When Field Marshal Donlira landed on a dinosaur’s head, she observed the helmet beneath her feet with remorse. Two months earlier, ant craftsmen had helped with the manufacture of these very helmets. They had woven the fine steel mesh that covered the ventilation holes. At the time, the dinosaur manufacturer had claimed the helmets were intended for dinosaur beekeepers. It seemed that the Saurian Empire had also been secretly preparing for war for a long time.
After the ant-rain tactic failed, the Imperial Formican Army resorted to using bows and arrows to stall the dinosaurs at the second line of defence. 1.5 million ants released their arrows simultaneously. A cloud of aerial weaponry sped towards the dinosaurs like sand stirred up by a gust of wind, but the arrows were far too dainty to cause even the slightest harm to the mountainous soldiers. They merely bounced off their crusty skin and piled up on the ground around their feet.
The dinosaurs stamped their lethal way through the mass of ants, leaving trails of fatal footprints in their wake. Thousands of crushed ants filled each hollow tread. Those that escaped could only squint up helplessly from far below as the titanic figures blocked out the sky and tramped on towards their citadel.
As soon as they reached the ants’ megalopolis, the dinosaurs began to stomp down extra hard and kick even more wildly. Most of the buildings in the Ivory Citadel were no higher than the dinosaurs’ calves, and whole blocks were squished beneath a single clomp of their feet.
Field Marshal Donlira had a depressingly good view of the destruction, for she and several other ant soldiers were still scurrying back and forth over the Tyrannosaurus’s helmet, desperately trying to find a way in. Looking down from their scarily high vantage point, they surveyed their ruined city and the fires that raged through it. This was truly a dinosaur’s-eye-view of the Ivory Citadel and what a sobering experience it was: to Donlira and her soldiers, their species appeared astonishingly small and insignificant.
The Tyrannosaurus strode over to the Imperial Trade Tower. At three metres high, this was the tallest skyscraper in the Formican Empire and the pinnacle of ant architecture, but it only came up to the beast’s hips. The Tyrannosaurus dropped to its haunches – the abrupt loss of height causing the ants a moment of weightlessness – and then the top of the tower appeared over the horizon of its helmet. The crouching dinosaur studied the tower for a few seconds, then grasped its base with its claws and plucked it from the ground. It stood, examining the tower curiously, as though it had found an amusing toy. The ants on the dinosaur’s head gazed at the tower too. Blue sky and white clouds were reflected in its sleek navy-blue surface, and its countless glass windows sparkled in the sunlight. They still remembered how, on their very first day of school, they had followed their teacher to the top of the tower for a panoramic vista of the Ivory Citadel…
As the Tyrannosaurus turned the tower about in its claws, it suddenly broke in two. The dinosaur cursed and flung the pieces away, first one bit and then the other. They arced through the air and landed among a distant cluster of buildings, shattering on impact and knocking down many other homes and offices in the process.
It took only minutes for the tread of 2,000 dinosaurs (who were so ridiculously bulky that they couldn’t all fit into the Ivory Citadel at the same time) to reduce the Formican capital to a heap of fine rubble. As clouds of yellow dust bloomed above the ruined city, the dinosaur soldiers began to cheer. But their triumphant cries were cut short when they turned to look in the direction of their own Boulder City.
Columns of black smoke were rising from the capital of the Saurian Empire.
Urus, with his imperial bodyguards clustered around him, lumbered from the palace through swirling smoke, only to collide head-on with the panic-stricken minister of the interior.
‘It’s terrible, Your Majesty – the whole city is burning!’ shrieked the minister.
‘What’s happened to your fire brigade? Get them to help!’
‘Fires are breaking out all over the city. The entire brigade has been called out, but they’re fully occupied dealing with the fires in the palace.’
‘Who started the fires? The ants?’
‘Who else? Over a million of them infiltrated the city this morning.’
‘Those blasted bugs! How did they even start the fires?’
‘With these, Your Majesty…’ The minister opened a paper packet and gestured for the emperor to look.
Urus stared long and hard at the packet but saw nothing until the minister passed him a magnifying glass. Through the lens, he could make out several mine-grains.
‘Municipal patrol officers seized these this morning.’
‘What is this – ant shit?’
‘If only, Your Majesty. No, it’s a type of miniature incendiary device. The ants planted over a million of them across the city, and at least one-fifth started fires that have now spread. By my calculation, that means there are currently some 20,000 individual fires in Boulder City. Even if we were to call in fire brigades from all over the empire, extinguishing a city-wide conflagration like this would be absolutely impossible.’
Urus stared numbly at the pall of black smoke in the sky, unable to speak.
‘Your Majesty, we have no choice,’ the interior minister said quietly. ‘We must abandon the city.’
By nightfall, Boulder City was a sea of flames. The fires cast a red glow across the night sky, bringing a false dawn to the central plains of Gondwana. The roads outside the city were choked with fleeing dinosaurs and their enormous vehicles, fire and fear reflected in every pair of eyes.
Emperor Urus and several of his ministers stood on a low hill and gazed at the burning city for a long time.
‘Order all Saurian ground forces in Gondwana to attack and raze every ant city on the continent – immediately! Dispatch fast sailing vessels to the other continents and make sure that every Saurian ground force in the world takes the same action. We shall deal a mortal blow to the ant world.’
And just like that, the conflict between the ants and the dinosaurs exploded. The flames of war soon raged across all of Gondwana, and before the month was out they were blazing through every other continent as well. A world war engulfed the entire planet. Terrible suffering ensued in both civilisations. One dinosaur city after another was consumed by fire, and ant cities were reduced to heaps of dust.
The ants also set fire to great tracts of grassland, farmland and jungle. They seeded vast areas with millions upon millions of mine-grains and the resulting infernos were impossible to extinguish. Brushfires raced across every landmass; orchards, pastures and forests burnt; and noxious smoke blotted out the sun. Less and less sunlight reached Earth and crop yields declined sharply, driving the dinosaurs, who required epic quantities of food, into starvation. It was an ecological catastrophe.
Meanwhile, crack teams of ants led raids on the dinosaurs from all quarters. Their preferred tactic was to launch their assaults from deep inside, which terrified the dinosaur public. Dinosaurs took to wearing masks at all times, not daring to remove them even while they slept, since the minuscule ants could sidle in and out of their most private spaces like a nightmarish crew of malevolent interns.
The ant world did not escape unscathed, however. Far from it. Ant civilisation took a severe beating from the dinosaurs. Almost every ant city was decimated, and the ants were forced to retreat underground. But they were not safe even there, for their subterranean bases were often unearthed by the dinosaurs and then destroyed. The dinosaurs made heavy use of chemical weapons and sowed a toxin that was harmless to dinosaurkind but deadly to ants everywhere. This not only killed innumerable ants but sharply constrained the scope of their activities. Individual ant colonies found it more and more tricky to maintain contact with other parts of the Formican Empire; because they lacked long-distance vehicles of their own, they had previously relied on dinosaur conveyances, but this option was no longer available. Communication became increasingly difficult, regions of the ant world became isolated, and the Formican Empire fragmented.