They had five, maybe six more orbits before the colony was done for. None knew for sure, but the swarm collectively understood it... It was in the way the old queen stopped laying eggs and cannibalized her ovipositor... In the stale, thin air’s, slowly putrefying scent.

The colony had been kicked so far down they had only a thin silk strand of hope left. Any dead weight had already been jettisoned to secure these last few orbits.

Styggy knew it. Mostly, by the lack of his peers. When he swept his antenna over other ants, but did not meet any more like him.

He was the last scout.

All others were workers... save for maybe a dozen warriors.

They were close to doom, but Space Ants never say die.

A signaler ant came to him.

Seek and capture, anything, the dancing antennas communicated.

He was being sent out, but was not deterred—it was a scout ant’s job.

There was the exit. An airlock held by the massive door-ant and he waited to exit. Around him he felt one warrior ant, and then two weavers.

They squeezed into the small space. Then they sucked in as much air as they could in their carapace... The door-ant closed the room behind them.

Then it lifted it's massive, flat, head.

Out Styggy went into the black vast of space and scurried around the colony-rock to the jump point.

There he saw it, one rock off into the distance. The sighters had been correct. It was a small rock, bad in that it might be hard to hit, but good because it would be uninhabited. But bad again, because a small rock would not have much momentum.

They needed something massive, preferably iron, to boost their colony into a safer orbit.

They could use ice for momentum, but only in a pinch.

Styggy tracked the prize. It was small, but silvery. Water-ice or metal. Regardless, the colony was past the safe point, they would soon be burned up in their gas giant’s cloud tops.

He positioned his muscular hind legs as two weavers wrapped a coil of silk around his bulbous posterior, the gaster. He crouched, like a set spring, and eyed the object.

Ready. A weaver communicated via tap command.

Behind them, small meteorites burned as they fell into the gas giant, never to be seen again. Perhaps radiotrophic life would grow in the atmosphere of the gas giant, and their colony’s extinction a mere blip on life’s eventual roadmap? Such issues were too large for space-ants to concern themselves.

But they would not die... Not this day, not this orbit.

Styggy, the space-ant, would nail this jump.

The silvery thing approached. He sat patiently and his back legs twitched. He could make it.

His legs triggered, and he shot up.

...

Styggy was born to soar!

He flew through the vacuum toward his colony’s last hope. Halfway, he flipped and now his sturdy legs faced the prize. He saw the enormous striped crescent which dominated their lives. His colony was on the innermost edge of the ring around their gas giant. Once, their planet had been a verdant moon before it drifted. Gravity had stolen the atmosphere slowly. The largest creatures died, then the small, and only the ants adapted to space.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

But Styggy and the space-ants did not comprehend. The colony knew by instinct that inward was death, and outwards was life.

Always jump out, never give in. Climb orbits.

Raw inherent knowledge.

The gas giant had immense rings of glistening material, which they could have if only they jumped for it.

He looked behind. Almost there. As he landed, the space-ant would feel instantly whether it was hollow, or ice, or metal, by the amount it recoiled from the landing.

Styggy hit with a muffled thump—a solid metal asteroid.

With all his might, claws, spurs, legs, and the innumerable hairs, he fastened to any fissure found, trying not to bounce back off into space.

He could tell by the lack of momentum he transferred... it was huge. They’d leech enough impetus for another few orbits.

Now the problem was different: far too much momentum! It was heavy metal versus insect silk. He felt the vibration of the weavers as they braided up new lines towards him. Tension on the line increased.

Being pulled off was an acceptable situation. He could make another attempt, but if the silk snapped, that would mean an untethered jump. But every moment’s delay was another closer to the colony’s fiery death.

They braided other silk lines furiously. The silver cord tensed even more as they ran.

Abandon the prize and doom the colony? Or hold on for a few moments longer? Styggy had no choice.

Anything for another orbit.

It wasn’t until the weavers got 3/4ths the way to the massive rock when he felt safe.

The silk held.

Weavers ran over Styggy, and split into different directions. The thin strand of his colony’s salvation stretched, then slackened. He loosened his grip as the weavers went around three more times.

The weavers then headed back down the line, braiding a fourth and fifth cord back home.

It was mostly a momentum catch.

Some workers would gnaw on the iron-rich rock. They would then feed it to metal-reducing microorganisms, whose biology did not need precious oxygen for energy. Later, when the bacteria grew a thick mat, workers could harvest it. Nothing went to waste, and they exploited every edge-case of extremophile chemistry.

Life would consume the inert, and it would never stop. It would wrest every free electron by any miracle possible. Life's solemn job is always everywhere to reverse entropy.

Styggy waited until the weavers had finished and returned to the colony rock. He passed the line gently through his mandibles, and once home, gave it a little tug. The line slowly became slack, and the ferrous iron hulk floated homeward.

His body felt tense as the carbon dioxide built up. Though his exoskeleton protected him from the vacuum, he was slowly suffocating. Nor were the bands of radiation healthy for him, but he did not know what that was, he only knew of the instinct to return to the nest.

He scurried swiftly to the door-ant. Styggy saw its bulbous blocky head, where the weavers had previously entered. He arrived and tapped on the head, but it did not open.

Open. His antenna demanded.

Wait! The door-ant communicated back. It was cycling a few workers out to help haul the prize. Styggy waited in the black, as his location drifted behind the colony rock’s shadow.

The gas giant was a slivered mottled crescent. Soon, there would be darkness as their colony rock drifted into shadow. Space-ant colonies always kicked off in the night of their eclipsing gas giant. It was an evolutionary countermeasure developed to deceive predatory colonies by hiding a new trajectory.

The door-ant finally opened, workers scuttled out, and Styggy entered. The head closed, and he exhaled all his stale air, and a panic set in as he breathed the same bad air back in. Then the butt of the door-ant opened and Styggy ran out. Inside, he hyperventilated on the thin oxygenated air and finally felt refreshed.

Styggy marched into the aphid chamber and milked one for its honeydew. The sugar was a splendid treat. Better than the bacterial mats, or the fungi, or even pieces of other ants. Syrup was splendid.

After his allotment, he left the chamber and recovered in a small hutch.

There had been other jumps recently, mostly for water-ice. Most of their water went to their caste of greenhouse-ants, who protected cyanobacteria in their bulbous transparent abdomens. They hung through large holes, and there they lived their entire lives, immobile with their heads stuck in the darkness of the hive. Their bodies grew thick petioles to pass oxygen, and sugars, to the colony, meanwhile ferrying carbon dioxide and water to the algae.

Though the apex creature, the ants were not strictly predatory. They could kill the aphids, and eat them, but that was not their way of life, nor even Life's overarching way. Their colonies had saved others from extinction and all benefited. This was the way of life: mutualism. The ants were the fittest, but their survival was not theirs alone. The space-ants were the organizers, and the stubborn shepherds, who refused to die though their planet had broken apart. It was they who allowed Life to get a new lease in the black airless void of the rings. Allowing life to flagrantly disregard hard physics’ cruel hand.

Though their moon had died, they were still alive.

Entropy tries to disorder, but life fights back until it has reorganized the entire universe into something alive.