Captured!
With each passing geyser strike, the colony lost altitude. Its only saving grace was the moon-wide resurfacing events, which resulted in long plains of smooth ice and no mountains. Along with its wisp-thin atmosphere, Black-Sting survives in a tight orbit.
They had no useful units of measure to calculate their speed. The number overflowed the colony’s ability to estimate with dozens of signalers. Meanwhile, they estimated the distance from the surface in only dozens of colony lengths.
The colony’s tiny consciousness knew it was hurtling at fatal velocities. They knew how slow something had to be in order to be caught successfully . On a scale from gentle to obliterate, they were way off the obliterate end. Striking the blue-white plains of ice at orbital speeds would be death, even at such a glancing blow.
Rothia was a worker. Though from time to time she was called on for other jobs, she mostly crawled around their black nest and carried items to and from the trash middens.
She woke naturally in her hutch close to the dump. The scent was unmistakable in the dark chamber. Heaps of the dead filled the room. She felt the faint fungi hyphae brush against her legs. Her usual job was to scour the colony for refuse, and drag it back to the waste chamber. Other times, she secured floating bits back into the pile.
Today it was the reverse. Remove. A signaler ordered her outside.
She was not the fastest worker, owing her back leg. It was thin from atrophy, and she used her other five legs to compensate. Rothia’s tiny mind did not know if it was an injury or a congenital defect.
She moved the refuse: parts of dead ants they could not recycle, waste ice, or loose rock. Outside, she saw the bits being sewed together into one massive pile at the front of their colony.
She looked out and was taken aback. A vast white light was below, though crescented and lit only along one far edge, it was so huge it dominated her field of vision. Rothia was one of those workers rarely cursed (or blessed) with outdoor work, and her fresh eyes adjusted to the bright new horizon.
Other workers streamed out of the ant airlocks, all lined up between the giant ball of trash and the colony’s only remaining rock. She was not commanded to help, on account of her bad leg, and scuttled back in. The other ants were all assembled for one last kickoff, one last attempt to slow down their fatal velocity.
Inside, Rothia felt only a slight change in momentum.
There was no time to rest. Now everyant was being called back into the royal chamber.
Rothia was carried along by the living carpet. She assembled with her sisters. At the entrance she felt the big-headed ant let many workers in, which filled every space. Rothia fell into a spot and felt dozens of legs and claws clutch her. Someone grabbed her bad leg tightly.
In the center, the queen floated. She had collected eggs and spheres of royal jelly. Twelve greenhouse ants crawled around her. They had been deflated and pulled out of their sockets, but now they reinflated to encapsulate the queen.
She felt a faint spin begin, and it pulled the ant sphere to the outer walls of the chamber. Spin continued; over and over, they all tumbled. She felt the room fill with anxiety like the chemical alarm of battle, but the blackness and the touch of others kept them all still. Rothia felt the air go stale.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
For what felt like forever, Rothia clutched the ball of her sisters. There must have been ants outside watching, because the entire sphere tensed at once. They took a collective deep breath and sucked in the last oxygen.
Bam!
Everything happened at once. The thin air over-pressurized, was heated to plasma temperatures, and the shockwave slammed into the big-headed ant. It instantly melted through the ant’s skull, and the shockwave exploded into the royal chamber. All with a sound too loud to hear, a force too heavy to bear, and a brief light too bright to behold. All of Rothia’s senses were shocked simultaneously.
Whatever strength the rock had was instantly obliterated. The force shattered the stones like an egg’s paper shell. The interior chamber had a brief flash of light, as the silk bindings ignited, but the already rarefied air and increased volume diffused the pressure. All went black again.
The considerable remaining force transferred to the ant sphere. Wrapped at least eight ants thick, the exterior-most ants liquefied on contact, insulating the next layer of ants from the colossal force.
Rothia slammed against her sisters. Something broke. Pain shot up from her hindleg. She lost grasp with her fellow ants, but since it was all exoskeletons and limbs colliding, she had nowhere to go.
The outer bottom layer of ants were ripped off, as the force of their friction, even on the flat plain of ice, exceeded all abilities to hold on.
But the ant structure bounced back up.
Rothia’s senses were addled. They spun too fast to get her bearings and felt like the air blast had blown all her hairs off—not that she could react intelligently even if she could see or feel. Only instinct worked, and she held onto any body she could. Her mandibles bit a foot, her claws hooked around some other parts, while others did likewise.
Ouch! At least two ants were pulling on her broken leg as the delaminated layers of ants cohered back into a ball.
The outer ants could see they floated and whizzed over the flat plain of ice at speeds of many hundreds of bodylengths per moment.
Rothia, in a now more exterior layer, was momentarily calm, except for the pain. There were no sounds, and few sights.
The sphere tightened. Rothia felt like her back leg would soon rip off.
Second impact.
The hit rattled Rothia’s organs, causing a slamming of pain.
Another layer of ants peeled off, and forces reverberated through the ball, but there was no blast of heat.
The sphere bounced, and the squirming, terrified mass reconfigured. As her sisters clutched her, the pain in her leg grew. Her midlimbs let go of her side neighbors and grabbed her injured leg.
The next hit came quicker. They lost fewer ants, and now Rothia could see—if there was anything to really see—it was all black, navy blue and gray, of a quickly spinning spirograph.
Her back leg broke at the joint, and she lost her grip on her front sisters. Her forelimbs let go and clutched her injured back leg, trying to lessen the pain.
Another impact.
This time the force ripped Rothia away from the sphere of her sisters.
Rothia spun weightless in the sky. She silently watched ‘the everything’ spin, then saw rays of sunshine as it briefly crawled over the horizon, only to disappear again as she descended. Her working limbs circled, trying to counteract the rotation. The ice had ghostly white highlights and glossy navy blue interior. It felt like the ground rose up to Rothia. She put all legs down and faced her fate.
She struck the sheet of ice. The exoskeleton of her unbroken legs cracked. The bad leg shattered. She felt the cold friction of sliding over rough ice, then struck an imperfection and she flipped over on her back. She saw the black sky and faint blurry stars.
After many moments, everything finally stopped. Fluids slowly boiled off from between the cracks in her body, which slowly coagulated.
Her antenna tried to move, only to find they were both broken.
Pain returned to her little brain. Her legs were unresponsive. She saw no sister near her.
A thin ray of sunlight came back over the hill. Then she passed out.
She died there on that ice plain. And in the millions of orbits hence, Rothia would never crawl, or eat, or twitch her antenna at another ant. No battles to clean up after, nothing to forage, nor ice to be mined, nor silk to be gathered. In the infinite expanse of time, the Universe spared her only those few orbits around the gas giant, not even once around her sun. But in that time, she did her job.
Was that the Universe’s cruel irony? That Rothia, who brought so many dying ants to the organic midden, would she die alone out here on the ice plain, never to be recycled? Was she being punished?
No. She was a good ant. The Universe did not require her to be a super-ant, it only required a little courage in the face of chaos. To locally reverse the entropy in one’s own small way. It also did not view death the same way. Though she felt alone at death, she was never alone. Rothia would be eternally eusocial.
But her death did not go unobserved. Observers, both near and far saw her.