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.