Chapter 14
Fred the Asteroid

Fred the Asteroid hadn't always been an asteroid, in fact his mother had wanted him to become an island. Like his brother Frank. Unfortunately this was not to be. No tropical breezes to caress his body, no ocean surrounding him, lapping his edges. No tides ever flowing and ebbing on in a never ending rhythm, like the breathing of the small living organisms that were now fated never to scurry along Fred's smooth white sandy non existent beaches.
Even an asteroid can dream.

The blue super giant had been stalked for six months. Then the little biological creatures made their move.

After the unwarranted attack on a completely defenseless and unarmed star system local outcry was heard far and wide. A witness was quoted as saying;

"There was a great KABOOM! Then there was star stuff everywhere. SOB. It was horrible."

In the first six minutes the explosion tore through the three inner planets of Fred's system, and then were consumed by their mother star, in a fiery flare of energy that would light up the entire galaxy for more than a month, giving off more energy than the Earth's sun could in ten billion years. It was a hell of a bang.

The perpetrators sped away from the scene of the crime at warp speed, like young vandals breaking store front windows then running only to be swallowed up into the darkness before the cold hand of justice could rest firmly on their guilt ridden shoulders.

Of the inner planets, the two gas giants suffered the worse, of which, three of their thirty four collective moons held a certain amount of undetectable intelligent life, in the form of rather clever plants. They frizzled out of existence nano seconds before the giants themselves ignited, like two planet size Roman candles, but just as they really started to flare up they were extinguished by the blast, then engulfed and torn asunder.

The three outer planets were not completely consumed by their distant mother. Seeing the bright flare in the center of their solar system they foolishly though to run. But to where? Never mind to where, but how? While still contemplating this question the three outer planets, were caught in the supernova blast and were also torn apart, though not completely vaporized by their once life giving mother star. Apparently whomever had taught these planets their physics seemed to have left out certain little bits of information like, how to run from a mother star which should have lasted another twenty-five million years or so, but had suddenly gone supernova on you like a football player who caught you trying to give a frenchy to his mum.

The shock wave which tore the solar system apart and consequently formed an asteroid belt also gave it the much needed momentum which a belt of that size must have in space if it was to find a new home in this great big crazy cosmos.

"There was asteroid belt everywhere." a local news reported commented.

"Oceans freezing in place, lava flows forming into weird and eerie shapes while hardening solid, like so much popcorn blasting ever which way, as the star which was their mother, was mindlessly destroyed."

"This figures", thought Fred the Asteroid rather sardonically, while hurling into deep recesses of a rather unfashionable part of his galaxy with his brothers and sisters, some nothing more than giant clouds of dust or frozen water dozens of miles across, becoming thinner and thinner as the blast carried them further and further into deep space.

Fred then went to sleep for the next two point nine million years, not that he was really counting. Fred wasn't that kind of asteroid. His attitude was, "Take what life throws you and work with it."

"That very attitude", his mother had once told him, "is precisely what will get you into trouble, my young formation." But the truth of it to be told, was Coke a Cola advertising department was the problem.

So long ago when he was a mere puddle of molten lava meandering through the seemingly never ending labyrinth that was his mothers womb, along with his thousands and thousands of siblings, coursing through these interconnecting passages never the same way twice, Fred knew he was different. But never had he thought that the sanctity of his planet would be his responsibility to avenge.

Fred, like so many others of his contemporaries, had never been to the surface. True since he had been aging he had been surfacing, but the rate was so slow that it was hardly noticeable. It had been ten thousand years since he had actually been with his mother, deep in the center of her being, glowing white hot bubbling and oozing through the cooler eddies that would congeal, then dissipate at his touch. The familiar warmth of her caress, the stories she would tell, her relentlessly grinding about.

Like a wash woman with twelve kids, who took in extra wash to pay the rent, so too she, Fred's mother, had her grinding to do, as rent on the gravity well that kept an atmosphere over her and her children's heads.

Now Fred thought he was out on his own, even though his very motion contributed to keeping the gravity as it should be. His constant pressure on the elder siblings above him, kept them ever breathing, the solid adult continents heaving up and down hundreds of feet above and below sea level across the span of a few hundred thousand years. Give or take a millennium, was the breathing of the planet Fred called home.

True Fred could brag to the others of having almost been sucked up through a blow hole, when he would conveniently get caught up within a chamber of solidity with several of his playmates, within his mother's lower mantle. This would have fulfilled his mother's wishes which Fred did not openly share. Sometimes he would dwell there a decade or two longer then he should have, but that was the kind of young lava flow that Fred was.

During lessons Fred mind would wander, "there was so much to learn that if I had a head, and understood what a head was, it would hurt".

"All that one planet soul stuff that I'll never use in real life. I'm part of an young healthy planet, what do I have to fear except maybe some biological carbon based tiny germ like creatures from an impossible distance away. Sure like who's going to believe that?"

Fred had a lot to learn.