Her body felt the slow release of chemicals, a warmth of stimulants, and she scurried to an exterior door ant. There was a swarm, and it would take several cycles of opening and closing to exit the colony. Warrior and worker alike waited. Her turn came, and she sucked in any remaining air and waited.

The great door ant lifted its head. Sunlight hit her eyes. Outside, the sun was dazzling. The rings lit up in a billion points of light and sparkled with great beauty. Myrmidonyx’s eyes adjusted. She beheld the backside of their gas giant in infrared. The swirling near-red sphere was intersected by the long thin slice of the rings, their biome, and stretched away as far as she could see. That thin ring, containing ice and the shredded leftovers of their dead moon, was all the life they’d ever know.

Myrmidonyx followed her swarm of sisters to one side of their colony.

There, a latticed bridge of workers towered into the black sky. Her eyes spied their goal. Up ahead, floating in space, was something she had never seen before. Above them was a huge green sphere, half lit by the light.

The dreams implanted during her sleep roused her from wonder to alarm. Distant memories stored in her genes equated green with water, and she was thirsty. But it was not all green. As it got closer, she saw a forest of long, white spines.

Their workers were constructing a siege bridge, which was nearly complete. Myrmidonyx crawled up the legs of her sister workers. The segmented tower was alive and cohered with one united purpose: water.

The massive green sphere floated above. It briefly eclipsed the sun, and a shadow fell over the tower. She could see spikes, white glowing and backlit. The green giant was in fact a prolate spheroid, not that space-ants had the vocabulary for that rugby ball shape. Its verdant green beckoned them. Fragments of forgotten neural pathways fired, remembering for once the old dream that Green was the original color of Life. They all felt it; their lost instinct had finally remembered a color spawned only by abundant water.

Another part of the colony cast off used mass, and everyant sensed the colony slowly moving toward its prey.

Myrmidonyx observed the sphere. The green skin was with dotted small bubbles or boils, and pinched ridges. Long spines were dispersed from each other, but in between the areas were filled with innumerable smaller ones. And she saw the flits of movement on what looked like trails under the white spine forest, but could not focus on anything.

Floating off from the spine tops, she saw thin lines of larva silk. They drifted and hung slack in the void. She saw lifeless drones from her colony, which looked impaled by the long protrusions. Did the drone jump-assault fail? Such a thought was too complex for her, and she only paid attention to her job ahead.

The siege tower stretched nearly to the spines.

Easy jump, and she crawled to the top.

Slowly, the green spheroid rotated away from them, deliberately, like it had animus. Out the back, it shot a tiny rock.

The stone flew towards the siege bridge, collided with a thin line of linked workers.

Myrmidonyx clutched the legs of her sister, bracing for the reverberation of the collision. The rock bowled three ants off into the void. She felt the silent impact.

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The living siege tower slacked and then tightened up. All legs tensed, and the impact was dissipated, while only losing three workers to deep space’s death. The green sphere’s countermeasure was ineffective, as it gained only a moment’s reprieve. Though the relative velocity between colony and green slightly increased, the colony’s distributed consciousness recognized this, and it pushed off some other mass opposite of the siege tower.

The colony inched forward and the bridge grew. Space ants approached again.

The green sphere pushed another small rock away, but missed hitting the tower.

They were in a slow race in zero gravity, each expelling anything to change their relative speeds.

Steady streams of workers left the bridge for an airlock, only to cycle back out in an endless circle of respiration, though a worker with no exertion might hold their breath for the entire siege. Myrmidonyx stayed still, almost asleep, conserving her oxygen. Her large size allowed her to compress more air and stay at her post.

A steady stream of workers crawled over her towards the green thing.

She watched as they reached their goal.

The living bridge reached out and clutched the long spines like the maw of a giant creature or a claw of a monster. Individual workers bit and held spines and were not impaled like the jumper drones, though the spikes were a strange encounter. Workers chewed off the long spines and slowly cleared a safe landing zone.

Other workers landed and bit anything to secure the connection. The siege bridge was the only point of contact, but the colony could scarcely maintain so many workers outside in the void. Weavers tried to tie lines, but the spines gave no barb to secure to.

Myrmidonyx was the first of four warriors to stand on the newly cleared space. Scouts came and reconnoitered the terrain, scuttling off in random directions, trying to penetrate the thicket. Workers cleared off most of the spines around the landing zone. Several carried them back to the colony, unsure of if their new thing was trash or treasure.

One worker impaled herself in the face. She writhed and collided with things until another chewed off the spine’s base. Then she could move again, though it kept the truncated spine lodged in its face. Removing it fully would have been a death sentence, exposing that ant’s innards to hard vacuum and rapid decompression. The injured worker moved its head in exaggerated movements left to right to see everything again.

Unable to move forward, and obeying the distant instinct that green equaled water, Myrmidonyx pushed with her obsidian blade into the strange shell. It was like an exoskeleton, but thick and rubbery.

Nothing could live amongst the rings unprotected. Still, it was not like any prior enemy she had encountered in dreams or reality. Not like mites, or tube worms, nor like the stinger ants. And not the bluegreen of their colony’s greenhouses. This green was verdant. Familiar, yet alien, Myrmidonyx did not know whether to classify it as friend, foe, or fortune. She was, after all, no botanist. She was a space ant. There were wrinkles and pinches to the skin, and the entire surface had small ridges and curves which let phalanxes of spines protect each other.

Myrmidonyx kept pushing her blade into the skin. She thought she detected wisps of liquid boiling off.

Water, she thought, and her body demanded. She sunk her mountparts, the maxillae and labium, into the hole she made, trying to seal it up, and to suck up anything.

She tasted the prize. The liquid was semi-sweet. Refreshing. Her anxiety relaxed for a moment. The rate of flow was slow, and she wanted water more than breath, but the peace did not last. Her sensitive hairs felt vibrations from below. The piercing or the sucking had provoked a reaction from the green sphere.

Her antennae tapped on a worker near her. Investigate, she commanded.

The worker walked through a small trail the in the forest of uncleared spines, one far too small for Myrmidonyx to enter.

Myrmidonyx let go of her hole and sunk her blade in deeper. It was easier to cut now and more fluid boiled off.

She quickly placed her mouth back in, but extracted only a quantum of fluids before she saw the unexpected: the forest of spines moved!

Ahead, on the same trail the worker took, a hole appeared. The hapless worker was almost swallowed up but hung on to nearby spines with its legs. It looked down into the green maw.

Six small ants emerged from the hole and dragged the fighting worker down. The hole closed up again.

A colony! Myrmidonyx realized. Battle would be waged soon.