The senior hunters had been no help, though. They were too stuck in their old ways. Held back by old ideas. So, he turned to the newer generation. While the older hunters often looked at him and shook their heads, Pitdigger had gained a small reputation among the younger hunters as someone skilled at planning hunts and organizing.
Sure, some still called him a coward who relied more on traps than his own power, but most would still listen when he pointed out a flaw in a plan or made a suggestion to improve a hunt. Small things. Little honors. Nothing like the ‘truly skilled hunters,’ but enough for him to gather a small hunting party together and explain his idea.
Half left before he’d even finished speaking.
Those that remained looked skeptical at best, or even desperate, with sunken cheeks and drooping ears. These hard times had been harder on some than others…
Most didn’t seem to think his plan would work, but like him, they were tired of running away.
Pitdigger’s plan was simple. If they couldn’t get rid of the Ironfurs, they would get someone else to do it for them. That’s where the Demon Ants came into play.
Demon Ants were typically docile if you didn’t get too close. They were perfectly content to forage for mana and spirit-filled resources as they patrolled the forest. They typically wouldn’t attack other living creatures, at least not when alone. Even so, most other creatures in the forest actively avoided them, even the smaller ones.
Why? Because Demon Ants had a unique ability to track the blood of their kind over vast distances. If a forging Demon Ant was killed, the area would soon swarm with them. The ant slayer would be relentlessly pursued by an ever-growing army until either the ants overwhelmed them or they removed their scent.
Pitdigger would take advantage of this. By covering themselves in thick fur so that no part of their skin was exposed, the young hunters slew several scout ants, timing their actions with counted breath.
From that moment, it was a race against time.
The corpses were scattered across the forest between the Demon Ant’s clearing and the Ironfur’s den. Once that was done, the furs were discarded along the same path, and the participating hunters vigorously washed themselves with pre-prepared supplies.
The heavy-scented oils and exotic soaps traded from the surface dwellers had cost nearly everything Pitdigger owned, but it had been worth it!
BECAUSE IT HAD WORKED!!
The Ironfurs had taken the bait wonderfully, the dumb beasts! And the Demon Ants, riled up by the blood of their kin, made a beeline right for the Ironfurs.
The hunters, smelling of flowers and heavy spice, had followed the battle from a distance, all the way up to the Demon Ant’s clearing. From there, they’d watched the entire confrontation as it happened, cheering every time the ants brought down one of the furry tyrants.
Once the battle was done, it was just a matter of waiting for the ants to finish collecting their spoils and swooping in for the leftovers. Honestly, Pitdigger had only been expecting the hides and bones. Both of which could be traded to the surface dwellers for vast riches more than making up for what he’d spent on the oils and soaps, even split between so many hunters.
That the alpha itself had been killed by the ant’s hellfires and left to burn was an unexpected blessing. The meat alone would sustain everyone in the tribe for months, while the spirit energy and mana it contained would strengthen their hunters. It was a shame the fur had been ruined, though. Pitdigger had daydreamed of fashioning a cloak from the glistening golden fur. He would have had to beat the women off him with a stick! Ha!
He would have to settle for a common ironfur cloak. Not that such a thing didn’t come with its own honor.
Pitdigger laughed with joy as he watched the young hunters start work on carving up the charred corpse of the Ironfur alpha. Several runners had been sent back to the tribe to call for more hands. They would need them if they had any hope of harvesting the spoils before the scavengers started showing up.
They would get significantly less meat from the other four corpses; the ants were nothing if not thorough. But that would be fine. With what they’d accomplished here today, the tribe would be prosperous for a long time to come.
Still grinning ear to ear, Pitdigger looked up toward the barely visible opening in the cavern wall far above them and wondered what kind of bright future awaited him.
- — — — - - — — — - - — — — - - — — — - - — — — - - — — — - - — — — - - — — — -
“Haha… Hahahaha… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Alpha raised the arms of the mini-TAWP into the air and laughed, dark lightning lighting up the flat, white plane of his core world. In front of him rotated the holographic representation of the controls for the completed nanite nest.
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The trip back through the ant colony had been uneventful. His attempt at finding the source of the red liquid had been a bust. Once they’d re-entered the tunnels, the nitropots had simply blended in with the workers seamlessly. It was possible the nitropots themselves weren’t even a separate class and simply those ants who were available at the time of deployment. Or maybe the nitropots took up other roles when they weren’t needed.
Either way, it had been a dead end for now.
So instead, he had set the [Wasp] on standby, instructing the onboard AI to stay with the carrier ant and record its activities. If the nitropots themselves couldn’t offer any clues to the red liquid, then maybe the carriers would.
That done, he’d flipped his consciousness back to his core and was rewarded with a long overdue piece of good news. The nanite nest was finished!
This was good. Very good.
Now that the first nanite nest was complete, he could start really ramping things up. The first order of business was producing a few more [Wasps]. All the drones he currently could connect to were being used to monitor various parts of the ant colony.
A few minutes later, the first of the new batch of [Wasps] was born. Alpha quickly shifted his perspective to the new drone. His core world faded, and he saw through the eyes of his drone once more. The nanite nest sat in a small cavity carved out of the floor under one of the largest ore piles collected by the ants.
The nest itself appeared little more than a floating orb of liquid black ooze, slowly rotating in place. It constantly shifted and twisted, as if never quite sure what it wanted to be at any given moment. Thin streams of black liquid poured from dozens of small holes in the ceiling, which led to the piles of ore above. These streams twisted in the air and connected to the floating orb, adding themselves to the nest.
If one were to observe over a period, they would see the nest slowly growing in size. It would continue to do so, carving out the cavity as the nest grew. Eventually, it would reach nearly ten times its current size, a little over half the size of Alpha’s own core. At that point, it would reach equilibrium and only produce more nanite mass when mass was ‘assigned’ to a function such as drones, tools, or equipment.
Theoretically, nanite mass could produce anything they had the appropriate matter for. In the Federation, however, the best practice was to use nanite mass to bootstrap production methods and build proper factories. Dedicated factories and equipment would always result in higher quality, more reliable products than if they were built directly from nanite mass.
For instance, a [Wasp] produced by a proper drone factory would have higher operating specs and more functionality than the ones pushing themselves out of the nanite nest now.
Alpha watched as the nest writhed, its black ‘waters’ sloshing like a sudden storm had been kicked up. Then, a small black bud slowly pushed its way out of the nest’s surface. Then another, and another. One by one, half a dozen buds formed on the surface of the nest, then pinched themselves off and fell to the floor of the cavity. The fallen buds wiggled for a moment before lines formed along their surface. A few seconds later, they had gone from looking like small blobs of goo to detailed carvings of Insect pupa.
Alpha gave the command, and the ‘pupa’ cracked open, and half a dozen newborn [Wasps] crawled out. Already with their pre-programmed orders, each of the drones took flight and flew through one of the small openings in the nest cavity.
These drones might not be as good as the ones he’d started out with, but they could serve their own purposes. He could always use more eyes and ears around the colony. Alpha set the nest to produce a new [Wasp] every few hours. Mass-wise, they weren’t very expensive, and the more he had, the better.
[Wasps] weren’t as good at collection as harvesters or at intel gathering as scouts, but for their cost-to-versatility, they were the best he had at the moment. Soon, that would change.
With that done, the next order of business was to produce a few [Clouds].
Again, the nest writhed, but this time, a thin black mist poured down, condensing into a thick fog that covered the cavity floor. After a moment, the fog swirled in on itself and condensed into four fist-sized black orbs.
[Clouds] were the most basic of harvester-type drones, being little more than a swarm of specially designed nanites that could break down inorganic materials into their component molecules. In practice, they could harvest small ore veins and scrap to be reprocessed into other materials. Small-scale colonies mostly used them to supplement other mining operations and squeeze out every last bit of useable material from what they dug out.
They weren’t as effective as other harvester types, but they were the best for what Alpha had planned.
And what was Alpha planning?
Alpha pulled up a design schematic he’d been working on. Sonar scans of the ant colony showed a complex maze of twisting tunnels and enormous caverns that stretched for a dozen kilometers in all directions. While it didn’t reach the same complexity as you might expect from their smaller cousins, there were still dozens of chambers Alpha had never seen and hundreds of tunnels. If what Alpha had seen so far held true for the rest of the colony, the total ant population should be in the tens of thousands at the very least.
That might have seemed low when you considered some ant colonies on other worlds could grow to the tens of millions. Yet the sheer size of these ants and their destructive potential spoke of how terrifying such a number truly was. And true to the nature of ants, it would only grow larger with time. If the Federation had found such a colony near one of its outposts, it would have ordered an extermination mission without hesitation.
Alpha, on the other hand, would be a good roommate and do his part to expand the colony.
The wall that his core was embedded in was the edge of a large “blank” area in the colony. Likely, the ants left this space untouched to better isolate their queen’s chamber from potential burrowing intruders.
But for Alpha, it was the blank canvas on which he would build the beating heart of his operations on this planet.
Alpha transferred the data to the drones, and the four orb-shaped [Cloud] drones burst like soap bubbles into clouds of dark mist. The dark mist traveled up and out the same holes the [Wasps] had exited a moment earlier, with Alpha following close behind.
The [Clouds] moved along the royal chambers, hugging the floor and spreading thin to avoid detection, and made a beeline for Alpha’s core. Once there, the drones passed through the nanite membrane of Alpha’s core and exited out the other side into a thin gap he had carved earlier to prepare for this.
From there, the drones would slowly expand the area, digging out Alpha’s own personal chamber and the start of something he should have begun the moment he landed.
His own base.