The reddish-brown smudge along the southern horizon broadened until it swallowed the morning sun.
By noon, the surrounding heat over the Ashen Basin had climbed eight degrees.
The air grew stifling, heavy with a dry, static charge that made the fine hairs on Toby Karr’s forearms stand on end.
Giles Croft stood on the southern outer edge levee, adjusting the level focus on his brass transit. The zoom brought the distant cloud into terrifying clarity.
It wasn’t a cloud of desert dust. It was a waving living storm fifteen miles wide and six hundred feet deep.
Millions upon millions of six-inch long, heavy-bodied insects were beating the air with wild rhythm. Their back shells gleamed with the greasy sheen of blackened iron. Their serrated jaws scraped together with a gritty drone that rattled the brass thumb-screws of Giles’s instruments.
Before his left eye, the colony management screen flashed a crimson alert border across his vision.
“The pathfinding logic on these vermin is remarkably aggressive,” Giles muttered, checking the wind speed with his pocket anemometer. “Zero evasive maneuvering.
