SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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.

“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.”

An emu ducked its head under the gate and strode into Arnhem.

“Your kind doesn’t do well in gaol.”

The American started sweating. Now he was the minority.

“Could I buy a permit? Please? Sir?”

“Well, you have to go back to Darwin.”

“Darwin? That’ll take hours!”

“Yeah, plus a week to process. Maybe two. That is, if you can get one. You know, they only let in 15 cars a week.”

“This is insane—what if I just drove around—-“

“Sure you could.” The largest of the Aborigines moved in front of the car. He was now joined by three others. “But there’s only one road. We’ll catch ya.”

“No, you won’t.”

“And how’s that, then? You go off road in this and you’ll get stuck in a billabong.” The black pushed up and down on the front of the car. “Maybe flipped over by a water buffalo. And eaten by a croc. But…do whatever you want, mate.”

The Americans swore at them, and the blackfellas just laughed and laughed.

Then they fell back when the American revved his engine.

But the gate remained closed.

Vauna realized what was happening and slammed the ute into reverse. She barely missed being hit when the Americans spun around and sped down the road. Back to Darwin.

“That was fun!” Vauna said. “This is, of course, why I wanted to drive.”

She turned to Shorty in the backseat and said, “You should hide back there, among the equipment.”

She pulled up to the gate.

“G’day!” the gatekeeper said.

“G’day!” Vauna said.

“Where ya goin’?”

“Eh, just mucking about.”

The gatekeeper looked at Todd, and Vauna quickly put her black hand over his white hand.

“He’s with me,” she said. “He’s fair dinkum.”

After a pause, the guard said, “All right, then! Off ya go. Enjoy your holiday!”

The gate opened, and they drove on.

At the edge of the ocean, the ants made their stand.

They began excavating a huge communal super-colony.

Although they came from different architectural schools, there was no bickering over design or construction. A single female, a queen of queens, sent aggregation and pacifying signals throughout the hordes. Her orders were inviolable.

She chose a nest topped by a large conical mound. Soon it was as tall as a red boomer kangaroo. Soon, twice that, and then twice that again. It was built with the aid of half a dozen wallaby and jumbuck skeletons, animated by ant muscles.

By her command, sand and pebbles covered the eastern slope, warming the nest in the morning sun.

The queen of queens chose leafcutter ants as middle managers. Overseers of the most complex colonies, they were ideally suited to this task. They collected—and taught other ants to collect—seeds, leaves and flowers to feed the massive fungal gardens, which were kept scrupulously clean and free of parasites. They ran the food distribution and garbage disposal systems, teaching others to deposit debris outside the nest, regularly turning it to aid decomposition.

The leafcutters entrusted their pupae to the jaws of other ants. These pupae produced silk, and the ants wielded them in their mouths like glue guns, assembling shelters and tents made of leaves.

Now the queen of queens sent new chemical signals. In addition to the chitins and chitosans they naturally produced for their armored shells, the ants would be making new materials. Multi-walled nanofibers with inclusions and cross-linkers of di-pentane-octane and tri-pentane-tri-heptane. New materials for a new project.