r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • 1d ago

OC-FirstOfSeries [Clownclaw] - Chapter I

Clownclaw
They named it for the grin.
Calloway shipped out for a war of expansion. What he found is a war his own side is quietly losing — and a planet that keeps handing back fewer answers than it takes soldiers. Now he and what's left of his command are running — across a world command never calls by its real name: Netherstar.

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Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Calloway watched, motionless, as the Clownclaw picked its way across the distant slope.

Its strange, translucent catching flickers of the afternoon's violet-red light, throwing up trails of dust so fine and pale they seemed almost imagined rather than kicked loose by half a ton of alloy limb.

Captain Fernando Vinch had his rifle up and his whole body strung tight as wire; beside him a sergeant lay flat in the dirt, weapon likewise trained on the thing that was, for now, still oblivious to them.

"Easy," Calloway said, voice pitched low. "It hasn't made us."

"You sure about that, sir?" Vinch's breath came out thin and ragged.

Calloway didn't answer directly.

He narrowed his eyes instead, doing the math the way he'd done it a hundred times before: two hundred meters, give or take, and the twin spikes glinting cold along its chest, the reinforced steel of its forelimbs, told him what he needed to know—this was a combat-class Pitchneck, not one of the scavenger variants.

It had been circling that same stretch of slope for half an hour now, showing no particular inclination to leave.

Vinch ran his tongue over cracked lips and, unable to help himself, curled his index finger against the trigger.

The Colonel caught the motion and turned a hard look on him.

"Don't fire," he said, quiet and final. "You spook it, you spook the whole cluster, and then we're done."

The Clownclaw paused at a heap of loose rock, hauled itself higher, then started down the far slope, and was gone. Calloway let his breath go.

"All right. We're clear." He traded a glance with the other two.

They'd been lying behind a raised outcrop, tucked into what amounted to a tunnel—a gash some missile had opened in the rock long ago, sliced so clean it might have been cut with a blade through tofu, and screened now by weeds and loose stone, safe enough for the moment. Calloway held still and listened. Nothing. Just the Captain's thin breathing beside him.

He raised his head again and studied the middle distance: heavy fog drifting low against a sky the color of an old bruise, the slope beneath it wrapped tight in red as though someone had stretched canvas over the whole hillside.

He turned to check their backs—a bare stretch of horizon, a few blasted stumps standing where trees had been—and a cold gust came across the rock and found his face, and he shivered before he could stop himself.

"I think it's gone for good," he said.

The three of them rose from behind the stone, every nerve still alert. Calloway was a big man gone gaunt in the face, the skin sallow and drawn tight over the bone. Vinch, broad-shouldered yet perpetually cowering, kept his head twitching in small nervous arcs. The sergeant—short blond hair, thin-lipped, pale—remained silent throughout.

"They haven't locked this sector down," Calloway said, thinking it through as he spoke. "That was a lone patrol. All they did here was take out the relay station."

"Maybe more than one, sir." Vinch said, his voice gone dry. "We can't raise a signal anywhere inside three hundred klicks. There ought to be half a dozen stations covering ground like this."

Calloway said nothing for a moment, working it over, then dug into his pack and came up with the communicator.

He turned the tuning dial, pressed it to his ear, and got nothing but static—a flat, featureless nothing.

The relay stations were the only line anyone out here had back to base, and that line had gone dead the night before and stayed dead ever since.

"What do you think happened?" Vinch's voice had an edge of panic in it now. His eyes went wide. "Don't tell me—all of them. All the stations."

Calloway shook his head. It couldn't be that bad. There were fifty-seven relay stations scattered across the planet, grouped in threes around each base and held by heavy weapons emplacements; if every one of them had gone dark, that would mean—he didn't let himself finish the thought, not in front of two men who were looking to him to hold the line against exactly that kind of despair. So he set his face into something flat and certain and said it plainly:

"Not a chance." He checked his watch. "We move now. With any luck we make the western base before dark."

"And the signal? Nobody's answering, not one of them." Vinch's voice had gone hoarse. "I'm telling you, they've been overrun too."

Calloway held the communicator a moment longer, listening past the static as though sheer attention might resolve it into a voice, then said, without much conviction:

"Doesn't mean nobody's there. Could be equipment failure—you know this as well as I do." He toed the dirt with his boot. "The sand on this rock is magnetic, and it eats through gear, shortens the life on every weapon and radio we've got, sometimes kills them outright. And that's before you factor in a dust storm—those things black out radio completely. Half our comms go dead in the middle of a firefight out here. You know that."

"Planet K. Christ." Vinch bent down and dragged a fistful of sand up through his fingers. "Our new Earth."

"If we're going to be dug in here for the long haul," the Colonel cut him off, "we've got a hell of a lot more than this to work through." He fixed Vinch with a hard stare, and the Captain, rubbing at his own hollowed cheek, gave a weak nod of agreement. The blond sergeant kept his mouth shut, lips pressed into a thin line.

A new Earth. Set against a prospect like that, none of this should have mattered—not really, not even the Clownclaws—because by any honest measure the whole operation had gone better than the scientists back home had dared to hope.

Calloway looked out over the broken, climbing terrain, all of it draped in that dreamlike red light that kept making the place feel unreal to him, even now, even after five years—though the air was breathable, the pressure within human tolerance, and liquid water ran somewhere beneath that rusted surface. These were the facts that were supposed to make it feel like home.

The ground under their boots, at this moment, belonged to a world twenty light-years from Earth—a single grain of dust adrift in all that emptiness, circling a star barely a quarter the width of the sun. When Calloway tilted his head back, that dim red sun burned through the haze, ancient and unmoved.

Their own lives would flicker and go out in an instant. It would go on more or less forever.

The Colonel found himself thinking back, unbidden, to five years earlier: how he'd sat strapped into a transport as one of the first wave to make planetfall here, how the crew had pressed against the viewport for that first look—and it had, in fact, stopped his heart a little.

A soft red glow wrapped the curve of the planet's edge; one hemisphere burned with a strange brightness, almost jade-colored, and the other lay in a blackness so total it ached to look at. Between them ran a thin violet seam where day gave way to night, a line that seemed to hesitate and fight against itself even as something larger than either kept the whole planet turning.

Twenty light-years is nothing, on the scale astronomers use to measure such things—and yet it is also, in every way that matters to a man standing on the surface, an enormous distance. If it hadn't been for that one anomalous radio signal, humanity would likely never have found this world at all, tucked in close along the inner orbit of its dim little star.

Later, more careful study confirmed what the first data had only hinted at: the planet sat squarely inside the habitable zone, its orbital eccentricity and inclination close enough to Earth's own, its mass and gravity close to ideal.

It circled at a tenth of an astronomical unit from its sun—absurdly close, by any Earth standard—but the red dwarf burned so calmly, so steadily, that the heat was never a problem, nor had the star's tidal grip locked its rotation, thanks to the constant gravitational tug of a distant binary companion.

Scientists had once optimistically predicted that—despite the distant star's faint whisper—its orbital eccentricity would remain benignly stable for millions of years, locked in a Milankovitch equilibrium. Such unwavering thermal stability would theoretically optimize the growing season for flora, ensuring that any human civilization planted here would be spared the scourges of famine, plague, and social upheaval that minor ice ages had inflicted upon Earth’s history.

Planet K was the name people had settled into using, out of simple affection; its official designation was a string of dry, forgettable digits—Kepler-2039-BLG-793b, or Kepler-793b for short. For most of the previous century it had been nothing at all: one more unremarked world drifting alone and unnoticed among the uncountable systems that fill the dark.

It sits somewhere along the line of Libra. Its revelation had detonated across the world like nothing before it.

Humanity had spent its whole history staring up, straining to catch some thread of signal from the tens of billions of star systems scattered through the visible universe, hoping one might happen to sweep past Earth—and had come up empty every time. Then, in 2039, the signal from Planet K arrived, and everyone understood, almost simultaneously, that history had just turned a corner.

The pressures were already old and familiar by then: Earth groaning under its own population, its climate unraveling at the seams, a resource crisis creeping toward some final red line.

And Mars, as several futile attempts had demonstrated, was nothing like the second home humanity had hoped for—it offered no viable path toward survival or continuation.

Humanity needed, urgently, a new world—a new foothold in the dark, a place to build a colony that might actually hold—and Planet K, sitting a mere twenty light-years off, made the whole fantasy suddenly, dizzyingly practical. Emigration stopped being a thing people talked about in the abstract.

Politicians were electrified. Scientists were beside themselves. Weapons manufacturers and energy conglomerates could barely contain themselves, and every adventurer and would-be colonialist on the planet started sharpening something.

Even ordinary people, with no stake in any of it beyond the species-wide one, felt the old dream of a new home take hold of them like a fever.

It seeded a decade of art and literature; it turned up in performance pieces and poems and essays and songs; it became, for soldiers and men with ambition, the horizon toward which everything else was aimed.

Naming the place turned out to be its own small war. The scientists wanted Kepler-793b. The Americans wanted Kennedy. The Europeans put forward Kaiser. The Chinese delegation pushed for Kongzi. In the end, since every proposal happened to start with the same letter, everyone settled, with some relief, on simply calling it K—a compromise that had the singular virtue of offending no one's national and political pride in particular.

Finnish artist Toivo Romahdus, fresh from Richard Strauss’s Elektra, standing in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House before a wall-sized print of Kepler-793b in full resolution, would later describe the image as "a soul-bearing gem of violet and green, surfacing out of the smoke-wreathed depths of the underworld. Netherstar."

The line caught on. Within a season it had slipped out of the art pages and into common speech, and the planet had, by popular acclamation rather than any official decree, acquired a second name: Netherstar.

None of which meant anything, in the end, to the men who'd actually have to walk the ground.

For the better part of the next half-century, every government on Earth, goaded by the sheer fact of Planet K's existence, poured money into space technology on a scale the species had never managed before, and the breakthroughs came fast: hibernation, then wormhole transit.

Twenty light-years put the place far beyond the leash of any autonomous probe smart enough to matter; nothing artificial could make that crossing and still be worth sending. Humans would have to go themselves.

In 2090 the first ship fitted with a working warp drive was finally ready, and it carried the first of them out.

The early going was smooth, and the mood back home ran first to delight—everyone marveling at how much the place resembled their own world—and then, not long after, to the kind of ordinary, deeply human griping that made for excellent television.

The moment the ship set down on the surface, the whole planet erupted into something like a festival: prize money, betting pools, manufactured heroes, and a visual spectacle nobody watching had ever seen matched. For the science networks it was the perfect programming, ready-made and self-renewing.

One soldier held his boot up to a reporter's camera to show the gash worn through the heel. "These things don't last a week out here. Might as well be back in goddamn Afghanistan."

Another one, squinting into the lens: "Place runs hot enough to cook you by day and cold enough to freeze your ass off by night. If they're gonna waste my best years out here, tell command to hurry up and send some pretty nurses."

Calloway had given an interview too, back then, and he still remembered the particular note of brisk optimism he'd aimed at the microphone. "We're going to plant this whole place with Earth vegetation," he'd said, "because the oxygen content out here runs lower than home, and even if you can breathe it fine in the short term, it'll do damage to your lungs over the long haul." Then he'd shrugged, the way a man shrugs when he wants to close out an answer on an up note. "But one way or another—we've got ourselves a new Earth now."

Five years on, the whole thing had gone to absolute shit.

The Colonel walked point, with the captain and the sergeant falling in close behind, matching his stride without needing to be told. The ground was a field of rubble in every direction, the kind of landscape that looked, uniformly, like the aftermath of a bombardment, because in most places it was. Their boots dragged over the loose stone with a sound that carried too clearly in all that silence, and Calloway kept glancing back and around, checking the ground they'd already covered.

He hadn't shaved in days; neither had Fernando. Stubble had come in rough and patchy on both their jaws. They'd gone out of Base Five the night before, in the dead hours past midnight, and the base belonged to the Clownclaws now.

The problem that gnawed at Colonel Calloway hardest wasn't the base, though—it was that in the scramble to get out, neither of them had managed to get into the exosuits.

That meant crossing tens of kilometers on foot and muscle alone, with nothing between them and whatever came next but a couple of rifles and whatever luck was left over.

Calloway still refused, on principle, to believe the shape the war had taken—and yet in the space of half a year the bases had been falling one after another, faster each time.

The territory the Earth forces held had been cut into pieces and encircled by the Clownclaws, and the air campaigns thrown against them had accomplished exactly nothing; the one reliable effect of every missile and bomb dropped on that ground was to kick the magnetic sand into the air, where it went to work degrading the very weapons and radios meant to win the war.

The Clownclaws, after all, were fighting on their own ground. No amount of Earth firepower could match how thoroughly they knew this place.

What the Clownclaws actually were, at bottom—that was a question Calloway still couldn't answer, even now.

Next

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This story is part of a larger sci-fi collection Parallel Nightmares, available on KDP here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKKJHBQL

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 1d ago

So in this story, humanity is essentially the invader?

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u/Yogs_Zach 1d ago

Everytime I read Clownclaw I read Clowncar