The river of ants came to Pine Gap, and then suddenly it stopped when it reached the ring of bait traps.
The ants were like thirsty travelers who, having marched across the desert, paused to luxuriate at an oasis.
They rushed over the shallow lips of the Petri dishes and swarmed the sweets. And the poisons.
For several hours, the ants bunched up at the line of traps, with no desire to go further. They were enjoying themselves too much.
It was as if the honey and blackberry made an invisible force field.
Then all the food was all gone.
And the ants moved forward as a single super-organism, past the line of traps toward the second barrier, the water moat.
Todd, watching on video monitors, was completely disappointed.
Maybe they should have let him unleash Attila the Hun. Maybe they needed more time for the poisons to work their way to the queens. Maybe he had under-estimated the number of ants. Maybe by an order of magnitude. Maybe he needed ten or a hundred times more poison to get them all.
He turned away from the monitor, turned away from Vauna and Shorty. He couldn’t bear to see their disappointment in him.
The ants, having no emotions, did not revel in their victory over the bait traps, but simply moved on to the water moats.
These held them for a while.
The ants tried to cross the water, which was six feet across, in chains made of ants. Yes, many would sacrifice themselves, drowning, but other would walk across their dead bodies to the other side. But these were washed away in the water’s currents.
The ants also tried to cross using leaves and twigs as little boats. These, too, were washed away.
Walking the perimeter, Lieutenant Osborne was pretty happy about the success of the moat until she felt an itch on her neck. At first she thought it was just formication, the false sensation that an ant was crawling on you.
No, she realized. It was a real ant. Dropping from a tree branch spanning the moat.
“Sergeant Kelleam!” she shouted into her comm. “I ordered all the trees chopped down!”
“We did, ma’am!”
“What about this one I’m standing under?”
“Well, that one shades the commander’s office.”
“He can lose his tree or he can lose his base! I want flame throwers here right now!”
But before the torches arrived, streams of ants rushed the tree. Once some had discovered this avenue, they all knew. They swarmed the branches, crossing high above the water moat, and dropping down on the other side.
Next was the final line of defense, the moat filled with gasoline.
The ants approached this moat cautiously. In a coincidence of chemistry, some of the hydrocarbons in the gas smelled like the chemicals the ants used as alarm pheromones.
So the ants snapped their jaws and sprayed poisons at the moat, as if it were an enormous enemy ant.
Then they started bombarding it with clods of dirt. If they kept this up, they could cross it without having their feet ever touch the foul liquid.
At that moment, the base commander approved the Lieutenant’s request to light it up.
And a ring of fire appeared around Pine Gap, brightening the night sky. It over-saturated the vid feed as Vauna and Shorty watched, filling the screen with white.
Soldiers cheered.
The ants were stopped.
For now.
The problem was that the Lieutenant had assumed that this army of ants was acting like army ants.
Army ants travel across the land, and so they can be stopped by obstacles on the surface. Like flood or fire.
Most other ants travel underground, where they can’t be seen.
This underground river, in fact, was flowing through thick tunnels, dug by mining machines made from koala claws and emu beaks and the bones of wallabies and sheep, re-animated by muscles made of ants.
Yes, the fire stopped the ants on the surface.
But it didn’t stop the river of ants from bursting up, through the ground.
When Vauna saw the video of the swirling mass of bone and ant erupt from the earth, she bit her tongue. Perhaps she should have told the others of her discovery, even without film or other evidence. Perhaps she should have predicted this was what they were using the bones for. Huge, ant-driven underground mining machines.
Pine Gap and Alice were quickly overrun.
Commissaries were emptied, mess halls cleared out. Bikkies and lollies were eaten out of the jars on secretaries’ desks.
And, then, just like that, the ants were gone.
Moved on, moving north.
In the end, Pine Gap only lost two laptop computers to the ants. Satellite monitoring was only briefly interrupted, and order was quickly restored.
All of Pine Gap’s defenses had been nothing more than a rock thrown into a river. And the river had flowed around it.
III. PHARAOH
“What’s north of here?” Todd asked. “Where are we going?”
They had stopped at a takeaway in the middle of nowhere.
Todd paused to look at the distant hills, rounded by time. The land was beautiful in its antiquity, he thought. Here ancient flightless birds still walked the earth. And the sun had bleached red sand to pink, green plants to gray. Like a faded photo. You could go backward 40,000 years, or forward. The land would look the same, he imagined. It existed outside of time.
“Not much north of here,” Vauna said. “The Top End. And then you’re at the ocean, and the Equator.”
Were the ants planning to cross the sea in rafts made of ants?
After what he had seen, Todd did not put it past them.
“I got you a Diet Coke,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I never touch the stuff.”
“I thought you—-“
She shook her head.
“Let me go get myself a real Coke,” she said.
“You’re not going walkabout on me again, are you?” Todd asked.
“No,” Vauna said. “But I reserve the right to, later.”
Then she pointed at a sign indicating mileage to Arnhem Land.
“I should drive this next bit.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“Trust me,” she said. “Arnhem is Aboriginal land. You’ll be glad I’m behind the wheel.”
They arrived at a new gatehouse to Arnhem, with one car in front of them.
A yellow and black striped metal bar blocked their path. A trickle of ants zigged across under the bar and into Arnhem.
The car in front of them was a rented Holden convertible with two blonde Yanks inside, skin as white as sour cream.
“G’day, mate,” said the dark-skinned gatekeeper. “May I please see your permit?”
“Fishing permit?” the American driver asked. “We don’t have one. How much?”
“No, mate,” the gatekeeper said, pointing at a sign.
YOU ARE NOW ON ABORIGINAL LAND. TO ENTER ABORIGINAL LAND, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BE IN POSSESSION OF A WRITTEN PERMIT ISSUED BY TRADITIONAL ABORIGINAL OWNERS, THEIR DELEGATE OR THE NORTHERN LAND COUNCIL. PENALTY FOR ENTERING ABORIGINAL LAND WITHOUT A PERMIT IS $1000.00.
“So… I need a permit to cross?”
“That’s right, mate,” the guard said. “This is Aboriginal land now. It’s not Crown land. It’s not public land. It’s private, owned by us, since they gave it back.”
A much larger blackfella stood on the other side of the car. “Without a permit, it’s trespassing.”