On hearing the dinosaurs approaching the server room, the ants had quickly ducked beneath their server’s motherboard, which was larger than the Ivory Citadel’s football stadium. They bunched together apprehensively as the door of the server cabinet crashed open. Gazing skywards through a small hole in the motherboard, all they could see was the lens of a magnifying glass and the grotesque eye of a dinosaur engineer distorted through it. The ants were terrified, but the dinosaur failed to spot them. Pretty soon, the engineer discovered the fake mine-grain that the minister had hidden, but he entirely failed to see the real mine-grain that the ants had just planted alongside it. The tiny chameleon mine had already taken on the hue of the wire it was wrapped around, making it effectively undetectable. A dozen further chameleon mines were wrapped around other wires of varying colours and thicknesses in the immediate vicinity.

There were also chameleon mines stuck to the circuit board. These supported a more advanced colour-changing feature that allowed them to adopt many different colours in order to perfectly match the board beneath them. With such flawless camouflage, they were even harder to detect than the mine-grains on the wires. These mines were not designed to explode. When the appointed time came, they would leak several drops of strong acid, dissolving the circuits etched into the board.

The ants remained frozen where they were beneath the motherboard while the interior minister and the emperor argued about tactics overhead. When the cabinet door finally banged shut, night immediately fell over the interior of the server. A single power-indicator light hung like an emerald moon in the sky, the hum of the cooling fan and the soft clicking of the hard drive accentuating the tranquillity of that strange realm.

‘You know, that dinosaur minister had a good point,’ remarked one of the soldier ants. ‘If the Ant Federation did pursue a simultaneous-strike policy like that, we could destroy the dinosaur world.’

‘Maybe that’s exactly what we’re doing now,’ one of her fellow soldiers replied. ‘Who knows?’

His observation was spot on. For, unbeknown to him and the rest of his cohort, the twelve of them inside that server were far from the only ants currently on manoeuvres in the Communications Tower. In fact, inside every server in that room and every switchboard on the floor below was a team of ants carrying out the exact same task. And, naturally, the ant deployment didn’t stop there. Hundreds of millions of ants had been dispatched across every continent to engage in precisely the same sort of direct action. An infinite number of invisible chameleon mine-grains were being laid at that very instant. The scale and reach of the operation was truly – literally – mind-boggling.

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