‘Had the Laurasian Republic known about this plan, they undoubtedly would have dispatched armed spaceships to intercept the Gondwanan transporter in space. But it was well on its way by the time they found out about it, and intercepting it at that point would have caused the fragment to annihilate in Earth’s atmosphere. The fragment weighed forty-five tonnes and its annihilation would have converted ninety tonnes of matter into pure energy. The resulting explosion would have wiped out life on Earth. Naturally, the Laurasians did not wish to perish alongside the Gondwanans, so they looked on helplessly as the spaceship splashed down in the ocean.’

Hearing some mutterings from the floor, Joya stiffened her antennae and requested that the other ants sit tight until she’d told them all she knew. ‘There is more to say, I’m afraid – quite a bit more, actually – and it won’t be easy listening. So, if there are no objections, I’ll just get on with it and then we can have a discussion once I’m done. Are there any objections?’

There were not.

‘Subsequent events escalated the madness to crisis point. After the Gondwanan spaceship landed, the containment vessel was transferred to a cargo ship. The name of the cargo ship was Leviathan and the dinosaurs came to call the antimatter fragment it carried by that name as well. The ship did not return to Gondwana but instead sailed for Laurasia, destined for the republic’s largest port!

‘Laurasia didn’t dare attack this ship of doom. They had no choice but to let it continue on its way, and when it did finally arrive, it might as well have been sailing into an empty harbour for all the resistance it met. Once Leviathan had docked, the dinosaurs abandoned ship and returned to Gondwana by helicopter, leaving their explosive load anchored in Laurasian waters.

‘The Laurasian dinosaurs treated Leviathan as if it were a bad-tempered deity. They didn’t dare disturb it in any way, because they knew the Gondwanan Empire could remotely deactivate the magnetic field at any time, causing the antimatter fragment to annihilate. If that happened, the entire world would be fireballed, and the first to go would be Laurasia, reduced to ashes in the blink of an eye by the flames of a lethal sun.’

Joya was looking and sounding extremely tired now, unsurprising given the stress of her encounter with the Gondwanans and the huge burden of responsibility she’d been bearing as the keeper of this Earth-shattering news. But a burden shared was a burden halved, so she ploughed on, keen to give Supreme Consul Kachika all the details she’d need in order to decide what to do next.