X-14a fucking hated X-14b. For one thing the little bastard was younger by about 50 million years, but had it shown a goddamn gigaton of respect to its older sibling? It had not. X-14b was a punk, tiny, a little nothing of a planet, rocks for brains, but it was a heavy dense motherfucker for all that. Hoarding an atmosphere, hogging the best orbit—not too hot or cold—seasons, even! Motherfucking seasons! And X-14b had built up a pretty little collection of life, or proto-life, or whatever, swimming everywhere under the surface of its frozen seas. All X-14a had were those microscopic silicate things flitting around in the lowest gas layer, which X-14a, it was embarrassing to admit, wasn’t even sure were lifeforms at all, and not, maybe, just part of its own intellectual processes: the movement of its mind. Stray thoughts.
          When the earth-things jumped in from hyperspace, X-14a recognized an opportunity. It played dumb until the humans had extracted all their samples, and then began to batter their ship with radiation and unpredictable storms, pulling them down through the clouds, further into the gravity well. Oh, they panicked! Bouncing around like stray ions. But soon they found the gravitational fluctuation X-14a had left for them, and performed the necessary calculations for escape.
          The near-orbit engines pushed the ship agonizingly upward through the layers of atmosphere, creating in their wake a trail of superheated plasma three thousand miles long. When the ship, finally free, made the jump into hyperspace, the flaming column dilated along the axis of travel and shot forward, now a microwave laser 230 million miles long, which struck X-14b slightly north of the equator and vaporized a third of its oceans.
          Fuck you! shouted X-14a along certain wavelengths. Fuck you!
          Man, what the fuck? asked X-14b, waking up.
          Fuck you, asshole! shouted X-14a. Fuck all your life! Life is an asshole!
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