That morning, Boulder City rumbled to life as it did every day. At the transport terminal by the city’s eastern gate more than a thousand jumbo-sized buses trundled out onto the streets. Cretaceous civilisation had not yet begun to extract oil, and so these buses, like the dinosaurs’ trains, were powered by massive, ponderous steam engines. They pumped out great clouds of vapour from their roofs as they rolled, shrouding the streets in fog from morning till night.
Today, however, Boulder City’s buses were transporting not only their regular dinosaur customers but also an additional cohort of unauthorised passengers. Ant-soldier stowaways! Swarms of these undercover operatives had scuttled aboard during the night. The Number 1 bus, which served the main artery through the city, carried the largest contingent – an entire division, comprising more than 10,000 ants. They were concealed in various inconspicuous locations: under the doorsills, inside the toolbox, clinging to the undercarriage, camouflaged inside the coal bunker. On such a huge vehicle, hiding a division of the Imperial Formican Army was easy.
Ten minutes after the Number 1 bus drove onto the hectic, thunderous street, it pulled in at its first stop. Hard on the heels of several dinosaur commuters, a company of 200 ant soldiers detached themselves from beneath the doorsill and dropped to the ground. Each one held a mine-grain in its mouth. They immediately filed into a crack in the pavement, their tiny black bodies invisible against the wet surface, and began zigzagging towards their destination. The dinosaurs stomping along the steamy street were oblivious to their presence. The ants, on the other hand, were all too aware of the dinosaurs. Every time a hulking great Tyrannosaurus passed above them, their world went black; there was also the ever-present danger of being crushed to death should they poke their heads out of the cracks. No catastrophes befell them, however, and eventually they arrived at a building. It was so vast that its front door opened into the clouds, and the upper storeys were lost in the ether. The ant troops stole through the gap beneath the door and filed in.
All dinosaur architecture was high-rise. From the ants’ perspective, each building was effectively its own world; for them, being indoors was no different from standing outside in an open field. This particular structure was a warehouse – a gloomy world whose only sun was a small, high-set window that let in just a little light. The ants wove their way across its wide floor, between piles of goods, until they reached a row of tall wooden casks. These contained kerosene that the dinosaurs used for lighting. Since the dinosaur world had not yet entered the Electric Age, they relied on oil lamps at night. Searching carefully, the soldier ants found several patches of moisture on the floor where the casks had leaked slightly. They removed the mine-grains from their mouths and stuck them to these oily patches. Soon, more than a hundred mine-grains had been put in place. The soldiers aimed their posteriors at the mines, and, at the first lieutenant’s command, sprayed a droplet of formic acid on each one. The acid began to slowly eat through the shell of each mine-grain, activating the ignition fuse. The delay had been set for six hours, scheduling ignition for two o’clock that afternoon.
Meanwhile, at every stop made by 1,000 buses crisscrossing Boulder City, other concealed detachments of ant troops alighted and slipped undetected into the streets. By midday, some 1 million soldier ants, representing 100 divisions of the Imperial Formican Army, had infiltrated every corner of Boulder City and planted mine-grains on every type of flammable surface. Millions of mine-grains speckled Boulder City’s government offices, marketplaces, schools, libraries and residential buildings, each one set to ignite at two o’clock that afternoon.
A little later that morning, in the imperial palace, the Saurian emperor Urus was woken from his sleep by the return of several officers from the failed attempt on the Ivory Citadel. The emperor had been up all night, wining and dining some governors from Laurasia, and hadn’t got to bed until the early hours. When he heard from the officers that not only was General Ixta dead but that half of the Imperial Saurian Army had been killed along with him, his first reaction was that he was being fed a fantastic cock-and-bull story. He was seized with an uncontrollable rage and was about to order that the good-for-nothing jokers be court-martialled, when something happened that opened his eyes to the threat posed by the ants.
It was the commander of the palace guard who alerted him. He was standing next to the emperor’s bed, shaking and yelling out in alarm as he gripped a piece of cloth in his claws.
‘You idiot,’ Urus roared at him, ‘what are you doing with my pillowcase?’ Today, it seemed, he was surrounded by numbskulls and numpties, and he was tempted to have them all put to death.
‘Your… Your Majesty, I just discovered this. Look…’ The commander held up the pillowcase in front of Urus’s face. Strings of small holes had been chewed through the fabric – a message, left by soldier ants who had infiltrated his chambers while he slept:
We can take your life at any time!
As Urus stared at the bed linen, a chill ran through him. This was not the sort of pillow talk he was accustomed to. He glanced about the room as though he’d seen a ghost. The other dinosaurs present hurriedly stooped and scoped the ground, but they could find no trace of the ants. The words on the pillowcase were the only evidence they could see.
There was more, however; it was just that the dinosaurs didn’t have the eyesight for it. The ants had laid in excess of 1,000 mine-grains throughout the emperor’s bedchamber. The yellow pellets, which were invisible to the dinosaurs’ naked eye, had been threaded into the mosquito netting, scattered around the feet of the bed, the sofa and the opulent wooden furniture, and stuffed between the mountainous stacks of documents. Formic acid was slowly eating away the surfaces of these incendiary devices, and like the million-odd other mines planted across Boulder City, their ignition time had been set for two o’clock.
The Saurian minister for war straightened up and addressed the emperor. ‘Your Majesty, as I warned you some time ago, although it is true that in inter-species wars size is strength, it is also the case that being small has its advantages. We cannot take the ants too lightly.’
Urus sighed. ‘Then what is our next step?’ he asked.
‘Rest assured, Your Majesty. We are prepared for this. I give you my word that the imperial army will flatten the Ivory Citadel before the day is out.’
Three hours after their failed first attack, the Imperial Saurian Army launched a second offensive against the Ivory Citadel. They sent in the same number of troops – 2,000 dinosaurs – and they advanced on the Ivory Citadel in the same phalanx formation, but this time each dinosaur wore a hefty metal helmet on its head.
The ant troops defending the Ivory Citadel responded with the same tactics they’d used earlier. Using the Formican slingshots, they again fired several hundred thousand ants into the air above the dinosaur phalanx, precipitating a heavy shower of ants raining down from the sky. This time, however, the ant soldiers were denied entry into their enemies’ bodies. The dinosaurs’ metal helmets fitted them very snugly. The visors were made from a single, solid piece of glass, the ventilation holes were covered in extremely fine steel mesh, the joints were seamless, and the helmets themselves were fastened securely at the neck with cord. They were impregnable: proper anti-ant armour.