Government Men by Gary J. Davies

  ****

  In the relative emptiness of space five million miles from Earth, twenty times the distance to the Moon, Dannos, the primal iron hammer of the Ra forged in a great star gone super nova billions of years before there were humans, sped towards Earth with a closing speed a hundred times greater than that of a rifle bullet. Kinetic energy being roughly a quadratic function of speed, Dannos packed ten-thousand times the energy of a rifle bullet, multiplied by more than a trillion-trillion bullet masses.

  The iron surface of Dannos was rough and pitted, from boiling in low gravity and other cosmic forces, except for one shiny area a few hundred meters across that was polished and melted smooth only seven Earth years earlier by the final remaining nuclear weapons of Earth. Its greatly elongated orbit around the sun was more typical of comets than asteroid-like iron bodies. In previous journeys around the Sun, Dannos had been melted and partly vaporized when it traveled well inside the orbit of Mercury. This would not occur again, however. In less than two days it would strike the Earth with such violent force that itself and many cubic miles of Earth would be vaporized as it bore through the Earth's crust.