth.