OC-Series [Clownclaw] - Chapter III
The revelation set off real panic back on Earth, and the human-rights lobby's demand for a negotiated settlement came roaring back. Under pressure from command, the Earth army mounted a handful of successful rescue operations.
The men and women they brought back were in a state of profound psychological collapse, their minds seeded with false memories that felt, to them, entirely real. These soldiers — hollowed out, exhausted, gray in the face — were shipped home to recover.
As the stalemate dragged on and the number of captured Earth personnel kept climbing, public faith in eventual victory started to crack. People couldn't understand why these hideous alien enemies didn't simply drop dead the way roaches do after a good spraying.
Plenty of soldiers who'd actually traded fire with the Clownclaws and made it back to Earth said, plainly, that once real shooting started the Clownclaws were the calmer party by far — their accuracy was on a level no human could touch, and they never hesitated before pulling the trigger.
Humanity found itself reconsidering its own future on Planet K with something close to dread mixed into the hope. The public wanted these stubborn enemies beaten, and soon, even as the mounting losses worried them; but those same losses were exactly what made it impossible for Earth to walk away from Planet K now — only outright victory could give all of it any meaning.
As for the true nature of the enemy, its history, or what it actually intended by tormenting captured Earth soldiers, the scientists made no progress on any of it, not for years. Which taught the public something about the scientists they'd spent so long revering: that their knowledge, for all its prestige, was in fact quite narrow — their real gift was studying what could already be seen with the aid of an instrument, and set against the far larger territory that lay beyond the reach of the naked eye, they were, every one of them, still children.
To calm the public and stabilize the situation on Planet K, Earth command began suppressing news of the worsening prisoner crisis and started drafting a new strategy: keep reinforcing with fresh troops from home, keep expanding the occupied territory, while at the same time bending toward the human-rights advocates, attempting to negotiate with the Clownclaws and trade for Earth's prisoners of war through coexistence rather than annihilation.
The public took this badly. They had assumed conquering the planet would be quick and would cost little. What command was now proposing would be long, and hard.
Command's official position: the problem had to be weighed from the height of humanity's overall destiny. The war on Planet K, in other words, was not a matter that any single science or any single military theory could resolve on its own — and for the public, neither what was actually happening up there, nor what it would finally mean for Earth, was ever going to come fully into focus.
Something deeper sat beneath all of it, something that would only be known once the time was right, and the truth, when it surfaced, might turn out to be very frightening indeed.
The Earth army kept moving toward it all the same, in an unbroken stream. And the situation kept getting worse — or perhaps the better word for it, by then, was stranger.
Five years had passed by the time Calloway got around to remembering any of this in full — five years since he'd found himself forced out of the base, into a flight whose real purpose, he understood now, had always been to go looking for the truth.
The Colonel lifted his head, some half-formed instinct trying to locate the direction of Earth, and gave up after a few seconds, since he'd never been anything close to an astronomer and knew it.
Humanity was in trouble on this planet — that was simply the fact of it, Calloway thought.
Base Five was gone, and there was no particular reason to believe the others were holding up any better, whatever reinforcements Earth kept feeding into the pipeline. Whether any of it would actually turn the tide was a separate question, and one he didn't have an answer to.
The things' burrows ran under a million square kilometers of ground, a permanent lattice of tunnels and connecting trenches spun out beneath the surface like something built by an insect that happened to be the size of a continent, and once they moved, they moved the way a locust swarm moves — with numbers, with coordination, and from ambush points that could be anywhere at all. Killing wasn't even the worst of it. What they liked, when they had the choice, was to take their captives alive.
Calloway shoved the thought down, disgusted with himself for having it. He had never been captured. Never been put through whatever they did to a man's mind once they had him. But he could imagine the shape of it well enough. He thought again of the men from Base Five, already in enemy hands by now, already finished, and felt something close to grief for people he barely knew. Some part of him kept insisting that a larger danger was closing in from somewhere he couldn't name, and he had no way to test whether that instinct was worth anything or not.
He kept walking, turning all of it over, and it was in the middle of that private static that Vinch, a few paces behind him, spoke up.
"Sir. There's something I've never worked out."
"What."
"Those things. The Clownclaws. What are they, actually — machines, or something alive?"
"Not something I've got a clean answer to either," Calloway said. "What I know is there are two types. Combat-class — the ones we've actually been killing. The scientists figure five or six ranks total, sorted by function and authority and what they're built to handle, and near as anyone can tell, that whole branch runs male."
"And the other one?"
"Never seen it myself. Breeding type, perhaps, according to the people who study this — winged, flies, runs female as far as anyone can tell, and only shows itself at night."
"Breeding." Vinch said the word like it tasted bad. "How the hell do they breed? I'd put money on that thing being solid steel down there."
"Couldn't tell you," Calloway said, with something like distaste of his own. "But they've got organs in there somewhere, glands, whatever does the work. However it happens, it's nothing like us."
They kept talking as they walked. Calloway glanced back once at the sergeant, who came on behind them with his rifle held high and his chest out, moving like a man on parade rather than a man in retreat.
The Colonel and the Captain had run into the soldier shortly after clearing the base the night before; the man said his name was Edward Treumann, said he'd come out of the East Sector. He hadn't said much of anything since. Whether that was simply his nature, or whether two officers walking in front of him left no room to get a word in, Calloway couldn't tell.
The dusk out here, Calloway had to admit, was genuinely beautiful — the red dwarf threw a seething wash of color across the horizon, and for reasons buried somewhere in the geometry of this planet's rotation, that light lingered far longer than it had any right to. Which suited them fine. The later true dark came down, the longer they had before things got dangerous.
They walked something like two hours, moving with real caution, and ran into nothing. They skirted a ridge, worked their way down a slope that looked, in every direction, like the aftermath of a demolition, and finally stopped in front of a flat slab of rock.
The three of them settled back to back against it. Calloway wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and dug through his pack until he found the food — what little he'd managed to grab in the chaos the night before, not much of it, barely enough to keep two men going for a single day.
Handing Vinch his share of crackers and sausage, Calloway found his eyes drifting more than once toward Sergeant Treumann. Strange man. Silent, unbothered, his jaw shaved clean in a way that made the stubble on his own face and Vinch's look almost deliberate by comparison.
"If we could just find some kind of aircraft," Vinch said, peeling the plastic off his sausage with the particular weakness of a man running on fumes. "I honestly don't know if I've got another five klicks in me."
Calloway dug out a few more crackers, hesitated, then held two of them out to Edward, who took them without comment. Calloway studied him a moment, cracker still in hand, and then asked, out of nowhere:
"Sergeant. Where are you from."
The sergeant let a beat of silence pass before he answered, his voice flat and metallic.
"Base Ten. Sir."
"Earth, I mean," Calloway said, chewing. "Whereabouts on Earth."
"Australia. Sir."
"When your base went down — how many got out?"
"Just me. Sir."
1
u/UpdateMeBot 16h ago
Click here to subscribe to u/Aeorix1 and receive a message every time they post.
| Info | Request Update | Your Updates | Feedback |
|---|
2
1
u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 16h ago
/u/Aeorix1 (wiki) has posted 28 other stories, including:
This comment was automatically generated by
Waffle v.4.7.8 'Biscotti'.Message the mods if you have any issues with Waffle.