by Cixin Liu
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.
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.
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 Ci
ty. 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.