Everything decays. Bodies, orbits, and the lighter things in the universe: atoms and molecules. Even information can rot.

In the fusion of their star, a photon was created. Moving at the speed of light, it was effectively timeless. It did a random walk of absorption and re-emission in the stellar interior. After unwitnessed years, it finally raced through the outer layers of the star, through interstellar space, and struck a water molecule at relativistic speed. From there, its energy separated hydrogen and oxygen (the dust of a dead star). The hydrogen escaped, leaving the reactive oxygen embedded in the ice. The ending molecule was smaller. The universe had become less complex. And in the eons, those three atoms would never be united again. The hydrogen was pulled into their gas giant. The oxygen reacted and held onto itself.

That bound oxygen, O2, remained stuck in ice. There it sat until it was breathed into the spiracles of a unique creature. A biologic machine which could do the impossible: reverse entropy.

The ant colony, now called Black-Sting, grew in complexity and prospered. It explored, gathered resources, performed chemical reactions to create larger molecules, and produced more of itself.

No other ant colony challenged them, though they were far from safe. They had experienced the repeated surges of terror of falling inward towards the white moon, only to miss it, and then for them to accelerate away. Over many orbits it looked like impact was inevitable, but then their rocks would race into a higher orbit, slow down, and miss the ice moon.

This strange cycle was alien to the ideas the Space Ants carried. In was death, out was life. Now what gave life or death was uncertain.

When their moon died, and the atmosphere was stolen by their gas giant, and the thinning air held much less water. The evolutionary stress of having less air followed leg-in-leg with needing less water. But less water is not the same as no water, and as Black-Sting grew, they needed it more. They lived in terror of the thing they needed: the white moon. White was ice, and life, but in was death. How could they reach the white moon without dying? The colony had no answer.

But this strange quasi-orbit became fortuitous for the armed ants. They came into contact with planetesimals of all sizes, as the ice moon had not yet cleared its orbit. Black-Sting found many things. Most were dry, hard baked masses of solid rock. Others were ice and enabled life to continue for another orbit. The worst were the hollowed out wastes of another colony; husks already picked clean and cast off by other ants. But the watchers reported a fresh sight: green specks, as they floated in this new orbit.

There was another color of life in their ancient collective memory: green. Only bluegreen algae, which was a critical color they cultivated, was consciously remembered. The distant dreams of verdant forests were nearly all forgotten in the black and silver wastes of the ring system. But the colony remembered, green was very good, and a visual synonym for water.

And water was what they needed more than anything.

Myrmidonyx was a soldier. She had fought many battles, with nary a scratch on her black exoskeleton, owing to her skill with obsidian’s sting.

Warriors were big, much bigger than workers which had already experienced evolutionary gigantism. In complex environments with many choke points or difficult terrain, evolution favors larger ants. On flat simple terrain, the strategy is reversed and smaller warriors succeed because they can surround the larger ones.

Size came with added expense and one which few colonies could spare. And so much of Myrmidonyx’s life was spent asleep. But that’s when the dream ants came.

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Dream ants were a breed of signalers, but specialized to pass information along. And Information was more resistant to decay. While ants slept, the dream ants trained the warriors. And it could be passed from one colony to another of a different breed. The dream ants of White-Moon, though few as none were replaced, gave strange dreams. Dreams of green spheres, and of green ants! Green was an impossible color for an ant. In the dreams, the enemies wielded long stingers—impossibly longer than any obsidian blade, and longer than an ant. Stingers which could wielded like obsidian and able to impale an enemy from afar. White-Moon was not small because of any inherent problem with the species. They were small because other tool wielding ants killed them.

At least, that was how the dreams went. Information decays like everything else, and perhaps White-Moon’s ideas had become corrupted.

The dream ant twitched and prodded the antennae of Myrmidonyx. Her neurons were being trained. Slash and dodge; wrestle and throw; sting and slice! Her many orbits of dreaming kept her skills sharp as her blade.

The training dreams ended, and Myrmidonyx awoke to pain, hunger, and unignorable thirst.

She searched around her hutch and found her blade, which was underneath her mat of old larva silk. By now the tip had broken, and the edge was chipped in several places, but those impromptu serrations had made the slice better, though the stab was worse.

Eclipse, as she called it. She held it in her mandibles with pride.

Next, she devoured a mat of old dried fungus. Her metabolism, the glycolysis central to life, could create water from chemical reactions, but that would be too little too late. She was intensely thirsty. The thin air could not hold much moisture. Though her resting respiration was faint, her slumber was long and had dried her out. Water could condense on the walls, especially in the center region of their nest where the big-headed ants slowly increased the pressure by alternating breathing in, blocking the tunnel, then exhaling inside the central chamber.

Myrmidonyx crawled to the more humid chambers. She dragged her mouthparts over and around the walls but found no moisture to suck. But space-ants did not give up and die at something as trifling as no water.

However, the colony’s success and growth was its own undoing. Previously, a single chunk of ice might water them for ten orbits, but now it barely lasted one.

Myrmidonyx searched for anything, but found no free liquid. A pool of liquid had to be near freezing, as even a tepid temperature might cause a boil in the thin interior atmosphere. But by now, nearly every crag of ice on their colony rock had been consumed. The holes where the ice had been were all backfilled with a structural slurry that hardened goth black.

Next, she searched the biologic dump for any plump nibble. There were few. Every skeleton was dessicated and picked clean. Nothing. The fungal farm was also dust dry.

She used her size to stop other ants. Water. She interrogated the workers who passed by.

Everyant gave the same answer. None. The honeypot ants were all thin. The ice was all mined, and the water had turned into waste. The waste was stored as ice, and bacteria slowly consumed it, but at a rate too slow to relieve thirst.

Myrmidonyx even squeezed her girth into holes where the greenhouse ants lived. Her antennae could not reach them, but they reacted violently to her approach. They would not regurgitate their moisture to anyant.

Her thirst was extreme. Myrmidonyx’s dorsal vessel had to pump more often as her blood, called hemolymph, had become thicker. She could feel the pressure pulse through her carapace. She felt the pain of friction as her organs were deprived of lubricating fluid. Her muscles were sluggish and pained, as they were bereft of energy from an interrupted ATP-ADP cycle.

This was death, and a painful one. A death not in battle, as warrior ants wished, but the slow terrible death of dehydration; life’s universal enemy, which could never be defeated. A death from chemistry.

When she had searched everything, she laid down in an intersection of tunnels and pondered eating one of her fellow workers. Killing and eating her own tribe was dishonorable. But perhaps an old worker from White-Moon would come by. Or rather, perhaps she was to be the one sacrificed for the colony, dismembered and recycled for them.

The workers scurried around her and were more annoyed than bloodthirsty.

But her patience paid off. One worker was bringing a fresh body to the morgue. Myrmidonyx held the worker down, sucked every drop of fluid she could from the partial corpse, and then let the worker go about their labor.

For a moment, her death was delayed. Though the certainty was inevitable. She was not dismembered, nor did she need dishonor to live.

Thump, ta-thump. She was roused by the signaling of many legs alerting the colony. The sweet music of alarm.

It had been many orbits since her last battle. She did not even know, but more orbits than she had legs.

Battle, finally. She thought.