‘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.