Myrmidonyx left her watering hole, returned to the siege bridge and found the signaler ant. She relayed the information to it. Then she returned to her post posed for battle. She held her blade in front and faced the alleyway where her worker had been taken.

She watched the trail, eager for battle. She felt rumbles, and the beating of legs, but rubbery skin muffled the meaning. Eventually she looked behind her and saw the agitation of her colony.

Another allied ant came. Under Attack! It tapped out on her gastor.

They all repositioned, crawling over other allies towards where the commotion originated, but there Myrmidonyx spied the same thing, a forest of spines with small trails, and no sign of danger.

Other soldiers followed the workers clearing a path, but again they saw nothing. Only glimpses of enemies through the thickets, or a few missing workers.

By now, the siege ladder had tugged the two massive structures closer. The colony’s instinct was to integrate anything it could, and with such a colossal prize, it needed it close.

Black-Sting knew there was something which inhabited the interior of the space cacti, though they did not know to call it that. Black-Sting was on the verge of dehydration, and anything silver-white or green had to be consumed. They had only passing knowledge of such an object from the patterings of White-Moon’s dream ants and did not know the danger it was in.

Once the green sphere got within a spine’s distance of the colony, they sprung the trap.

Myrmidonyx could feel immense changes underneath her feet. She saw the spine forests move, which revealed many large stomata, which had co-evolved to act as airlocks for the smaller ants. Out of the new holes, swarms of small ants emerged.

Battle! She and her sisters thought.

She readied her blade, eager to teach them the pain of obsidian’s slice.

The small ants were fearless and charged directly at her.

She recoiled on her back four legs.

And swung.

The serrated blade traced a wide path, crashing into the first enemy.

She killed it outright and saw its head rupture and spray fluids onto her blade, rebaptizing it.

There was no time to relish the victory, or to savor the enemy’s vital fluids. Myrmidonyx turned and immediately killed another ant, only for another to take its place. Holding the blade in her mandibles, she swung it in wide arcs in front of her, trying to cover more area, but then she became weighed down. It was as though gravity was slowly turned on.

Trap—Another warrior said visually with their antennae, but their words were incomplete as the panicked ant was pinned to the ground. Dozens of the swarm stung it in the head, eyes, and pronotum. It writhed in pain, and let loose its air, only to scream in silence.

Myrmidonyx moved over to rescue, but a leg was stuck. She turned her head and saw small enemy mandibles fastened to her leg. Its back legs clutched a nearby spine.

She reached behind, swung her obsidian blade, and missed. But instead of a failure, she had severed the spine it clutched to. She barely felt its increased weight and ran over to the ally, being swarmed and stung to death.

Other allies backed into her, also seeking to evade the swarm and form a defensive perimeter. She continuously circled, trying to keep the workers off her legs. For every ant Myrmidonyx killed, another two took their places. They were being overrun. She could not help.

Myrmidonyx saw the tiny ants spear the pinned ally with a spine. White-Moon’s dreams were not wrong. Other ants with tools existed! She watched her ally’s antenna signal panicked thoughts until the tiny enemies chewed them off. Spines were sticking out of its head, but it was still alive. An enemy worker moved one embedded spine up and down.

Myrmidonyx marched to rescue her ally. She felt another ant on her back trying to bite through her exoskeleton, but her armor was too strong. Ahead, just two body lengths away, she watched the tiny ant continue to lever a thick spine up down. The spike must have hit a joint in their armor, for her ally’s exoskeleton ruptured catastrophically. A rapid decompression of fluids coated everything in the melee before boiling off in the vacuum.

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Armor was no good against tools. Adding insult to injury, the battlefield was too open. It allowed the smaller ant swarm to flank every one of Black-Sting’s soldiers.

An ally came over to her, killed her free rider, and Myrmidonyx turned around and did the same for her warrior. They stood leg-to-leg but facing opposite directions, each covering the rear and one side of the other. Myrmidonyx looked for better terrain from which to fight from. Could she crawl into the tunnels? No. She could not fit through the thicket.

They needed sisters at their sides and defensible terrain. The only option was back up the siege tower, which still connected the two colonies.

Lines of her worker ants still clung to the spines, spread out like a sticky net over the landing. Their single points of contact partially protected them from the swarm scurrying around the strange sphere’s emerald skin. The workers held (best they could) but anxiety pulsed through the tower.

Myrmidonyx retreated. She felt like she was dragging an entire colony behind her. Pain emanated from the bottoms of her legs, as she could feel the mandibles of the minions squeezing at her exoskeleton, but they were too weak to pierce.

Ouch! White hot pain emanated from her rear. She had been speared in her gastor. What a dishonor, being stabbed in the back while fleeing.

She felt more pain, but the enemy ant couldn’t lever her armor off as she was now scurrying with all her might. Because of her dehydrated state, less liquid was exposed to hard vacuum, and she did not explosively boil out. Her armor held.

Allies were escaping swiftly. The last workers evacuated the landing zone. The entire siege tower retracted, as if it had one collective purpose: save the colony.

Myrmidonyx reached the nadir. She saw other abandoned allies around her being swarmed.

The tower’s shadow passed over her. Fitting. She might have thought if there was time for such a thought. All that was left was her and her black blade.

She turned around and swung Eclipse in wide strokes, slaying every tiny ant in her reach. Better a fate of dismemberment before one of dishonor.

Slice, dodge. She killed another. Blood and fluids propelled the carcass, which crashed into another tiny ant.

Wrestle, fling. Her body bucked a free rider off into deep space.

Her energy waned, and the enemies pinned her down, but she would not relinquish her blade. Ahead, she saw an enemy approaching with a spike.

Death comes. She thought.

Darkness grew. The siege tower had stretched, and with one final expansion, reached down, and two workers grabbed her off the landing zone and back into safety. Six of the enemy swarm still clung to her. Another evacuee ant placed its large mandibles on a neck and decapitated it in one satisfying crunch. The other enemies were to be captured alive and held more gingerly in the jaws of workers.

The tower retracted and disassembled. Myrmidonyx watched the enemies grow smaller until all she could see was the faint scurry of creatures recycling the battlefield.

Back on her colony rock, Myrmidonyx had difficulty getting back into the airlock. She had to fold her body painfully and reinjured herself more from the broken spine still stuck in her rear.

Inside, she finally breathed. For many moments she hyperventilated the thin dry air, and laid still in the hallway, sure that being recycled was her next and last mission.

She crawled feebly to the trash midden.

The hive was alive with great activity, and workers passed over her. They excitedly cycled back through the airlocks. The workers had succeeded with something, somehow. Unseen to her, they took something from the green sphere.

The great green thing reproduced by asexual budding and, when time was ready, would slough off a new sphere. But it was a holobiont, a multi-species egg, containing a fully sealed ecosystem. The space cacti was a mutualistic complex of organisms. An organism of organisms. In the alarm of escape, the green thing had propelled several buds in their direction, hoping for momentum or for injury. Several struck (and stuck) to the webbing connecting their colony’s rocks. The workers busily bit into one of them, extracted any water, and brought dismembered bits back into the colony.

They had also secured many spines which would supply the colony with more weapons than the now-rare obsidian blades.

Myrmidonyx arrived at the organic trash heap. For the colony, she seemed to think. She dropped her blade. Goodbye Eclipse, she thought.

A worker, one of the medical caste, came over to her. It went over her entire body, searching without telling her anything. She breathed hard, but other than dehydration, and the pain of being impaled, she was not due to die. Not this orbit anyway.

The medical ant concluded the same. However, the spine needed to be removed. Another helper ant came over and steadied itself against the walls with its hindlimbs. It placed its mandibles on the spike and gave it a slight twist.

Remove. The medical ant ordered.

Pain! Myrmidonyx jerked forward and shrieked.

The helper ant extracted the spine, and meanwhile the medical ant stung near the wound, then it placed a foot over the hole. Her blood, still thick by dehydration, sealed it quickly. The medical ants were a class of workers with a weakened poison. This chemical was a painkiller and a coagulator.

Myrmidonyx was not to be recycled, not today. With so many warriors already dead, she had too much information to waste. The colony needed her.

She picked up Eclipse and dragged her butt back to her hutch and there she slept.

Deep in her slumber, her battle with Green-Sphere was retransmitted to the dream ants. Over and over, there were dreams of little ants using simple rods to pivot and pry.

And the colony learned.