Lost!

She looked around. There she spied another chunk of ice which was angled up and over the long wall of ice.

Clutching and pulling on the ice was the one physical skill that greenhouse ants had strength at. Her long front legs pulled herself up the makeshift ramp. She looked around a full half circle and saw nothing recognizable. This had been a fool’s errand, a stressed colony’s feeble attempt to get some bearing on a dire situation, and now she had to pay for the panic. At least it was daytime; she would not suffocate.

Hive? Her tiny mind kept searching.

As if by instinct, she restarted a search spiral, though more like half circles which alternated direction when she hit the cliff. Each subsequent half-lap widened evermore, though with her poor eyesight, she could not transit far from the previous lap without missing something.

On her sixth (or thereabouts) transit, she came across another ant. The poor creature was half frozen in the ice.

Black-Sting, her antenna reflexively tried to communicate.

The dead ant said nothing.

After waiting for the non answer, she finally moved.

From there, she restarted her search.

After a few passes, she saw a green smudge. Green was innately interesting, but on this white ice plain, any color would have been attractive. She approached it in a straight line, and the smudge became a shape. She discovered one of the small holobiant eggs. The colony had prior excised Green-Sphere’s ant larva, but otherwise it remained a tightly sealed environment, complete with the inert spores and seeds.

Aerofolima mentally recorded the location and walked another circle.

There she found another dead ant, or was it the same dead ant? It did not reply. With more probing by her antenna, she discovered it was not half stuck in the ice and thus a different ant. Again she searched.

Lost. The pain of the realization hit her again. Though rarely a wanderer, she still carried the ant instincts to find the colony. She spun around and looked every direction. There was no sign of the hive. The incredible loneliness fell upon her like an asteroid striking a world.

Alone. In all her life, she had never been far from any other ant.

She stopped. The cold overtook her. Though she could walk on her claws and reduce contact with the ice, it did not solve all her problems. More wispy ice fell on to her, sapping her heat. For many moments, she stood there, until eventually the muscles holding her abdomen were exhausted. Rarely had she ever needed to do so. Even if the colony was spinning, and her leg muscles flexed, she never had to keep her abdomen ‘up,’ which was a new muscular phenomenon.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Finally, she lowered her bottom. She could feel the cold stab through like an obsidian blade, but only for a moment. The algae’s chemistry slowed.

The colder she got, the less she wanted to move.

Sleep, her body told her.

She twitched her eyes left and right. The white plain had various deformations, but none were promising. Then she turned around again and looked behind her. A similar scene greeted her until the cliff’s horizon met the black sky. The sun was still dazzling and beautiful.

The cold pierced, but only to a point. Most of her clear abdomen was air, and it insulated the rest of her from the cold. She became lethargic, but did not slip into torpor. Her dorsal vessel was on top, where it joined parts of the distended intestines and hindgut. There it naturally transferred oxygen to the bloodstream as easily as it transferred the chemicals from her digested food, and there the pockets of algae also lived.

No sleep. She knew she couldn’t stand here forever. Though usually immobile, they were still space ants. And space ants are always busy.

She got up and followed the slope of ice down. Ahead were more small blemishes on the featureless plain. There she spied a peculiar rise, which was pointed and pronounced. She walked toward it. Perhaps at the top, she could get the entirety of her posterior off the chilly ground.

She summited, and turned completely around. The sun reflected off the ice, and when it was at her back, she saw the faintest of a rainbow reflect off the mist which hung in the air. Her eyes could only see part of the colorful spectrum, but it was another display of nature’s beauty above its bleak harshness.

Though it was the most amazing thing she had seen in her life, an unexplainable impulse made her look down. There, semitransparent, barely a foot-width deep, were dead ants. Colony? She thought in horror.

She clawed at the ice. Then used the full weight of her body to land again on the two pointed claws of her frontlimbs. She made little progress. Her other limbs and hairs felt the impact of her strike. The faintest of reverberations jiggled up her back legs and the hairs which were in contact with the ground. Aerofolima stopped and listened, trying to discover if it was the echoes of her actions or something else.

The vibrations came again—but now they were stronger!

She reoriented herself and looked below again. Down through the fresh casing of frozen water something—many things under the ice! She banged on it again. Then she saw movement.

She recoiled; half in fear, but half curious. Again she repositioned herself, looking for a more hopeful sign. Directly below her she saw a white tube, almost the width of a…

Tunnel? She thought.

The Colony! She was elated at finding her family of Black-Sting.

The ice quakes had released a large flow of water and the colony instinctively swarmed around the queen. The water could not decide whether it wished to boil, flow, or freeze; it fell, flowed, or was repulsed by the teeming sphere of everyant (water’s molecular cohesion being a strange thing at zero pressure and freezing). Though shocking and deadly at first glance, fate had smiled on the colony and sealed the entire mass of surviving ants into one large chamber. Together, and contained the colony could survive.

Aerofolima banged on the ice more. Soon she was tired. But the white tunnel slowly crept toward her and then it turned upward.

She could almost see the ant through the rough walls.

Inside, one ant formed a makeshift airlock with its head.

Finally, the ice broke under her.

Black-Sting, Aerofolima’s antennae reflexively identified herself.

Black-Sting. The worker ant replied sluggishly due to the cold, though it could have easily been interpreted in a nonchalant ‘who else might it be’ manner.

The worker backed up, and Aerofolima crawled in upside down.

Now with one full-time oxygen producer, fully exposed to the sun, the colony of Black-Sting was safe for their rest of their moon’s orbit.

But still, they were dead cold for now. But with atmosphere and oxygen (and with an inexhaustible supply of water), Space Ants could solve any problem.

How deep is the ice? And what lurks in that darkness? Space Ants would need to dig deep to find out.