Crashed.

Despite the losses, Black-Sting lands on the ice moon. Spread back to the horizon was a long line of the dead or dying ants. The hive could do nothing. It had no conscious thought as the dreamers were unorganized; the signalers were dispersed and dead. No hive mind. Only instinct triggered. Dig to live. Dig before exhaustion overtakes. Make a hole, cover their heads, and hope for the best. That was the space ant way.

All around was confusion. At first, a few ants dug separately, then the signalers organized them. But digging takes oxygen. With no air and no nest, asphyxiation would soon overtake and kill them all.

All except for the greenhouse ants; luckily dawn was here. Sunlight lit their bulbous transparent bottoms, generating a thin margin of oxygen for them to use. Greenhouse ants wouldn’t suffocate, but death was still at the door, as no ant lives alone. The queen laid motionless, still curled into a ball. She was surrounded by bluegreen royal jelly. Perhaps the colony egg had survived the landing, then if they all died, the hive might still continue.

Aerofolima was one such greenhouse ant. Although dazed and stunned by the landing, she was otherwise uninjured. She let go of her sisters and looked about, but her weak eyes saw little. Small workers scurried about—some searching manically for door-ants, which were no more. Others uselessly clawed the ice.

Attention! A signaler organized the panicked ants.

Dig here, one said to Aerofolima. She could feel the anxiety from the haste and uncertainty of the message.

Aerofolima used her claws to scratch out a hole in the ice. Next to her, another greenhouse ant also clawed. Around her, masses of suffocating ants stood around silently. Most entered torpor, awaiting the curtain call to expend their last ounce of energy to save the colony before perishing.

When the depth of Aerofolima’s hole was a leg’s length, the tiniest of their workers crawled down into the pit. The small ant continued excavations and Aerofolima used her long forelimbs to pull up the ice. She packed it around the top of the hole. Other workers came and excreted the last of their liquids around the mount. Most liquid boiled off to the near vacuum, but enough froze to seal the growing conical mound.

Soon the tiny ant was exhausted. It crawled off, perhaps to die, perhaps to be revived after a torpor, and another took its place. Then Aerofolima climbed in behind it head-first. She expanded her torso and sealed the room. The scatter of light filtered through ice filled the tiny room.

Aerofolima’s antenna tapped the small worker ahead of her. Breathe, she ordered it, and they both exhaled.

The little worker felt relieved to be under the pressure of oxygenated air again. Its anxiety lessened, and it happily dug deeper.

The bluegreen algae in Aerofolima’s abdomen received the sun’s rays and the new carbon dioxide from the worker, but she felt no stress. After a few breaths, both ants sucked in the remaining air. Aerofolima pulled herself out of the hole, which looked like some tiny volcano finally blowing its unbalanced top.

Another worker climbed in while Aerofolima watched the sun. It dazzled her—such a rare sight for her. She felt a faint drift of ice land on her body—the output of some distant geyser—and it blanketed the exposed hive. Aerofolima climbed back in the hole and sealed it again.

Over and over they repeated the pattern with different workers cycling in until eventually five, then six small ants could squeeze inside. Those new ants chewed sideways, linking the holes into the core chamber of a nest.

Other ants suddenly woke from slumber, then collected and pushed the crystallize snow around the two stacks of the reforming hive. After they exhausted themselves, they added their own bodies to the sides, sealing it further.

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Aerofolima exited the hole and felt quite sluggish. She basked in the sunlight, but there was no warmth on the blue field. One thing space ants lacked was the ability to generate sufficient heat. Their thin fat reserves had extra mitochondria to generate energy, but their colony’s ecology had been too stressed in recent orbits to pack on fat.

Even before their planet died, the space ants descended from a breed of ant which lived in the high mountains. They simply retreated into their warm insulating rock when they got cold. And then in space, where radiative cooling was their only loss, they also stayed relatively warm. But now, with ice beneath and mist above, heat leeched away like a parasitic mite sucking their blood.

A signaler came up to Arefolima and commanded, Search.

Arefolima did not take offense that her sunbath was interrupted—it was wholly ineffective at warmth—or being ordered to walk. Being an oxygen producer, greenhouse ants were the only ones who could, but walking was never their most attractive quality. As she walked, her bulbous abdomen dragged on the ice and soon went numb.

She had to walk with an even more exaggerated stance, holding her gastor up in the air with her back legs fully extended. Greenhouse ants hate to walk. It’s as tiring as it is awkward. They spend their entire lives plugged in a hole, gripping the interior with their long claws. Since no other ant could survive physical exertion, it was up to them.

She left her huddled dying colony and her sister greenhouse ants and did a random spiral walk towards the horizon. The faintest splotches in her vision were inspected. She had to use her antenna on them to figure out what it was. Mostly, they were fragments of rock, or dead ants, which littered the white plain.

It was cold (it was always cold), but being in contact with the ice sapped her energy. After the seventh or eighth pass of the spiral search pattern, and after finding nothing more of interest, and tired of walking, she turned back to the hive.

She saw nothing, but still had a general idea of where the hive was.

The ground reverberated. It shook from beneath her.

She stopped and put her antennae on the ground.

Another wave of ice crystals wafted down and coated Aerofolima and everything. Her antennae moved fast and did not get frozen to the terrain. (Perhaps at another time, from a cosmic perspective, the sight of a greenhouse ant, large butt in the air, and antenna stuck in the ground would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, and the colony not in mortal danger).

Aerofolima felt more disturbed. Small vibrations ran up the hairs that touched the ice.

What was that? She turned toward the seismic origin.

Below her, titanic forces moved. She stopped—or rather was halted. Cracks bloomed into quakes and rattled her. She almost lost her footing! (Which, with having six legs, is quite hard to do.) A new crack fractaled out underneath her. Though Space Ants rarely experienced quakes, they instinctively knew cracks could be dangerous.

Ahead, a sheet of ice uplifted and rose to a peak several times her height.

Aerofolima scurried to her left, trying to outrun the growing cliff. Cracks zig-zagged underneath her. Water sprayed out then boiled, and the mist froze, leaving some crystals to escape the moon’s low gravity. Pebbles of ice landed on her, and further occluded her translucent abdomen, which weakened the already faint photosynthesis.

She ran faster, and her oxygen depleted. Soon she walked, and finally she stopped. For many moments, she waited and regained her strength.

The ground broke up on every side. Cold liquid water boiled off in the exposed vacuum. She clutched her raft of solid ice. Ahead of her, cracks became holes and water surged out of it, seemingly at triple point. Her float of ice was heaved up and around on the newly exposed liquid sea.

The three phase water pushed around her raft of ice with a ghostly life of its own. Liquid water, under pressure and underneath the ice, kept forcing its titanic will onto the surface, while a profuse rain of crystal mist showered her.

She backed away from the oncoming water. Her back legs and abdomen hit something cold. More water-ice had come from behind. She retracted her back leg, quick enough to prevent it from becoming frozen.

Ahead, the ice looked solid, and Aerofolima used her last oxygen to scurry over to the next raft. She climbed the slight angle to the apex, which was only a single body-height above the newly reformed plain.

Water everywhere! She surprised herself at this thought, as the frantic fight for survival had filled up her neurons. They’d never be in want of water, which was often the limiting factor to their colony’s growth.

She felt more reverberations under the ice. Her raft rose as water’s incompressibility forced her up. Liquid between the cracks refroze to crack again and push forth into a new shape like some infinite worm endlessly turning itself inside out. Then, as quick as it had started, the pulsing under the ice stopped. Their new hydraulic gods had been satiated.

For several moments, she did nothing and felt for the slightest sounds.

Aerofolima had had enough and longed for the comfort of her sisters. She could be cold, and die, if only she were surrounded by the hive. That was the way to die, not out here lost on the ice alone.