Synteletrix was a signaler. She had acute vision and two lengthy ten jointed antennae which glowed silver in the sunshine.

She was at the base of the siege tower. As it grew, she relayed signals from others of her caste positioned on the structure. She stood on her hindlegs in an exaggerated stance to ensure that the other signaler ant received the postured message correctly through the void of space.

The signalers had a white side and a dark side. This evolutionary trait allowed space-ants to simply ‘flip’ over and reflect or absorb sunlight to regulate their temperatures, but this had the added benefit of enhancing postured communications over long distances.

Above her, the giant tower wavered in the sky. Even though at zero gravity, undamped oscillations could crash the giant structure of ants. She watched it slowly approach the strange green sphere.

(We’ll keep calling them ‘Green-Sphere’ for convention’s sake. Communicating the colony by their actual name is impossible, unless you want to sprout a pair of sensitive feelers from your head.)

Synteletrix was the most important segment of the communications relay. She sat near the great door-ants. Other signalers flashed messages up and down the line. More workers. Her antennae instructed to the door ant.

The door-ant secreted scents from their gastor, which was inside. This attracted workers to the bottom of the door-ant. The new workers exited to replace others who needed to cycle back in for air.

Time passed, but she kept her gaze on the next chain in her signal troupe. She ignored the scene unfolding above her.

Standing at the ready, a different signal was flashed. Danger.

And then another sign. Surprise Attack!

Soon she saw the flash of a signal she had never had to relay before: Retreat.

Synteletrix pounded her legs to translate the visual gesture into a seismic one that the interior colony could hear.

The colony pounded back one last command from inside: Push away. And Synteletrix relayed that command back to the signalers on the long tower. With one last extension, the tower shoved the two colonies away from each other.

Peace for now. The first battle against Green-Sphere concluded with a draw.

Synteletrix stayed at her post until the next signaler came, then she folded up her elongated antennae and cycled back inside.

There was general agitation and anxiety. Numerous workers scurried about. She and her fellow signalers tried to command them to return to their typical interior duties. The colony’s fear died down, and all became orderly.

Synteletrix returned to her hutch. She folded up her sensitive antennae, unwilling to leave them out to be trampled by careless workers. After a few moment’s rest, she heard someant searching through her hutch.

Signalers needed. The worker ant relayed the order to her.

Synteletrix rose, unfolded her antennae and asked, Where?

Prison, it said.

She exited, climbed through the tunnels and followed the chemical scent the worker laid down to the holding cell.

The prisoner had been dejawed and disabled, and Synteletrix had no fear of being hurt by the captured enemy. She passed her antennae through a small opening into the prison hutch where the enemy ant was entombed by construction slurry. She listened to it and felt its anxiety, terror, and the pain it felt from its wounds.

Job? She asked.

Pwggv txlppy, the green ant captive replied.

Utterly unintelligible. This would not be a quick job.

Population? She asked and counted to six by tapping out on the ant’s head. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

It knew it’s math, at least up to six, because it replied with six taps.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Synteletrix used her antenna to point to the first joint of the ant’s antennae. There she counted out six again. Did it know the mathematical shorthand? It failed to copy the pointer counting system.

Ant math was base six, and signaler ants could point to a segment of their antennae up to ten joints, and communicate up to sixty visually. That sexagesimal counting system left Space Ants with a highly composite number; they did not need to learn fractions.

But the Green-Sphere prisoner still comprehended nothing over six.

Again Synteletrix questioned the ant. Queen Count. But the garbled reply gave no help.

Find White-Moon, she told a nearby worker. Perhaps there was an old signaler who could translate.

While the request spread throughout the colony, Synteletrix tried to teach the captured ant of Green-Sphere about maths above six, or discover if there was a different way to count above six.

A worker returned with one of the last remnants of White-Moon. Their upper caste had been reduced to laborers, but this old ant was previously a signaler and in the past had crossed paths with the colony of Green-Sphere.

Synteletrix relayed her original three questions to the translator.

The old ant put her antennae into the cage. Warriorker, can the answer to the first question. Some sort of undifferentiated ant able to kill or carry equally well.

Many multitudes, the second answer came.

Six sixes, came the final answer.

Synteletrix needed to use her antenna segment counting method to figure out how many that was. Was it twelve? Smaller ants often had many queens, and a Queen-Strike assault would not have the same decisiveness. Or was it six times six? Thirty-six queens would be impossible for their colony to defeat by a war of attrition.

With the help of White-Moon’s last signaler, they interrogated the prisoners for several more sleeps. Every day, they extracted a bite of new knowledge and transferred it to the colony.

Each time Synteletrix slept, dream ants came to collect her memories. Like a forager who brought a morsel back to the colony, the dream ants collected information.

Dream ants were old signalers in the last few orbits of their life. She would become one if she survived. (Though signalers did not have as high a casualty rate as other castes.)

In a chamber next to the queen, the dream ants gathered. None of them had an entire concept in their tiny minds, but united they could trigger each other, and collectively process complex problems.

The dream ants all laid down, each being able to touch another with their long antenna and touching others with their back legs. Each ant acted as a sort of crude transistor, able to hold and process a small amount of information before relaying it. There were circuits of feed forward to the center, feedback to the edges, and a very slow recursion, as a pile of ants could call more ants to solve a particular detail.

Six dreamers held themselves tight in the center, each sensitive and complex antenna laid over another’s. Behind each dreamer, there was another row of two junior dreamers, followed by another of four, then finally eight signalers radiated out. Ninety ants in a tight node.

The colony thought. It seemed to remember that it got its ass bitten and impaled by ants half to a third their size. Those bitey-tiny ants had a prize and Black-Sting could not simply forget it and navigate somewhere else.

Plus, they might not have the option to escape. Green-Sphere was still close. They could attack any orbit and Black-Sting might be the prey!

The first task was to assess the current count of castes, but first it needed more. Workers ferried out into all parts of the nest to gather more ants.

Synteletrix was roused. Arise. Join. A dream ant called to her. This was the first time she had been called into dream ant council.

The collective had a second question to solve. What is an orbit? It thought. They were now captured by the ice moon, and their sighters had observed new faster orbits. They also appeared to be both orbiting their massive gas giant, which unmistakably dominated their horizon, and the ice moon. Other ants, with the ability to detect the several Gauss strength magnetic fields, confirmed that they were still at the same distance from the gas giant’s center, and the colony was far from falling in to death. There was now a long rarer eclipse, and a more frequent but briefer smaller eclipse. The collective tried to calculate the ratio of mini orbits to big ones.

Synteletrix was on the outskirts of the mass of dream ants. Today, she was merely a counter.

She readied herself and connected to the node.

Tap, someone hit her exoskeleton. +1. And she dutifully incremented by crossing her antenna a certain way and holding that position. And so it went: tap to add, tap-hold to subtract, and her antenna moved appropriately. When the ten joints were exhausted, she positioned one leg under, then another. She moved that leg out and put the next back until she could hold the place of any digit from one to sixty.

When (or if) she hit sixty, she would then tap the ant in front of her and tell it to increment, while she reset her position.

Another signaler ant, which held the number of their warriors, never reset. The colony had far less than sixty to defend itself. That was a dangerously low number, the collective thought. It sent a worker off to signal the royal chamber to differentiate more eggs into warriors.

Eventually, the calculations finished. Synteletrix reset her counter and retired to her hutch.

The colony now tried to imagine or simulate how another battle with Green-Sphere might unfold. Black-Sting could not invade, but it did not seem that Green-Sphere could attack back. Every attack they imagined on their rock left a chokepoint which a few of their warriors could hold. Even their colony’s workers were larger than Green-Sphere’s default ant. But a direct hit, where the green sphere collided with the center of their colony, (which was still a loose netting of rocks, gunk, and insect silk), might enable enough of an attack surface for their warriorkers to overrun the chokepoints.

Black-Sting needed a new strategy.

The collective imagined. It passed signals between the other six, and back down their line, only to get new impulses passed up. The dreamers dreamed, and the networked node devised a new plan.