A deathly hush settled over the battlefield. The Cretaceous sun quietly rose higher, and ten minutes soon passed.
‘Attack!’ boomed General Ixta.
The phalanx began to advance. The ground trembled under the rhythmic tread of 2,000 dinosaurs, creating waves in the puddles left by the rain. The ants did not budge.
‘Queen Lassini and Field Marshal Donlira,’ General Ixta roared in the direction of the massed columns of ants, ‘I have no idea whereabouts you are, but if you don’t order these critters to make way, our feet will crush them to a pulp! Ha ha ha!’
As he stared at the ant army, he noticed a distinct ripple running through their ranks. He peered more closely and saw that the ant infantry had erected countless tiny structures. To him they looked like blades of grass newly sprouted from the blackened earth. A niggle of doubt lodged in his massive dinosaur brain, but the niggle was not sufficient to give him pause, and so the dinosaur phalanx pressed on.
A second surprising change now swept through the ant army. The smooth black pool that had blanketed the ground suddenly went lumpy and separated into a multitude of miniature spheres. Ixta was reminded of the wondrous movements of the ant word corps, and for a moment he thought the 10 million ants in front of him were about to spell out something. But the ant clumps did not reshape.
The dinosaur phalanx continued its advance until it was just ten metres from the ants’ frontline. Only then did General Ixta realise that those blades of grass were in fact a barrage of miniature catapults, cords stretched taut, each pocket loaded with a cluster of ants!
There now came a soft pitter-patter, like raindrops hitting the surface of a lake, as 100,000 ant projectiles were fired into the air. It was as if a cloud of flies had been startled into flight. The ground ahead of Ixta regained its ochre colour and the tiny compacted spheres soared above the first few lines of dinosaurs and then disintegrated. Each ball contained dozens of soldiers and now a shower of ants cascaded to the ground.
The air was thick with so many falling ants that it was almost impossible for the dinosaurs not to inhale them up their nostrils. As they frantically slapped at their heads and bodies, their phalanx fell into disorder.
Some of the ants that landed on General Ixta’s head were brushed off, but others hid from his gigantic searching claws, ducking into the wrinkles of his coarse-grained skin. When his claws moved to slap at his body, several soldier ants skittered towards the edge of his brow, seeking out his eyes. Crawling across the wide crown of the Tyrannosaurus’s head was like trudging across a plateau scored with ravines. The plateau swayed back and forth like a swing, and the ants had to cling on tight to keep from being thrown off. When they reached the edge, they peered down and were met with a breathtaking sight.
Imagine for a moment that you are standing atop the majestic peak of China’s venerable Mount Tai. Now imagine that this most holy mountain is in motion: it is striding across the earth on a pair of colossal legs. Even more terrifying, when you lift your head, you see that you are encircled by a thousand other mountains and that these are also on the move!
The soldier ants located the dinosaur’s right eye, which was below them. The enormous eye was like a round pond that had frozen over; its translucent surface was slightly curved and sloped sharply downwards. Three of the soldier ants cautiously picked their way onto the glassy membrane. This was the dinosaur’s third eyelid – its protective nictitating membrane, to be exact – and it was as slippery as melting ice. The slightest misstep would see the ants slithering off and tumbling into the void. They began to gnaw at the wet ice with their powerful pincers, but this irritated the eye and it began to secrete tears, which surged across the frozen pond like a flash flood, flushing the three ants from the eyelid.
Just as Ixta made to rub his eye, three other ants nipped into his nostrils. Battling their way into a screaming gale, they expertly threaded their way through a tangled forest of nose hair, making a concerted attempt not to trigger a sneeze. They advanced quickly through the nasal cavity to the back of the eyeball, tracing a route that was familiar from countless surgical procedures. Following the translucent optic nerve, they now proceeded towards the brain. Here and there a thin membrane blocked their path, but they simply chewed a small hole and squeezed through. These holes were so tiny that the dinosaur felt nothing.
Finally, the three ants arrived at the brain, which was peacefully suspended in a sea of cerebrospinal fluid like a mysterious, discrete lifeform. After careful searching, they found the thick cerebral artery, the main pipeline supplying blood to the brain. Through the pellucid pipe wall they could see and hear the dark red blood coursing past with a low rumble. Ixta’s brain was working overtime, trying to process the mind-blowing quantities of battlefield information being transmitted from his optic and auditory nerves, and this torrent of blood was fuelling it with the necessary energy and oxygen.
The three ants were neurosurgical techs and this was familiar territory to them. They had been dispatched to places like this countless times before, to clear clogged cerebral blood vessels and save untold numbers of dinosaur lives in the process. Now, however, they would do the opposite. With their sharp mandibles, they began to make three deep scratches in the artery wall, working with care and skill. When the incisions joined up to form a complete circle, the ants rapidly withdrew the way they’d come. They had no wish to witness the end result. As veteran surgical techs, they knew exactly what was about to happen. Blood circulated at high pressure and very soon beads of blood would well from the incisions on the artery wall. Then, as neatly as if it had been scored by a glasscutter, the lesion would rupture and the little circular section of the artery wall would come loose and create a round hole. Blood would gush out of the hole, sending tendrils of crimson curling through the brain fluid and staining it red. Deprived of its blood supply, the brain would quiver and grow pale.
On the chaotic battlefield, Ixta was yelling commands, attempting to regroup the dinosaurs into attack formation. All of a sudden, everything went dark before his eyes. As the fog descended, his surroundings began to spin. The three ants racing through his nasal cavity felt a sensation of weightlessness, followed by a shuddering crash. The world around them rolled several times and then came to a standstill. The dinosaur had fallen to the ground. The gale in his nostrils ceased, and the distant low thump of his heart went silent. The Tyrannosaurus Ixta, Major General of the Imperial Saurian Army, had been killed in action, felled by a cerebral haemorrhage.
One by one, the other dinosaurs on the battlefield toppled. Some were murdered in the same manner as their commander; many more either suffered a fatal rupturing of their coronary artery or had their spinal cord severed. The ants had infiltrated their enemies’ insides via ears, noses or mouths and had racked up more than 300 casualties. The ground was littered with gargantuan bodies and the air echoed with the unearthly yowling of dying dinosaurs. The survivors, scared witless by this nightmarish scene, fled the battlefield at breakneck speed. Broken necks, however, were not to be these deserters’ downfall. Though they’d escaped the site, they’d not escaped the invasion of the brain snatchers. Ant soldiers continued their internal operations even as the dinosaurs retreated, and the route back to Boulder City was lined with monstrous corpses.
While their comrade ants were busy resisting dinosaur incursions into the Ivory Citadel, millions of other ants were launching a major military offensive on their enemy’s stronghold. Despite the declaration of war, Boulder City had continued operating much as it always had. Although the loss of the ants’ services was certainly an inconvenience for the dinosaurs, it was by no means devastating, and as for the conflict itself, the dinosaur public was utterly unconcerned. They were confident that the Imperial Saurian Army could defeat those titchy insects with the absolute minimum of effort – a few swats and kicks should surely do it, they thought. To them it seemed like overkill to mobilise 2,000 dinosaur soldiers just to crush that toy sandpit of a city, but they rationalised it as the emperor’s way of demonstrating the empire’s strength.