Chitin armour
Chitin armour is body armour made from the shells of Paussid beetles. Bianca has it built so that Portia and a band of warriors can walk into the marching ant colony and deliver her chemical weapon. The shell carries the beetles’ scent of absence, so the ants register the wearer as nothing at all.
Making
Bianca’s plan needs beetles first. The Paussids are twenty centimetres at most, dark red, with antennae that spread into a disc of fine fronds like circular fans. Her assistants collect them from the colony below her laboratory, and the creatures are driven to the army’s camp at the last hour of the night. Some escape on the way. The rest are killed and their shells peeled off.
Great Nest artisans then clad Portia and her fellows in the pieces. They have no fire and no metal, so the work is done with fangs and the strength of the legs. Each section of shell is twisted and cracked until it fits its wearer, and every plate is fixed in place with webbing. The finished suit is a heavy, cumbrous coat of chitin mail that covers as much of a spider as the shells allow, and it reads as black on the wearer.
It is a step beyond the armour the spiders already wear. At Seven Trees the defenders carry plates of soft wood bound with silk, which snag the saw teeth on the ants’ jaws and can be shed and repaired in the field. Chitin comes from a species that lives among the ants.
How it works
The suit is not built to stop jaws. Portia doubts any armour that could keep ants off a spider, since there are too many weak points and too many joints for them to seize. Bianca’s answer is that the armour works another way. When she first describes it, she says Portia can put it on only when she is about to make her attack. The Paussids live inside ant nests unharmed because of a master scent that never changes as the colony’s chemical codes do. The scent does not say that a beetle is an enemy, or an ant, or even a stone. It says that nothing is there, a void that the ants’ antennae skip over, even when they play across the ridged carapace.
The scent outlives the beetle, but only briefly, which is why the shells are cut and fitted on the night of the attack. Bianca cannot say how long the protection will last. Portia carries hers like a second skin.
In the ant fortress
Near the fortress the band splits up, each spider hunting for a different way in, and Portia chooses to climb. She goes up a ladder of living ant bodies, up the wall of the ant column’s fortress. Their limbs and antennae twitch as she crosses them, and one investigates her plated underside. No alarm comes. On the way there ant scouts passed them in the dark as though they were the wind.
The armour costs as much as it gives. It is heavy, it obscures her vision, it is awkward to run in and it makes jumping impossible. Inside the fortress she overheats and her muscles give out, and her heart can barely keep oxygen moving around the hollow of her body. Her own passage leaves ripples that the colony notices even though it cannot smell her. A blocked airway registers. So does an ant body pushed aside to make a way through. A live Paussid meets her in the dark once, investigates the stolen carapace and retreats in fright, and she follows it deeper.
Some distance away, one warrior leaks, and mandibles close on one of her leg joints and cut the limb off at the knee. The fluid draws the rest of the ants, and while the armoured parts are ignored, they follow the blood through the wound into her body and take her apart from the inside. Portia is caught in the same way at last, where a questing antenna finds a gap and her own cuticle is exposed.
After the gas has emptied the colony of purpose, Portia lies on her back, legs curled in, still in most of her beetle armour. Fewer than half of her band are alive, and all of them are worn out by the weight of the suits. Bianca tells her she may shed her ungainly second skin before she goes to look at what has fallen from the sky.
Unanswered questions
- How many beetles Bianca used.
- How long a finished suit stays invisible to the ants.