Insecta: Planet of the Ants (Book 1 - Zombie Nest)

INSECTA

Planet of the Ants

by

W Thor Larson

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Also available in paperback!

http://insectaplanetoftheants.wordpress.com/

Copyright 2014 by W Thor Larson.

Version: February 16, 2014

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For

Spencer

~ ~ ~

Earth Fact, or Insecta Fiction?

Although this story is set in a distant bioluminescent world populated by gigantic insects, many of the characters, places, and things are inspired by some of the weirdest and most awesome insects, locations, and events found on Earth!

Check out the Did You Know? box at the end of each chapter to learn a cool fact, then visit my website for the full interactive glossary (with links to images and videos). See the actual creatures that inspired it all, gain insights about the insect characters and their world, and find out what I was thinking while crafting the amazing world of INSECTA: Planet of the Ants.

http://insectaplanetoftheants.wordpress.com/glossary/

Book 1

Zombie Nest

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IT IS NOT GOOD FOR AN ANT TO BE ALONE

Formicidaen adage, first framed in the historical account of origins.

Inscribed the Hall of Feats.

Table of Contents

Front matter

Start of Book 1 – Zombie Nest

Chapter 1 – Cloud

Chapter 2 – Maggots

Chapter 3 – Aphids

Chapter 4 – Hatchlings

Chapter 5 – Super Colony

Chapter 6 – Identity Thief

Chapter 7 – Grave

Chapter 8 – Capture

Chapter 9 – High Council

Chapter 10 – Crystals

Chapter 11 – Healer

Chapter 12 – Recon

Chapter 13 – Extraction

Chapter 14 – Suspicion

Chapter 15 – Miracle

Chapter 16 – Stagger Grass

Chapter 17 – Carpenters

Chapter 18 – Devil’s Garden

Chapter 19 – Contagion

Chapter 20 – Destiny

The Saga Continues …

Join the Super Colony!

Chapter 1 – Cloud

The desert sea threw its fury at the mainland. Great tidal waves of sand heaved beyond their bounds. Swirling plumes of grit raked the southern shores, blasting and sharpening mountainous limestone towers and stripping huge trees to the bone. The storm’s outer gyrations lapped at the tropical borders and swept in a vast swarm of flies that lurked in the shadows of the hinterlands. The gale force winds inhaled the flies with a giant yawning breath, drawing the foul living smog deep into its alluvium lung.

The flies were propelled for hours among motes of dust and granules of rock before Zeta Orionis Alnitak, the blue super sun, splashed into the western horizon, followed closely by its smaller companions Delta Orionis Mintaka and Epsilon Orionis Alnilam. Deprived of the tri-suns’ blue-hot rays, the dynamics that drove the violent air currents cooled and dissipated. Weakened, the desert tempest stumbled and fell dropping its quarry of sand and leaving the sky clear and clean.

But the cloud of flies within did not fall. The hairy, voracious insects coalesced, melding to form the reaper’s grim face. The ghastly form buzzed onward released from its arid conveyance like a dark spirit freed from a crumbling corpse. It stayed on its southwest trajectory until it passed through the trailing aromatic wisps of a sweet and enticing smell. As the odors wafted through the specter’s smudged nostrils, it lifted the aileron edges of its makeshift maw and twisted them into an evil grin. It pulled the dusk sky around itself like a dirty burlap hood, and dove into the darkness.

Did you see that? Nodosa clicked squinting to the north. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the mysterious, pulsating, inky cloud on the horizon just before night wrapped it in the shroud of its dim embrace.

What? Naegleria reoriented his compound eyes and antennae to mirror his companion’s gaze. That cloud? Come on, let’s get back to work. It’s nothing.

Yeah, Nodosa puffed with feigned relief, you are probably right. Just an evening mist I guess.

The sight was strange to be sure and it disturbed Nodosa more than he thought it should. Oddly, the feelings it stirred reminded him of the fear he felt seasons ago when the blurred outline of an assassin bug slipped from sight into the forest shadows. He knew he had seen the nocturnal hunter, but no one else in the small scouting party had seen or sensed the danger, and none believed him. The beetle tracked them for miles, and then attacked, killing three ants and making off with another.

Nodosa’s sensory neurons had always been hypersensitive, which contributed to his reputation for paranoia. The assassin bug’s attack validated his fears and redeemed his character for veracity back then; nevertheless, over time he found the dangers he sensed more-often-than-not passed without incident and he learned to keep his mouthparts shut. He rolled up in a psychological and emotional pill bug shell and kept his thoughts to himself.

Nevertheless, Nodosa’s impressions and forebodings continued, and his fears remained. He was most nervous at night, especially when the moon was full. He felt vulnerable. He thought the odds in the grand chess game of Nature were uneven at night for ants that lingered outside the safety of the mound. Although they could see well in the dark, the hunters and beasts of the blackness could see them more easily too. Now, even with the wispy cloud afar off, he felt that familiar uneasy feeling. This time it was intense—much more than he had ever felt in the past. It was as if many hostile compound eyes were intently upon him and there was nowhere for him to hide.

Nodosa and Naegleria were field workers laboring among thousands of their Myrmelachista Schumanni brothers. They had worked two-by-two for many months preparing another circular ribbon in the forest canopy for excavation, facilitating their tribe’s territorial expansion. The Schumanni were distant cousins of fire ants. Unlike their relatives, the workers used their stings primarily as tools to inject formic acid into the leaves of unwanted plants and trees rather than as weapons of war. One worker systematically nicked leaf tissue with his mandibles and then lifted the flesh back. The second dropped his sting into the tear and released a small drop of his natural herbicide. Saplings so treated lost their leaves within days and died within weeks. Though towering trees resisted longer, they too eventually fell and moldered in the heat. The Schumanni thus cleared their ‘gardens’ by pushing back the forest walls to provide suitable sites for their nests.

The primary botanical benefactor of this activity was the hardy Duroia Hirsuta shrubs that the Schummani cultivated. With competing species removed, the trees basked in unlimited light and monopolized nutrients and water. As the trees matured, the ants would begin to hollow out and occupy the trunks, stems, roots, and bulbous nodes and internodes of the Duroias, and connect them to the subterranean nest.

This nest site was relatively new, with a solitary Queen and just over twenty-thousand sons. At the center of the clearing, the thriving mound complex bustled with activity of every sort, day and night. Ants crisscrossed on roadways and trails carrying supplies of every kind. Workers covered the area, cheerily going about their business. Over time, with the right conditions, the ants would build the colony up to become quite large, with hundreds of thousands of workers and numerous queens. But Nature intended a limit to its growth and would show no mercy on the colony’s youth—the coming of the winged cloud sealed its fate.

Nodosa and Naegleria had worked their way high into a lone pine tree on the northwestern edge of the borderland. The tree was a ‘weed' as every non-Duroia species was considered. Nodosa kept an eye on the darkened sky as he worked. He nervously scanned the horizon from his vantage point, anxiously squinting to discern the sky patterns. A dark mass blotted his view of a large section of the stars. More and more stars were consumed as it advanced and drew nearer. Subtle vibrations in the air tickled Nodosa’s antennae. His instincts screamed in his mind. He turned to Naegleria and blurted out a warning, similar to other warnings he had expressed over the seasons. Something evil approaches in the sky; we’ve got to warn the others and get back to the nest!

I know you’re tired, Naegleria responded wearily, revealing some irritation in his tone. I see it; it’s a cloud, he acknowledged impatiently, briefly looking up from his work and pointing to the heavens. We are almost done with this sector and then the next shift comes in. Come on, brother, let’s finish up and then we can eat and rest.

Nodosa shifted nervously, turning this way and that. His eyes darted from the sky to Naegleria and back up again. His face strained, begging his brother to look skyward and see what he saw. He wanted Naegleria to listen to him—to believe him! Every ounce of his being begged him to flee, to hide. This was no fleeting warning, no temporary fear of an unknown danger. This was real; it was tangible. That was no ordinary cloud advancing toward them. He pointed to the blackening sky and desperately described the faint hum that his companion could not feel. Naegleria wouldn’t budge, growing more and more impatient with his younger sibling. As the cloud expanded to hide the moon, Nodosa’s urgently repeated warnings only gained Naegleria’s reproach. Yet the frightful fog rolled ever closer, driven by its own volition rather than by any wind or desert breeze. Desperately, he turned and scanned the canopy for a place to hide. He saw a small cluster of conifer cones on the next level of the tree, and darted toward them.

Nodosa! his companion called after him, You really need to get control … of …

Naegleria’s rebuke was interrupted as the death knell dropped like a thick sticky net from the sky. The sounds of the forest were replaced by the buzz of thousands upon thousands of wings that shook the pine needles all around him. The cloud descended into the clearing and onto the vast circular worksite in the trees. He was dumbfounded as the night mist transformed into a thick blanket of noxious flies. They were everywhere, on everything—and everyone.

One quickly found Naegleria and buzzed around him relentlessly, not as a pest but as an aggressive and skilled hunter. The ant snapped to his senses and attempted to flee, to follow Nodosa. It was too late. His stinger punched and jabbed but could not hit the small fly. Its wings beat a thousand times per second providing unbelievable agility and speed. Turning this way and that, he sliced through the air with his mandibles to no avail. The fly maneuvered around his feeble defenses, perched on his back and latched on. It inserted a sharp appendage into the ant’s thorax, injected an egg, then detached and quickly buzzed away looking for another victim. Naegleria felt the sharp pain, then staggered, spun and fell. His compound eyes pixelated to darkness as the world around him went blank.

Another fly picked up Nodosa’s scent. It landed on the tree branch among the thicket of pine needles and chased him, scuttling behind at an extremely fast pace. It did not reach him before he dove into the spiked enclosure of a small conifer cone. The creature attempted to crawl into the cone, reaching its claws after the ant. Nodosa was in a defensible position. He thrust his stinger out and pierced the fly between its glowing, grey, compound eyes. It reeled in pain, briskly wiping at its hairy face feebly trying to brush off the poison that had penetrated its head. Within moments, its eyes flickered out. It was dead, trapped in a bract of the brown cone.

Nodosa was safe for the moment; but his brothers were exposed to the full fury of the massive swarm. From his perch high in the pine tree, he watched in horror as numberless insect dive bombers zipped here and there. Their compound eyes were obviously highly sensitive and equipped for night vision; their sense of smell acute. Nodosa could see the subtle luminous glow of their eyes mingled among the brighter glow of his brothers’ complex eyes and the electromagnetic signature that surrounded their antennae. The ants themselves were beacons calling down their own doom; they themselves were signals broadcasting their location and screaming to be stung. Nodosa pushed himself deeper into the cone and concealed himself from the swarm of flies—hiding from the horrendous specter whose thousands of eyes still seemed to look into his soul.

The flies targeted workers in the perimeter trees, attacked in the Duroia orchards, covered the gardens and paths, and pushed into the entrance of the mound itself. Chaos reigned as ants scattered in all directions searching for cover or places to hide. They were helpless. The flies found their victims and the ants fell, each stabbed in the thorax. With the ants down, the throng of flies did not feed or leave, but gathered again in a single dark mass in the sky. They converged in a swirling humming congregation and circled the nest site as if they were a great charcoal halo hovering over their prey or a hairy winged wreath floating over a mass grave. The grey glow of their eyes merged into a smoky luminescent ring of putrid light.

Sensing a change in the vibrations and sounds, Nodosa moved carefully to the edge of the cone, covering his face with a cone scrap to hide the glow of his eyes and peered through a small hole in the foliage. Victory flight, he whispered in tones laced with disdain and stunned fright. Unable to help, and to avoid detection, he waited within the spiked cone’s protective enclosure, and watched and listened.

The vast assemblage of small monsters continued their loud, buzzing, frenzied flight for much of the night. Then the vortex picked up speed and spun at a furious pace. Flies in the center of the circle began to drop like muddy brown hail stones to the fields and trees below, their eyes blinking dark. The swarm veered out over the canopy and started to break up. The congregated beast gave way to centrifugal force and flung its parts out over the forest, scattering the flies into the woods to become food for the beetles and centipedes.

They are dying, Nodosa realized as he watched the evil rain of fly corpses until it was utterly spent and the air was again calm. When the curtain of flies dissipated, the full moon shone bright once more. The reflected light of the three suns transformed the pocked surface of the lunar sphere into a kaleidoscopic menagerie. Its hues—blue, green, yellow and red—shone bright. It was as a huge iridescent beetle shell in the sky that brought the night to vivid life with bioluminescent glow. The moon was magnificent and alluring, mysterious. It was as a great black light that caused whites and pastels to shine, and enhanced the fluorescent qualities of so many elements of the landscape.

Nodosa moved to the cone’s spiky entrance to examine the scene, kicking the dead fly away and watching it drop to the ground far below. He cautiously crept from his hiding place, pausing to listen to his instincts. Hearing only a dull general apprehension, he gained courage and rushed along the tree branch to the work site on the level below that he had so hastily abandoned.

Naegleria! he called. Naegleria, where are you? He heard a faint reply further along the branch and found his brother partially concealed under a dying cluster of pine needles. You are alive! Nodosa called as he ran to his side and lifted his head. Naegleria, are you alright?

Nodosa, the limp ant answered weakly. I’m sorry … you were right … should have listened to y ….

Nodosa attempted a sympathetic reply as Naegleria collapsed to the bark and slipped away into a deep unconsciousness. He expected the glow of Naegleria’s eyes to blink out as death came. But his companion’s eyes simply grew dim. Faint green electrical sparks slid along his antennae confirming that his mind was still active. He was in a strange stupor, motionless, limp—but alive.

Nodosa noticed the piercing in his brother’s thorax and leaned in for a closer look. The moonlight revealed a puncture wound. There was no poison residue or calcification; no oozing or bleeding. It was simply a small hole that had already begun to close and heal. He gently moved his brother to a safer spot on the limb, marked the location in his chemical memory, and descended the tree.

Moonlight bathed the garden and Nodosa saw ants scattered everywhere, lying motionless, with eyes glowing. He checked some of them and found the same wound in the same location on the thorax as he had found on Naegleria. Their common comatose state jarred Nodosa’s senses, and feelings of foreboding welled up inside him. Alarms blared in his head. The Queen! he cried out in despair, turning to the mound, eyes wide with panic.

He hastened his pace and rushed across the field toward the main entrance of the nest, zigzagging among the ants and flies that littered the garden’s expanse. The irony was stark. So many of his brothers were fallen, nonetheless he knew that few of the flies were claimed by an ant’s sting or bite. The flies had butchered his brothers, but shed no blood and brought no death. Then the attackers apparently died of their own accord. He was reminded of honeybees who sacrifice their lives to defend the hive, except the flies were not defending anything at all, and no bee was ever found a mindless aggressor.

As Nodosa raced on, the sounds of the forest began again. Crickets broke the silence and the rasping sounds of other nocturnal creatures joined in the chorus. When he reached the nest, he rounded the entrance and scurried up the incline to the top of the mound for a better view of the garden expanse. He turned and searched the panoramic scene for other survivors wandering toward the center mound. He was again amazed at the number of fallen ants. The nest was usually a scene of constant motion; now his brothers’ eyes remained as fixed points of light. Hope of finding survivors was a mirage, so he moved back down to the mound’s archway entrance. Summoning his courage, he stepped over the threshold and disappeared underground.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Did You Know?

It is true that Myrmelachista schumanni ants on Earth use their stings to destroy all vegetation in an area except for the ant-plants in which they live. These ants are the only known insect to use formic acid as a herbicide. Until the ants were discovered, the cause of huge clearings in the Amazon rainforest was a mystery. Natives called the spaces Devil’s Gardens because they thought evil spirits were at work.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Chapter 2 – Maggots

White and bright yellow mosses illuminated the countless comatose ants lining the roads and corridors deep in the Schumannian nest. Nodosa had expected the worst, but seeing the devastation inside the mound was more than he could bear. The familiar faces of his brothers lay emotionless along the way, eyes glowing dimly. Very few flies littered the passageways as the dipterans had returned to the surface to join the halo flight. Nodosa was surprised that none of the corridors or byways were blocked by the nest’s great defensive bulwarks. No channels had been collapsed as they should have been. There had been no warning, he thought, and no time to bring down the barricades or hem in the colony’s superstructure with blockades.

Nodosa’s mind focused again on the Queen, distressed. He knew that if the flies had found and attacked her, then the destruction of the nest would be complete and his family would indeed be gone. He doubled his speed urging his six legs to run faster and faster down the spiraling freeway that led to the depths more than a mile below the surface. At length, he reached the entrance to the Queen’s chambers and found—to his profound relief—stones, pebbles, and chunks of cement piled thick blocking the way.

It’s sealed! Nodosa cried with renewed hope that his Queen-Mother was yet alive and safe within. He called, emanating several high-pitched clicks that penetrated the sound barrier. Queen Cordia! Queen-Mother! Are you there? He repeated the call frantically pulling away the debris.

Then a reply came from one of the Queen’s guards. The Queen is safe. Has the danger passed? Is the nest secure?

Nodosa slumped in relief for a moment, then stood upright again and yelled, Yes, it has passed! Help me dig through the wall.

The Queen’s guards and suitors picked at the rubble from within, while Nodosa dug from without. By and by, the thick barrier gave way and a hole formed big enough for Nodosa to crawl through. He squeezed in the opening and passed into the chamber. Two guards stopped him to check his scent and identification. The guards were larger than Nodosa, who was the size of an average worker. Their features were austere and angular; their mandibles large and sharp. They were well trained in the use of their stings and mandibles as combat weapons, unlike Nodosa who, although trained to defend the garden and nest from invaders, was more accustomed to specialized horticultural pursuits. A guard reached out with his antenna and touched Nodosa’s sensory appendage. A small green identifying electric charge passed between them and the guard checked his scent signature. Satisfied that Nodosa was a brother, the guard let him pass and approach the Queen.

Nodosa drew close to Cordia, his Queen-Mother, and greeted her with joy. She was larger than the soldiers, and her serrated mandibles and sting were likewise formidable. But her mannerisms were kindly, and the deep aqua-marine glow of her compound eyes overcame any fear.

Her clicks were somber and worried as she spoke, and her antennae were held high with alarmed interest. Nodosa what has happened? she asked. We were attacked but I don’t know more. Tell me what your eyes have seen.

The worker hesitated, and then cautioned, My Queen, prepare your mind for what I will say. The news is grave indeed. Nodosa’s head drooped as he mustered the mental will to continue. The nest was overwhelmed by thousands of flies and ruined. They attacked on the surface and in the mound. As far as I know, we in this chamber are the only ones unaffected.

What do you mean ‘unaffected’? the Queen asked.

Nodosa stepped forward and touched his antennae to the Queen’s. Mild electrical sparks carried vivid images of the cloud’s advance, the pinecone, the attack of the flies, the halo, and the fields and roads filled with fallen ants. Once the images flashed into her mind, the Queen staggered back a pace breaking the antennal contact. Her suitors moved in to stabilize her.

What does it mean? Are all my sons dead?

I don’t know their fate, Nodosa admitted. Those I checked were alive, but lay unconscious, each with the self-same puncture wound in their thoraxes.

No. This can’t be! the Queen said in disbelief. Take me out.

Masada, the Captain of the Royal Guard, objected. We cannot leave the chamber. Let me go to survey the scene. We cannot risk your life.

"I know