Empire of the Ants (17 page)

A few soldiers stuffed with sugar carried out tests in the solarium. Six ants lifted up a seed-crusher and ran along, trying to synchronize their steps. It seemed to work very well.

The city of Bel-o-kan had just invented the tank.

They never came back up.

The next day, the newspaper headlines read: 'Fontainebleau -Eight firemen and a police inspector disappear mysteriously in a cellar'.

In the purple light of dawn, the dwarf ants surrounding the Forbidden City of La-chola-kan prepared to do battle. The russet ants isolated in the stump were starving and exhausted. They could not hold out much longer.

When the fighting started again, the dwarves captured two more crossroads after long artillery duels with acid. The wood eaten away by the shots spewed forth the bodies of the besieged soldiers.

The last russet survivors were finished. The dwarves advanced through the city, hardly slowed by the sharp-shooters hidden in cracks in the ceilings.

The nuptial chamber could not be far away now. Inside it, Queen Lacho-la-kiuni was beginning to slow down her heartbeats. All was lost.

But the dwarf troops who had advanced furthest suddenly picked up an alarm scent. Something was happening outside. They retraced their steps.

Up on Poppy Hill, overlooking the city, thousands of black dots could be made out amidst the red flowers.

The Belokanians had at last made up their minds to attack. That would teach them. The dwarves sent mercenary messenger-gnats to warn the central city.

All the gnats bore the same pheromone:

They're attacking. Send reinforcements from the east to catch them in a pincer movement. Prepare the secret weapon.

The warmth of the first ray of sunlight, filtering through a cloud, sparked off the decision to move into the attack. It was three minutes past eight. The Belokanian legions swept down the slope, skirting blades of grass and leaping over bits of gravel. There were millions of soldiers running along with their mandibles wide open. It was quite impressive.

But the dwarves were not afraid. They had foreseen these tactics. On the previous day they had dug holes in the ground in staggered rows and had hidden inside them with only their mandibles poking out, their bodies protected by the sand.

This line of dwarves at once broke the russet ant assault. The Federation troops fenced uselessly with enemies who presented them with nothing but strong points. There was no way of cutting off their legs or ripping out their abdomens.

It was then that the bulk of the infantry of Shi-gae-pou, stationed nearby under cover of a circle of devil's boletuses, launched a counter-offensive which caught the russet ants in a pincer movement.

If there were millions of Belokanians, the Shigaepouyans could be counted in tens of millions. There were at least five dwarf soldiers for every russet ant, not to mention the warriors crouched in individual holes, who chopped off the heads of all who passed within reach of their mandibles.

The fight quickly turned to the disadvantage of the smaller army. Hammered by the dwarves, who suddenly appeared on all sides, the federal lines broke.

At thirty-six minutes past nine, the russet ants beat a retreat. The dwarves were already raising victory scents. Their stratagem had worked perfectly. They had not even needed to use the secret weapon. They pursued the runaway army and considered the siege of La-chola-kan as good as over.

But with their short legs, the dwarves
had to take ten steps for every
one a russet ant took. They got out of breath climbing Poppy Hill. It was exactly what the Federation strategists had counted on. The sole purpose of the first charge had been to bring the dwarf troops out of their basin to confront them on the slope.

The russet ants reached the crest of the hill with the dwarf legions in disorderly pursuit. At the top, a forest of thorns suddenly reared up. It was the seed-crushers' giant claws. They brandished them so that they glittered in the sunlight, then lowered them level with the ground and swooped down on the dwarves. Seed-crushers, dwarf-crushers!

They took them completely by surprise. The stupefied Shigaepouyans, their antennae stiff with fright, were mown down. Taking advantage of the slope, the seed-crushers went hell for leather at the enemy lines and broke them. The six workers under each of them really put their hearts into it. They were the war machines' Caterpillar tracks. Thanks to the perfectly synchronized antenna communication between the turrets and wheels, the thirty-six-legged animals with two giant mandibles moved with ease among their hordes of enemies.

The dwarves scarcely had time to glimpse the juggernauts before they fell on them by the hundred; smashing, flattening and crushing them. Their hypertrophied mandibles plunged into the crowd, browsed and rose again full of bloody legs and heads, which they snapped like straw.

There was total panic. The terrified dwarves bumped into, trampled and sometimes even killed one another.

Having 'raked through' the dwarf ranks, the Belokanian tanks were carried beyond them by their momentum. They eventually came to a halt and immediately started back up the slope for a fresh sweep, still perfectly in line. The survivors would have liked to pre-empt them but a second front of tanks appeared above them and started to descend on them.

The two parallel columns met and corpses piled up in front of each tank. It was a massacre.

The Lacholakanians, watching the battle from a distance, came out to encourage their sisters. Their initial surprise gave way to enthusiasm and they sent up pheromones of joy. It was a victory of technology and intelligence. The spirit of the Federation had never been so clearly expressed.

However, Shi-gae-pou had not played out its hand yet. It still had its secret weapon. Normally speaking, this had been designed to dislodge recalcitrant siege-defenders but, faced with the nasty turn taken by the fighting, the dwarves decided to go for broke.

The secret weapon took the form of russet ant heads shot through with a brown plant.

A few days earlier, the dwarf ants had discovered the body of a Federation explorer. Her body had burst from the pressure of a parasitic fungus,
alternaria.
The dwarf researchers had analysed what had happened and found that the parasitic fungus produced volatile spores. These stuck to the ant's cuirass, ate into it and invaded it, then grew until it exploded.

What a weapon!

And guaranteed safe to use, for although the spores stuck to the russet ants' chitin, they could not get a hold on that of the dwarves. Quite simply this was because the latter felt the cold and were in the habit of smearing themselves with snail's slime, and that gave them protection from
alternaria.

The Belokanians might have invented the tank but the Shigaepouyans had discovered bacteriological warfare.

An infantry battalion moved off carrying three hundred infected russet heads collected after the first battle of La-chola-kan.

They threw them into the thick of their enemies. The seed-crushers and their bearers sneezed from the deadly dust. When they saw that their cuirasses were coated with it, they lost their heads. The bearers dropped their burdens and the seed-crushers, once more helpless, panicked and violently took it out on other seed-crushers. It was a rout.

At about ten o'clock, a sudden cold spell separated the combatants. It was impossible to fight in an icy draught. The dwarf troops took advantage of the lull in the fighting to make good their escape and the russet ant tanks climbed up the slope again with some difficulty.

Both sides counted the wounded and dead. The provisional toll showed heavy losses and they longed to tip the battle in their favour.

The Belokanians had recognized the
alternaria
spores and decided to put all the soldiers hit by the fungus out of their misery.

At that point, spies came running and told them they could protect themselves from the bacteriological weapon by smearing themselves with snail's slime. No sooner said than done. They decided to sacrifice three snails (which were becoming more and more difficult to find) and everyone protected themselves from the scourge.

They made antenna contact and the russet ant strategists decided they could no longer attack with tanks alone. In the new plan of attack, the tanks would occupy the centre but a hundred and twenty legions of regular infantry and sixty legions of foreign infantry would be deployed on the wings.

Morale rose again.

argentine ant:
The Argentine Ants
(Iridomyrmex humilis)
arrived in France in 1920. In all likelihood, they were transported in tubs of oleanders destined to brighten up the roads of the Cote d'Azur.

They were first reported in 1866 in Buenos Aires (hence the name by which they are commonly known). In 1891, they were found in the United States, in New Orleans.

Hidden in the litter of exported Argentine horses, they next arrived in South Africa in 1908, in Chile in 1910, in Australia in 1911 and in France in 1920.

The species is distinguished not only by its minute size, which makes it a pygmy compared with other ants, but also by the intelligence and warlike aggressiveness which are in fact its main characteristics.

No sooner were the Argentine ants established in the south of France than they waged war on all the indigenous species and defeated them.

In 1960, they crossed the Pyrenees and made their way as far south as Barcelona. In 1961, they spanned the Alps and poured down as far as Rome. Then, in the 1910s, the
Iridomyrmex
began to move north again. They are thought to have bridged the Loire one hot summer in the late 1990s. The invaders, whose combat strategies equalled those of Caesar or Napoleon, then found themselves up against two rather tougher species: the federative russets (in the south and east of the Parisian region) and the pharaoh ants (to the north and east of Paris).

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The Bat
tl
e of Poppy Hill was not yet won. At ten-thirteen, Shi-gae-pou decided to send reinforcements. Two hundred and forty legions of reservists would go and join the survivors of the first charge. When told about the 'tanks', they put their antennae together for an AC. There must be some way to outwit the terrible machines.

At about ten-thirty, a worker made a suggestion:
The seed-crusher ants owe their mobility to the six ants who carry them. All we have to do is cut off their 'living legs'.
Someone came up with another idea:

The weak point of their machines is their inability to turn round quickly. We can make use of this handicap. All we have to do is f
orm up into compact squares. Wh
en the machines charge, we just move aside to let them pass without resisting. Then, while they are still being carried forward by their momentum, we strike them from the rear. They won't have

time to turn round.

And a third:

The movement of the legs is synchronized by antenna contact, as we've seen. All we have to do is jump up and cut off the seed-crushers' antennae so they can no longer direct their bearers.

All the ideas met with approval and the dwarves began to work out their new battle plan.

suffering
: Are ants capable of suffering?
A priori,
no. Their nervous system is not designed for it. Where there is no nerve, there can be no pain message. This may explain why parts of ants sometimes go on Hiving
⁹
independently of the rest of their bodies for a very long time.

The absence of pain leads to a whole new world of science fiction. Without pain, there can be no fear, perhaps no consciousness of
^‘
self
^’
even. Entomologists have long been inclined to the theory that ants are incapable of suffering and that this is the basis of their society
^’
s
cohesion. Which explains everything and nothing. The idea has the added advantage of removing any scruples we might have about killing them.

I, personally, should be very scared of an animal which could not feel pain.

But the whole concept is wrong. A decapitated ant emits a particular smell, the smell
of
fear. Something therefore happens. The ant does not have a nerve impulse but it does have a chemical impulse. It knows one of its parts is missing and it suffers. It suffers in its own way, which is no doubt very different from ours, but it does suffer.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The battle resumed at eleven-forty-seven. A long, compact line of dwarf soldiers slowly climbed to the assault of Poppy Hill.

The tanks appeared between the flowers. At a given signal, they hurtled down the slope. The legions of russets and their mercenaries paraded on the flanks, ready to finish the juggernauts' work.

Soon the two armies were only a hundred heads apart. . . then fifty . . . twenty . . . ten. The first seed-crusher had barely made contact when something quite unexpected happened. Gaps suddenly opened up in the dense line of Shigaepouyans as they formed squares.