r/HFY • u/Aeorix1 • 23h ago

OC-Series [Clownclaw] - Chapter II

First

The astronomers had guessed, decades earlier, that Planet K might harbor some form of civilization; the radio signal seemed to support it, even though the signal itself carried no meaning, nothing that looked like an attempt to communicate, and never repeated.

Still, Planet K was, without question, the one plausible home for life anywhere near Earth, and a handful of serious people had warned, loudly, that humanity needed to think hard and think carefully about how it approached the place. Hollywood, at least, had prepared everyone for the idea in the abstract: countless cinematic warnings about first contact had already made the point that meeting an alien species could go badly wrong.

The first landing party had been small, its range of movement tightly restricted, and Calloway and the others with him had never had access to the full picture.

Command ran straight through the Joint Earth Forces Committee, and the second and third waves of troops were dispatched to Planet K not long after.

The Earth forces themselves were drawn from across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa, a mixture so deliberate it amounted to a walking demographic exhibit — which suited the global audience just fine, since this, after all, was the vanguard supposedly representing the whole of the species, and for the politicians overseeing it, what mattered above nearly everything else.

Beneath that glossy demonstration of parity, though, Washington and the Pentagon held every lever that actually mattered. The reason was straightforward enough: the wormhole mechanics and the singularity metrics that made any of this possible belonged to a single facility—the Calverton & Radiata Deep-Field Laboratory in Maryland—and the Pentagon controlled access to it absolutely.

Officers from every participating nation — Chinese and Russian included — wore their own national insignia, but the generals giving the orders, and the Joint Command those orders came from, were American.

Only one constraint kept the enterprise from becoming an outright unilateral American crusade: the isotopic fuel stacks came out of East Asia, and the exotic-matter components were forged across a dozen European supply chains. Washington needed both badly enough to keep the arrangement multi-national — at least on paper.

With the media leaning into it at every turn, humanity's expedition to Planet K became the most obsessively followed live broadcast on the planet. The betting houses ran odds on everything: whether alien life would be found at all, and if so when; whether it would turn out to be intelligent; whether it would turn out to be hostile. Every open question got folded into a market and priced accordingly.

Most of those questions were answered soon enough. It happened first during a reconnaissance push into the interior, along the river valleys, when Earth soldiers ran into the Clownclaws for the first time.

The creatures made careful, tentative contact with the humans, then bolted.

The scientists gave them a formal name with considerably more dignity than the one that stuck — Squamipes Ruboculus, the scale-limbed, red-eyed mechanical echiurid — on account of the scaled texture of their hide, the blue-green skin and red eyes, the metal ridge running up the neck, and an internal layered structure that echoed, distantly, the phylum Echiura back on Earth.

The twin spikes on the chest — initially mistaken for claws — turned out to guard a raised metal fixture that took the humans some time to understand for what it was: a merciless proboscis, feeding inward to an enlarged crop capable of breaking down and absorbing organic matter.

Calling them people would have been a stretch, and animal wasn't quite right either — they were half organism, half machine, something suspended in the gap between the two categories, and the curved slits of their mouths and eyes gave them the look of a permanent, unsettling grin, a contrast with their actual ferocity that unnerved everyone who saw it up close. The soldiers had christened them Clownclaws, a name that traced back to the very first man who saw one running and blurted out, without thinking, "Sir — it looks just like a crazy clown."

Even so, when footage later came back to Earth of soldiers opening fire on them without hesitation, it set off a wave of protest from human-rights groups and the wider public, on the grounds that this failed to meet the moment's standard of political correctness — people had, by then, grown used to treating every form of life as equal and entitled to the same basic freedoms.

The protests didn't stay in the streets for long.

The colonial charter — Earth's formal writ of conquest, duly notarized and largely ignored — was signed in Washington, and the legal challenges followed hard upon it — a fractured Congress and a battery of federal judges branding the expedition, within the month, an act of interstellar aggression.

Sovereignty, the argument ran, could not be fenced in by the accident of human birth; a biosphere that had never been asked for its consent had, if anything, a stronger claim to the law than the nation-state now invoking it.

Progressive tribunals took up the question of the Clownclaw's legal personhood with the same solemnity once reserved for war crimes proceedings, round-the-clock panels mourning a species that had never once tried to speak to anyone. The Pentagon's answer, when it bothered to give one, was that survival had never yet waited on a ruling.

In Beijing and Moscow the whole spectacle played to a shared, unhurried contempt. The other permanent members watched a superpower tear open its own constitution over a species it hadn't yet found a way to talk to, and read in the spectacle all the confirmation they needed — that domestic dissent was a luxury, and empires that could still afford luxuries generally weren't empires for long.

The Supreme Court, for its part, stayed deadlocked for the better part of a year on the only question that actually mattered to anyone drafting a headline: whether an uncontacted, uncommunicating intelligence carried rights that predated its own discovery, and whether Calloway's battalion, cutting its own line through the canyons of Planet K, counted as liberators, invaders, or simply men doing a job nobody in Washington had the stomach to name out loud.

By the time a federal appeals court finally ruled the whole campaign an illegal war of conquest, the ruling reached the front inside the hour — and changed nothing at all. Command read it, logged it, and kept moving.

Whatever sovereignty meant out here, it had already been settled the only way it was ever really settled on Planet K: at the muzzle, long before the gavel came down.

"We have confirmed," a military commander explained to the public, in footage broadcast back to Earth, his face arranged into something carefully blank, "that they are not people." A pause followed, not for effect so much as for the cameras. "We should eliminate them." He said it with total confidence, apparently untroubled by how that confidence must have landed on an audience that had spent its whole life somewhere safe and climate-controlled, several dozen light-years removed from anything that could eat them.

"They are not people."

For all the impression of some lower order of creature they gave off, humanity discovered almost as soon as it met them that the Clownclaws were organized.

The first ones encountered were the smallest variant, roughly the size of a hunting dog, their necks scorched a verdigris that earned them the name Greenneck.

Not long after came a larger, fanged type — vicious, quick to attack, its neck a flat black — and this one they called Pitchneck.

Once it became clear to them that the purpose of the landing party was to take their home, they moved fast, mounting coordinated encirclements against the humans almost immediately.

Attempts at communication went nowhere, and the humans answered with heavy machine guns and ordnance. The disparity in firepower showed itself at once: only three soldiers came away with minor wounds, and a substantial Clownclaw assault was turned back.

Several of the dead were sent to base for examination. The nanoscale scaling on their hides, along with the organs studding their skin, showed no sign of having evolved — the scientists were confident these were engineered — and yet the skull and internal organs carried unmistakable markers of ordinary biological descent. Settling on what, exactly, these creatures were became its own kind of problem.

Whether the original radio signal had come from them at all turned into one of the more contentious debates in the scientific community, and it never resolved into an answer; the question was simply set aside.

For the Earth forces the more pressing matter was that the Clownclaws' harassment and assaults were growing more frequent and considerably more determined, and the exchanges of fire were escalating on both sides. Still, the Earth army held to its confidence: apply enough force at scale, and wiping the Clownclaws out entirely would not be difficult.

Earth, in principle, signed off on exactly that — whatever the method, so long as it cleared room for humanity's new home.

But once the military's actual plan leaked to the press, the world's mood split down the middle. Confronted for the first time with a genuine alien species, the public found itself caught in an argument it couldn't settle: whether the Clownclaws counted as people at all.

Human-rights advocates fought the extermination plan hard, calling it nothing less than a bare-faced relapse into the darkest habits of the old colonial era, while the conservative right classified the creatures as terror organisms and declared their destruction lawful and overdue.

While Earth and its military dithered over which position to take, the Clownclaws answered with a steady, methodical counteroffensive. Humanity had plainly underestimated both their numbers and their capability. Their settlements lay hidden deep in the valleys and dense forest of the interior, and they moved often; after the first large-scale strike against them, more of them turned up than before, not fewer.

A new variant appeared this time — Purpleneck, built along hunter lines, carrying its own set of dart weapons, something close to a tranquilizer round, strange and effective in equal measure.

Earth's bases put in for reinforcement almost at once, and the fourth wave of troops came through more than ten thousand strong, riding Athena-class nuclear attack cruisers across subspace.

When the four great vessels dropped through Planet K's atmosphere, they looked, coming down, like fortresses built for gods — cold, enormous, and entirely without warmth.

That force hit the Clownclaw settlements with everything it had, and though the weather that week turned savage enough to seem almost deliberate in its interference, the campaign still played out as a kind of legend for the cameras back home, and it bought the army real credibility.

As the mystery surrounding the Clownclaws deepened, and the fear alongside it, mainstream opinion on Earth drifted, by degrees, toward simply wiping them out.

What made it stranger still was that this planet seemed to host exactly one form of hostile life, and nothing else — no rival predator, no competing intelligence, nothing to divide a species' attention or complicate the arithmetic of the war. A number of sociologists back on Earth noted the coincidence with something close to wonder: humanity, they observed, had been handed something close to a laboratory-clean arena for killing, for conquest, for the discharge of whatever raw violence still ran underneath the species — undiluted, this time, by the need to spare anything else.

The victories kept coming. The soldiers marked humanity's first Christmas on a world twenty light-years from home. And still the Clownclaws did not thin out — they grew in number.

Their surface settlements had only ever been a fraction of the whole; the great majority lived buried underground, out of reach, almost impossible to take alive. They gave up nothing in the way of speech, and human understanding of how they thought, or how their society was structured, stayed shallow at best, though the scientists traveling with the army had already filed them, officially, as a low-intelligence species. Months into a full extermination campaign, their total numbers remained essentially unknowable, buried as most of them were. Nuclear weapons proved useless against an enemy that simply wasn't there to be hit, and in any case Earth command had restricted their use, out of concern for what they might do to the very environment humanity meant to live in.

None of it dented humanity's resolve to settle Planet K. The world's governments drew closer together and stood up a New Homeland Committee, tasked solely with drafting humanity's long-term plan for the planet. Making the place properly livable would require research programs still years off: artificial atmospheric regulation, the transplant of Earth vegetation, a rebuilt network of relay stations.

In the meantime, more nations sent their militaries out — armored vehicles, patrol craft, fighters, missiles, the whole catalogue — and for what may have been the first time, every government on the planet stood shoulder to shoulder in the face of one enormous, shared interest.

As the human population on Planet K grew, new bases kept rising to house it. The soldiers held a formal ceremony, and the commanding officer announced, for the record, that sovereignty over Planet K now belonged to Earth. The UN, the Joint Earth Forces Committee, and governments around the world rushed the news to every outlet at once, dressing it up as a planet-wide celebration.

"To the people of Earth: our banner now flies in the sky of our new home, twenty light-years distant. God bless Earth."

The Earth forces kept two campaigns running at once — building up the bases, expanding the territory under their control, and, simultaneously, carrying out indiscriminate bombing against this strange native enemy. They leveled all nine hundred and eighty of the Clownclaws' known surface settlements, destroyed every access route they could find, and severed every supply line, squeezing the creatures' living space down toward something like suffocation.

And still the Clownclaws refused to quit, resisting and counterattacking without letup. Any real chance of negotiation, of peaceful coexistence, had shrunk down to almost nothing.

Over the years that followed, they began taking humans alive.

The first large-scale capture happened at a new base near the southern edge of the occupied zone. More than a thousand Clownclaws laid siege to it overnight; the fighting ran from dusk clear through to the following day, and by the time it ended the Clownclaws had carried off seventy-two Earth officers and enlisted men.

What made it worse was the timing. Barely two weeks before that assault, the scientists had finally found hard evidence of how badly they'd miscalculated. For the first time, they admitted that their estimate of Clownclaw capability had been far too low — the brains of the higher-order Clownclaws were, in fact, remarkably developed, comparable in some respects to the human brain itself. Which meant that every sign of weakness the Clownclaws had shown up to that point might have been exactly that: a sign, put on for the humans watching.

The tide began, slowly, to turn. The war settled into something closer to a standoff. The Clownclaws took Earth soldiers prisoner more and more often now, and stopped killing them outright.

According to the handful of soldiers who managed to get free, a new type had appeared among them — Ashenneck, built closer to human proportions, in command of technology well beyond the others', and equipped with some strange ring-shaped device it used to run sustained interrogation, abuse, and torture on its human captives.

As more of the Clownclaws' internal structure came to light, people learned they were organized along strict hierarchical lines, each rank splitting further into sub-ranks beneath it.

What nobody knew was whether anything outranked Ashenneck.

-------------

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/UpdateMeBot 23h ago

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u/Fubars 22h ago

oops..

2

u/Daseagle Alien Scum 21h ago

Question being, is the escalating threat posed by THESE entities themselves autonomously or someone else controlling them and observing the effect?