Battle of the Beetles

by MG Leonard

  There was a thunderous rumble above their heads as another giant beetle egg dropped down into a soft bed of oak mulch.

  Darkus ran alongside the trough, counting the eggs. ‘There must be at least thirty eggs here.’ As he ran, he felt exhilarated, like he could run for miles – even though he’d been walking all night, he realized he didn’t feel tired. He stopped. ‘Virginia, do you feel different in any way?’

  ‘Different?’ Virginia frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, like . . . energized,’ Darkus struggled to explain. ‘My body, it feels strong.’

  Virginia blinked. ‘I know what you mean. Like, right now, I feel like I could run up that wall and do a back flip.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Virginia snorted.

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Darkus shrugged. ‘You’re good at gymnastics.’

  ‘Yeah, but I can’t run up a wall and do a back flip. If I could, you’d have seen me do it by now. I’d be doing it all the time. Although,’ she eyed up the wall, ‘now I’m thinking about it, my muscles are bursting to try.’

  ‘Try it,’ Darkus said.

  Virginia looked at him for a second, spun around and burst into a sprint, running back down the room as fast as she could, speeding up as she approached the wall. Slamming her left foot down, she hurled her right leg up, landing one, then two steps up the wall, before thrusting backwards, into a back flip, and landing in a crouched position.

  ‘Whoa!’ Darkus clapped. ‘That was cool!’

  Virginia stood up straight, looking down at her body. She walked towards Darkus. ‘You do something.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything. Run. Jump. Just do something.’

  Darkus sprinted towards her, slamming both feet down hard to jump, he sprang high into the air, his arms windmilling as he travelled nearly four metres before landing.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Virginia asked, her eyes wide as she looked down at her legs. ‘It’s like we’ve got superpowers.’

  ‘But we haven’t changed.’ Darkus looked at his hands and then around. ‘It’s this place. It’s the atmosphere,’ he waved his hand in front of his face, ‘it must have a high level of oxygen in it.’ He narrowed his eyes as he stared at the trough. ‘Yes, of course! There has to be more oxygen, otherwise the giant beetles wouldn’t be able to breathe! They’re too big. That’s what was killing the dinobeetle in the forest.’

  ‘Slow down.’ Virginia frowned. ‘Explain.’

  ‘Beetles breathe through holes in their exoskeletons.’

  ‘Yeah, spiracles, I know.’

  ‘Air travels through the spiracles and the oxygen in the air is absorbed into the beetle’s body by diffusion. The reason beetles don’t grow bigger is because the air can only travel a certain distance into a beetle’s body before the oxygen in it is absorbed and runs out. Even the tissues deep inside a beetle need oxygen to stay alive. This makes it impossible for beetles to grow beyond a certain size. They have to stay small . . .’

  ‘Unless . . .’ Virginia’s eyes lit up, ‘there’s more oxygen in the atmosphere!’

  ‘Yes!’ Darkus nodded. ‘In the Palaeozoic era, three hundred million years ago, the atmosphere was thirty-five per cent oxygen and there were giant insects.’

  ‘And the oxygen is working on our muscles too.’ Virginia bent her knees and jumped high in the air. ‘I wonder if it does anything to Marvin?’

  Darkus looked to his shoulder. ‘Baxter, can you feel it?’

  The rhinoceros beetle nodded and rocketed off Darkus’s shoulder, flying more like a falcon than a beetle.

  ‘Nice!’ Darkus laughed as all the Base Camp beetles perched around the opening of his rucksack decided to join Baxter in the air, zooming about.

  ‘These eggs,’ Darkus looked out across the vast hall of troughs, ‘they’re all giant beetles.’

  ‘You think she’s breeding an army of giant beetles?’ Virginia’s eyes grew wide.

  Darkus frowned. ‘But surely they wouldn’t be able to survive in the earth’s atmosphere.’

  Virginia shrugged. ‘Lucretia Cutter is a giant beetle.’

  Darkus shook his head. ‘No, she will never be a real beetle.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Larvae Farm

  They walked beside the troughs, and Darkus saw that beneath the eggs and the oak mulch was a slow conveyor belt. The further along the belt they got, the larger and more jelly-bean-shaped the eggs became, until they reached a couple of eggs that were hatching. The translucent flat heads of larvae were breaking through or protruding out of the giant eggshell.

  The largest larva Darkus had ever seen until now was the size of a cocktail sausage, but these dinobeetle larvae were the size of human babies.

  ‘Oh, wow.’ Virginia lowered her head till it was the same height as the larva wriggling out of the egg. ‘You are ugly!’

  ‘The conveyor belt ends here. Look, there are chutes.’ Darkus came alongside the closest chute. It was labelled Hercules. There was a diagram of the larvae.

  ‘This one says Tiger.’ Virginia pointed. ‘And this one says Titan.’

  There were eight chutes.

  ‘Larvae must get sorted by someone, and put into the relevant chute.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to have that job.’ Virginia pulled her chin in. ‘Those guys look bitey.’ She pointed at the rearing larva opening and closing its black jaws.

  Darkus poked his head down the chute marked Tiger. ‘Urghhh!’ He jerked his head back. ‘It stinks down there.’

  Virginia came and stood beside him, wrinkling her nose. ‘Oh, man! I see what you mean.’

  ‘It smells like rotting meat.’

  ‘Tiger larvae eat other insects,’ Virginia said. ‘They’re vicious.’

  ‘I wonder what giant tiger beetles eat.’

  ‘Let’s not find out.’

  ‘Well,’ Darkus looked back up the hall, and then back at the chutes, ‘we either go back the way we came in, or . . .’

  Virginia saw where he was looking. ‘Oh, no. I’m not going down there.’

  ‘This one is the Hercules larva chute.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘They eat rotting wood in their larval stage,’ Darkus said. ‘They won’t be interested in you.’

  ‘But we don’t know what’s down there.’

  ‘Exactly. I want to know what happens to the larvae once they’ve hatched. There are often three or four stages of larval growth, called instars, before pupation. It’s the feeding phase where they do all their growing.’ He gazed down the chute. ‘A fully-grown larva is bigger than the adult beetle. I have to see.’

  ‘I’m OK with not seeing,’ Virginia said, pursing her lips.

  Darkus sat on the edge of the chute, swung his legs in and grinned at her. ‘See you down there,’ he said, pushing off.

  ‘Wait!’ he heard Virginia cry as he slid down.

  The chute was like a playground slide. It launched him into a dimly lit room carpeted with a woody mulch. He stood up and dusted his hands off against his trousers. His feet sank into the soft floor. Most larvae like to bury themselves, so he took extra care not to step on anyone’s rear end as he picked his way to the middle of the room.

  Piles of compost were liberally scattered about and the surface of the mulch undulated and cracked like the precursor to an earthquake, as the larvae beneath moved about. Darkus reached down into the soil until he found a larva and, lifting it, he saw it was the size of a sausage dog. In the middle of the room, the larvae he uncovered were the size of seals.

  A squeaking noise heralded Virginia’s cautious entrance, as she edged herself down the slide backwards, a foot wedged hard against each side of the chute, moving a step at a time.

  ‘What are you scared of?’ Darkus laughed.

  ‘Er . . . sliding out into a mound of dung?’ Virginia replied.

  ‘It’s just mulch and compost . . . rotting wood an
d vegetation.’

  ‘It’s still revolting.’ Virginia wrinkled her nose as she looked around. ‘Is this room full of Hercules larvae?’

  ‘There must be a room for each species of giant beetle she’s breeding.’ Darkus nodded. ‘You know I’d really like to go and look in the titan beetle larvae room. No one has seen a titan beetle larva in the wild, they must be massive.’

  ‘Are you crazy? A giant titan beetle larva could bite your head off!’ Virginia shook her head. ‘No way.’

  ‘It could,’ Darkus nodded, ‘but it probably wouldn’t.’ He gestured to the room. ‘They’re gentle giants.’ He smiled at a Hercules beetle larva burrowing its flat rust-brown head into the substrate, digging with the hairy rounded ends of its stubby amber legs. ‘Look, see those dark spots along the side of the larva’s body?’ He pointed. ‘They’re the spiracles.’ As the larva dug down, its fat, semi-translucent rear end waggled about.

  ‘They’re not pretty, are they?’ Virginia said peering at a larva munching on watermelon. ‘That’s a face only a mother could love.’

  ‘Watch your ankles,’ Darkus said as the sharp black jaws of a larva rose out of the soil beside her.

  Virginia skipped away from it. ‘How do we get out of here?’

  ‘There’s a door over there.’

  ‘Of course, it would have to be as far away as possible,’ Virginia muttered, clambering over to Darkus.

  ‘Look!’ Darkus pointed. ‘The larvae get bigger and more developed as you cross the room. Check out how massive they are. That one’s as big as a walrus.’

  ‘That one is all stiff. Is it dead?’

  ‘No, it’s a pupa.’ Excited, Darkus clambered over to the pupa and ran his hand over the hard-edged surface. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’

  ‘Yeah, brilliant.’ Virginia jumped over to the door and tried the handle, smiling with relief when it opened. ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here. This place is weirding me out. We need to find your dad.’

  Darkus took one last look around the larvae room. It wasn’t fair to breed such amazing creatures when they couldn’t survive in the earth’s atmosphere. And to breed them for what? An army? That was perverting their nature. Everything about this was wrong. He felt sorry for the giant beasts, and he knew that if he were confronted with these creatures, he could not fight or hurt them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Beetle Borg

  They found themselves back out in another white hexagonal corridor.

  ‘All the corridors look the same,’ Virginia complained.

  ‘I think we’re still heading in the right direction,’ Darkus said, ‘but we need to find stairs or a lift. At some point we’re going to have to go up,’ Darkus said.

  ‘The higher we go, the more likely it is we’ll be spotted,’ Virginia replied.

  As they walked they kept their eyes peeled for cameras. They found a warehouse-sized room with a carpet of soil on the floor, where, laid out with a metre of space between them were hundreds of giant pupae.

  ‘Inside,’ Darkus whispered, ‘they’re transforming into fully-grown dinobeetles.’

  ‘Metamorphosis is a weird kind of voodoo,’ Virginia replied.

  They continued on down the never-ending corridor. Darkus pulled out his device, tapping the hexagon to open another door. They peeped their heads into a white room; at the far end were thirty or forty dead beetles, of normal size, lying on their backs, legs in the air. Along the right-hand wall of the room was a bank of TV monitors, all appearing to show images of the sunrise or jungle foliage. Baxter leapt off Darkus’s shoulder and flew over to them, wandering between the corpses, his antennae quivering. Darkus knelt down on the floor beside the macabre scene.

  ‘Are you OK, Baxter?’ The rhinoceros beetle bowed his head, and using his horn, pushed one of the dead beetles towards him. Darkus picked it up gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s a male monkey beetle,’ he said as Virginia came over. ‘I recognize it from my book. Look at the long, strong, back legs and the shiny blue exoskeleton.’ He looked up at her. ‘These guys are only found in South Africa.’

  ‘What’s that on its head?’ Virginia bent down. ‘It’s got a metal thing on its thorax and a tiny bobble glued between its eyes.’

  ‘I wonder why?’ Darkus looked around the room, as Baxter returned to his shoulder. Beneath the flickering screens was a long desk. There was a notebook beside a computer. Walking over to pick it up, he saw that the back wall of the room was covered with shelves of Perspex tanks. Handing the notebook to Virginia he went to look in the tanks. ‘This one has giant African flower beetles in it. This one is monkey beetles. More African flower beetles in this one.’ He looked at Virginia. ‘These are all beetles that are strong flyers.’

  ‘She’s making beetle cyborgs,’ Virgina said, flicking over the pages of the notebook and looking up at the TV screens. ‘They’ve got microchips on their thoraxes, allowing an operator to control their flight by administering electric shocks and the blob between its eyes is a pinhead camera.’

  ‘Beetle surveillance!’ Darkus looked down at the dead monkey beetle on the palm of her hand. ‘Using electric shocks? That’s so cruel.’

  ‘First dinobeetles, now beetle cyborgs.’ Virginia slid the notebook into one of the large pockets in her trousers. ‘I dread to think what else she’s doing. I’m going to give this book to Emma Lamb. She’s going to need evidence, if she’s ever going to win that Pulitzer prize, because no one is going to believe that beetle borgs exist.’

  ‘This place is horrible.’ Darkus wanted to get out of the room. He put the dead monkey beetle down on the desk. ‘Let’s go.’ The plight of the beetle cyborgs upset him, but then, he thought, they are no worse off than the giant beetles who will never see the sky or breathe the earth’s air. He wanted to set all the beetles free. He thought back to Lucretia Cutter’s beetles at Towering Heights, angry and aggressive, head-butting the walls of their tanks. He’d thought they were evil, because Lucretia Cutter had bred them, but now he wondered whether they behaved that way because of what she’d done to them. Maybe they just wanted to get out. No beetle started out bad. Lucretia Cutter made them that way by using genetics and her knowledge about the insects to make them to do bad things . . . but if beetles could be used to do bad things, then by the same logic, they could do good things.

  They continued on down corridor until they came to a junction.

  ‘Left, right or straight ahead?’ Virginia asked.

  ‘I say we keep going,’ Darkus said.

  ‘We might end up going under the whole dome and coming out the other side.’

  ‘Emma said there was a central lift that goes up into the main dome, to the laboratories. We haven’t seen a lift yet.’

  As they walked, Darkus opened doors and peeped into rooms. There was a stockroom stacked with bags of soil and mulch, a room that stank of antiseptic and was clearly for cleaning the insect farming equipment.

  ‘There’s the lift,’ Virginia whispered, pointing to double doors at the end of the corridor. She looked up to see if she could spy cameras.

  To the left, right before the lift, was a door. Darkus pressed the hexagon and it lifted. ‘I’ll just take a quick look in here,’ he whispered, ducking inside.

  The room was dark and warm. There was a glowing thermostat to the left of the doorway. A soft red light radiated from a tiny bulb on the far wall. Light from the corridor spilt into the room and Darkus could see it was empty but for four huge cylindrical tanks lying horizontal on white stone slabs.

  He crept towards the tanks, unable to see what was inside them. He went right up to the nearest tank, pushing his face against the glass. All four tanks seemed to contain the same thing, a pale ridged object. He moved and realized that the surface of the rigid object was semitranslucent, that there was something inside. He saw two dark circles, eyes, and claw-like jaws.

  Gasping with shock, he stumbled backwards, his eyes flitting from one tank to the next, then he turned
and ran out of the door. Slamming his hand down on the black screen, he hammered at the hexagon until the door slid shut.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Virginia asked. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘It’s her.’ Darkus couldn’t breathe. ‘She’s in all of them.’

  ‘Who is?’ Virginia stared at him, frightened. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There are four of her!’ Darkus’s heart thudded furiously. ‘She’s making clones of herself.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Lucretia Cutter.’

  ‘What?’ Virginia sucked in her breath.

  ‘Virginia, we’ve made a terrible mistake. We shouldn’t have come here on our own. We need Bertolt, and Uncle Max.’ Darkus grabbed her arm. ‘We have to get out of here and get back to camp, right now.’

  ‘Leaving so soon?’

  Darkus froze, and every single hair on his body lifted in fright at the sound of that horribly familiar voice. He turned around. The lift doors were open, and standing inside was Lucretia Cutter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Darkus Decoy

  Lucretia Cutter had dispensed with the wig, sunglasses and gold lipstick at the Film Awards. She no longer had a chin, but in its place were beetle jaws and mandibles. The top of her head was a patchwork of black scales, tufts of wiry hair and her long antennae. Standing on her hind legs she was nearly nine feet tall. She still wore her lab coat, but underneath her dress was slashed up the front so her chitinous limbs could move freely. Darkus and Virginia walked in front of her into the lift. There was no need for restraints: she could sense they were going to move before their brains had even sent the message to their muscles. There was no escape.

  Baxter had retreated, clambering inside the collar of Darkus’s T-shirt and down his back. He was now nestling in between his shoulder blades, just above the rucksack. All the Base Camp beetles had scurried down into the bag.

  Lucretia Cutter took them up in the lift. As it travelled up the glass shaft Darkus saw a misty sunrise casting a rosy light through the roof of the enormous greenhouse on to an impossibly beautiful rainforest, but the icy fear that was gripping his insides eclipsed all of his senses.