Dave watched the flying drone\u2019s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.\u00a0 It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.\u00a0 It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.\u00a0 But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.\u00a0 It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.\u00a0 And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.\u00a0 They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.\u00a0 Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.<\/p>\n
Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.\u00a0 They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.\u00a0 Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.\u00a0 He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.\u00a0 He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.\u00a0 Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.<\/p>\n
The rest of the day was uneventful.\u00a0 The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.\u00a0 When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.\u00a0 The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.\u00a0 Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.\u00a0 It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.\u00a0 There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.\u00a0 One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.\u00a0 When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.<\/p>\n
Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.\u00a0 The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.\u00a0 The supervisor was already reading Dave\u2019s report and said, \u201cThat hive is a disappointment.\u00a0 We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.\u00a0 Maybe the current virus isn\u2019t 100% effective anymore.\u201d\u00a0 Dave nodded his head wearily, \u201cYeah, same old story.\u00a0 Nothing works forever.\u00a0 Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.\u00a0 Anything less is just too dangerous.\u00a0 We can\u2019t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.\u00a0 It\u2019s not right.\u201d<\/p>\n
The supervisor gave him an angry look, \u201cLook, we\u2019re making progress.\u00a0 The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s five hundred.\u00a0 We\u2019re winning.\u00a0 There are bound to be failures.\u00a0 Stop getting so emotional.\u00a0 Just do your job and be part of the solution.\u201d\u00a0 Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.\u00a0 Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.\u00a0 Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.\u00a0 No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.<\/p>\n
When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.\u00a0 Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.\u00a0 All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.\u00a0 But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.<\/p>\n
The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn\u2019t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.\u00a0 All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.\u00a0 In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.\u00a0 Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, \u201cWe found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.\u00a0 What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?\u201d\u00a0 Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.\u00a0 Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.\u00a0 The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, \u201cWell Craig is right that we have turned a corner.\u00a0 In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.\u00a0 We lost another billion people everywhere else.\u00a0 After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.\u00a0 And this year was the first net population gain.<\/p>\n
As far as the bugs.\u00a0 Initially their population increase was asymptotic.\u00a0 In the last twenty years it\u2019s levelled off.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.\u00a0 The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that\u2019s a low confidence study.\u00a0 The problems with resistance to the viral agents we\u2019ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dave nodded his head, \u201cThat\u2019s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.\u00a0 Not particularly cheering.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave watched the flying drone\u2019s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,1289,1263,237,4,242],"tags":[1557,1290,265,161],"class_list":["post-33402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-giant-ants","tag-my-fiction","tag-science-fiction","tag-them"],"yoast_head":"\n