Andrew wasn’t a typical teenage ant, for one thing he loved spending time with his grandfather listening to stories and asking questions. Although he wasn’t big on church and religion, he did have a great interest in the paranormal and loved to hear stories of the unexplained. His grandfather had spent his life as a soldier in the service of the queen and had many such tales to tell. He never tired of hearing the story of the day the colony was hit by something that had remained a mystery to that very day. His grandfather was just a young ant then but remembered it he always said, “as if it was yesterday”. There had been the changing of the guard and he was heading home for dinner. He had a lot on his mind that evening and was more than a little nervous, for this was the night he had planned to ask Andrew’s grandmother to marry him. As he walked along with all those thoughts going through his head, he was suddenly conscious of a dark shadow that had turned the late afternoon sunlight into almost total darkness. At once there was a deafening crash as something hit the anthill, destroying perhaps one fifth of the colony in little more than a second, as quickly as it came it disappeared, leaving only destruction behind.

The soldiers that were left standing immediately went on the attack, although not one of them had any idea as to the enemy. Later some would tell of being hurled through the air at almost lightning speed while others were found dead as much as fifty centimetres away. There were those who had disappeared completely and were never heard from again, although searches had been carrier out up to a distance of one hundred centimetres. Within the colony itself, sixty-three houses at been crushed, forty-one ants were dead and another fifty injured. Many rushed to the various churches, sure that this was the time of the end that their priests had warned about and that had been foretold in the ancient holy books. Days passed without further incident and things gradually started getting back to normal. There were the usual crackpots of course, who talked of seeing aliens and hearing strange voices, but no explanation for the disaster had ever been established. His grandfather had been just nineteen days old at the time, and in all of his seventy days since, there had never been an hour when he didn’t think of it, or wonder if and when it might happen again.