No matter how many times he experienced it, upper energy seeming to randomly disappear in front of Chidi was quite surprising. Obviously he knew how it was happening. He could feel the void of energy where Crossed Antennae stood, which was clearly different from the zones of energy she emptied. Upper energy would rapidly flow into whatever area Crossed Antennae drained, which meant her method wasn’t any good for leaving clear writing. He appreciated the thought, however, and the void ant queen hadn’t been willing to give up there.

She learned to do more than simply consume the energy from an area, but how to do it in focused patterns. In that manner, she could create whole words at once, using a modified writing style. Chidi wasn’t used to written text to begin with, since he had to feel the shape of ink in paper. Many common letters lost their distinction with Crossed Antennae’s method, so instead they made something entirely new.

Chidi could most easily sense larger distortions in energy, and they remained clear for a few moments longer as energy filled in the remaining space. Thus, rather than proper characters Crossed Antennae created small and large voids, as well as wide ‘gashes’ that could be rotated in four distinct orientations. It was a large undertaking just to talk to Chidi, but he appreciated the effort all the more because of it.

“How goes the search for sword cultivators?” Crossed Antennae asked, the distortions of energy that formed words appearing in sequence in front of her.

“Only a very small portion seem to have both interest and aptitude,” Chidi admitted. “Though it’s possible I missed something given… well, communication difficulties.”

“Indeed,” Crossed Antennae said. “We had not anticipated how troublesome it would be to teach my offspring to understand human speech. That was not an issue for the other colonies, who grew up among them.”

Chidi nodded. He and the other humans had been helping teach them to understand speech, though his own part was minimal in that regard. They had been worried the communal learning sessions might fail- not because void ants were not good in such environments, but because of the subject matter. The void ants could not relay the spoken word to each other. However, they did sign the spoken words in sync. And words weren’t repeated just once.

Of course, they might not be staying with the colony indefinitely- that was where technology came into play. They had spare communications equipment on which they stored recordings. Not all created locally, but instead some were sourced from the core of the Scarlet Alliance. It was much simpler for thousand people to record a hundred words than for ten people to record ten thousand words. And even if there were some logistical issues, they weren’t anything insurmountable.

“Those who have the aptitude have shown success, at least,” Chidi added. “They are much more effective when using their mandibles as swordlike weapons. Though they’re mostly, uh…”

“Quite weak,” Crossed Antennae said. “I have not had time to produce many at the quality of royal guard. And other void ants need quite long to develop unique properties. Soon, however, I will not be involved in producing larger quantities of offspring. The last of the queens we need for the foreseeable future will be placed around the planet. Thank you for your aid in larger scale changes, by the way.”

When she ‘spoke’ for a long time to him, Chidi noticed a large scale depletion in energy. Knowing that, she would fly around to different locations. He turned to face her as she did, though it didn’t really mean anything. “We’re happy to help deliver things,” Chidi said. Mostly, it was the ship that did the work. Void ants could obviously transport things for themselves, but moving them around the planet was a bit beyond their capabilities. At least in a timeframe shorter than years. Or decades. “And reshaping the terrain in broad strokes is easy enough.”

The void ants weren’t terribly picky about where they lived- as long as it could produce natural resources for them to consume. The planet named Bounty was missing some of the things Chidi could have considered necessities, but for the void ants purposes it made sense. Just enough wild plants to feed upon and sustain the upper energy was the threshold they wanted to reach. If the planet seemed to be something more than just someone scattering seeds on a planet with atmosphere, their goal might not be accomplished.

That goal being lying in wait for groups from the upper realms to use these planets as ‘short term’ bases before invading the lower realms. From what they had seen previously, that might be a few decades- but they were only truly informed about what happened during an abnormal cycle one time.

When Chidi considered that, he realized that the seemingly frantic pace the void ant queen was working at was not so odd. She wanted to get the planet properly established before moving on. And she would have to move- traveling between planets to provide queens for others. If she spent a decade on every planet, she wouldn’t actually get very far before the next cycle. And then the surprise factor would be lost.

That was the main reason their group had come. The ship that carried her from the lower realms to the upper realms was not expected to be able to make further trips. They came to deliver the first round of a small fleet of ships- each one being hardly larger than Chidi himself, but capable of hosting Crossed Antennae and a large quantity of others.

-----

Aconite had hopes for the void ants. They could be excellent poisoners with their particular qualities. As she had previously noted, ignoring defensive energy was huge. The only issue, aside from most void ants not taking the initiative to learn anything except what their queens directed, was that there wasn’t much local that was poisonous to humans. Not in sufficient concentration to use. They likely wouldn’t be setting up any extraction and refinement processes, either. It wasn’t that they were incapable, but even underground structures might give them away. They were sticking to tunnels that looked as natural as possible, and little else.

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But she still found a few interested. Perhaps one in many thousands of void ants was a bit different from others, wanting to try new things. Some of those wanted to learn from her. And with the permission of Crossed Antennae, she would be taking them with her to learn off planet. The loss of a few void ants as workers was ultimately trivial- and there wasn’t any sort of competition that truly necessitated soldiers at the moment either, so snatching away some of them wouldn’t hurt either.

If ultimately they lost interest in her craft, they could still live on Xankeshan. The plan was to not have any void ant colonies among the actual Scarlet Alliance, for purposes of plausible deniability if nothing else, but the higher ups were interested in seeing void ants in person. The species had been practically eradicated, including records. Perhaps only Everheart’s little pocket on Ceretos’ moon had been kept safe.

-----

“... I hate Everheart,” Engineer Uzun commented to Catarina. “This is… ugh,” he shook his head. “Teleportation between continents? Simple enough, once you know how. Going as far as a planet’s moon is a huge expense. Between planets in the same system? Damn near impossible except for closer neighbors.”

“And?” Catarina raised an eyebrow.

“And what? Interstellar teleportation is impossible with our current resources.”

“So you’re saying it is possible,” Catarina said.

“No, I- look, it might be. If we could draw upon the power of a star. But even if we could, it would be risky. And we don’t have any materials that could handle that kind of charge, even if we had something that could draw in that much energy.” Catarina waited. “Even using the best techniques available, you’d be lucky if something worked once, and that would involve filthy tricks like unifying the functionality of the device at a certain moment with its total output across its lifetime. You know, Everheart crap.”

“So expensive, dangerous, and single use,” Catarina said. “We should definitely look into that. What about your other travel ideas?”

“The most promising is a network of warp gates,” he said. “Aside from the fact that a failure along the path might strand ships along the way or worse if our safety precautions fail. Not counting malicious actions. I wouldn’t expect a functional prototype this century. Though who knows? We might get a generation of tech savvy ascenders who prove me wrong. I’d love to see it.”

“Unlikely,” Catarina said. “Simply because you have the experience and cultivation insights. Plus, I know you keep up on all of the developments in the lower realms.”

“I try,” he said. “But even with miraculous reading techniques, I can’t actually understand everything. Do you know how many research papers ten billion people produce every day? And Rutera hasn’t had a population that small since before first contact. I’m not even talking about fusion cultivator technologies.” He frowned, looking at Catarina. “Actually, shouldn’t it be you working on the teleportation devices? You’re better at formations.”

“I have set aside the topic for the moment,” Catarina said. “I have other things to focus on.”

“Like your absurd plan to relocate all of our systems?”

She shrugged. “I considered options to compress space, but that would have higher sustained upkeep costs and problematic results if it was sabotaged.”

“I can see that,” Uzun nodded.

-----

In addition to discussing her plans with work colleagues like Uzun, Catarina did like to pass them by her level-headed husband. She was rather surprised he hadn’t completely shut down her idea to compress the various systems under Alliance control together, but perhaps that was because he’d considered the defensive benefits.

“Tell me about those warp gates,” Timothy said. “How would they actually work?”

“They’d be something like a replacement for the individual drives on ships that perform the same work. They’d create a corridor of distorted space that would allow ships to travel through either distorted space or a subspace, depending on various factors.”

“So this would be more valuable for civilian operations,” Timothy said. “Unless the expense is too much for military ships?”

She nodded. “It might increase our trade efficiency, if it ever gets working. And it could make military travel more effective, allowing them to arrive at the far end with more energy. But if going into a warzone, they would have to be aware of sabotage once information about these is disseminated.”

“How come nobody else has these things?” Timothy asked. “I understand the technological side of things. But the formation focused ones like teleportation portals…”

“Who says they don’t? Everheart certainly has demonstrated such things in the upper realms. It would just be expensive. Exclusive. We haven’t been spending a lot of time inside our neighbor’s borders, you know. Even Velvet would be cautious entering large sects.”

Timothy nodded. “Of course. It would be used only by the wealthy. And I suppose there would be risks for them to consider. They’d want to keep quiet about it.”

“That’s right,” Catarina said. “But we can probably rule out quick and easy large scale teleportation mainly because Everheart hasn’t been caught.”

“About that other thing. Intersystem teleportation. That would be easier if the systems were compressed, right?”

“Of course. Shorter distances would greatly help,” Catarina said.

“And if the locations were otherwise connected by formations, wouldn’t that help?”

“Hmm… I suppose that’s true. That could significantly…” she began muttering to herself. “... but the energy costs… emergencies…”

Timothy just smiled as he watched his wife. He might not ever be able to invent any of these things, formations or high level technology, but he wasn’t without learning or insights of his own into the world. He had no guarantee if any ideas he tossed to his wife would get picked up or even that they were viable in the first place, but he could still put them out there. And if nothing else, it would keep her occupied and not focused on some of her wilder ideas