Dread- A Love Story

The plan was to shoot it down, blow it up with nukes, somehow. The monster was coming at better than seventeen thousand miles an hour, so this would be a shot much like shooting a rifle bullet out of the air… with a BB gun. The thing was estimated to be larger than a hundred and fifty million tons, ten times the size of the proverbial football field, and not quite peanut shaped. And it was only spotted yesterday. Two weeks away.Those that love to play with the numbers told us that it would hit Earth dead center… but where dead center might be by fourteen days, four hours, thirteen minutes and change, was still a bit of a guess. Could be off by a thousand or two miles. After all, the surface of good ol' Earth spins a thousand miles an hour. Had no idea you were going that fast, all the time, did you! Figure it out. The system has to get your sun at high noon within twenty four hours, every day. And the circumference, that is the fat part, is twenty four thousand miles around.Well, the nuke guys were argued against, for then there was the terrible danger of being hit with a thousand smaller pieces. I, for one, was all for it. A thousand little pieces might lose eighty to ninety percent in the atmospheric entry, overheating, melting, even exploding. Hell, I watch TV. Earth has those all the time, some bigger, some smaller. Shooting stars. But, as usual, when things are run by a committee, no one could come to an agreement.How the hell had it snuck up on us? With all the technology, umpteen huge observatories, and whatnot, we should have seen this months and months out. But space is, like it or not, huge! It is why we call it space. Lots of it. The explanation was that it was part of another comet, breaking away almost in a perfect sync with its fellow intergalactic traveler. Only when two or more of the observatories agreed that there was a shadow on the shadow, so to speak, did the thing get its name. Dread.In the seeds of despair, in the hopelessness of fear, pain and death, there often arises opportunity for love. And the choices are not always our own. Thrust together by circumstance, two unlikely people find themselves drawn together, literally under fire. The people are not the players we expect. But this is a love story… Asteroids come and go. Love endures all things… So they tell us.