Styggy was jolted awake by the thunderous sound of many synchronized feet.

Alarm, a worker ant said as it climbed over Styggy, and up through the tunnel.

Styggy, marched too, and up to the remaining door-ant. Around him, on many sides and surfaces of the tunnels, he assembled with his brethren. He waited his turn and found himself pushed into the lock with two pupae scouts, still white from youth, and a weaver. They were crammed in, with legs and antenna shoved into every space.

Raid, one antenna said with great difficulty.

The airlock ant lifted its head and disgorged them from the black confines. They crawled up, and around, and took up defensive positions. Above them was a massive networked amalgamation of rocks held together by the thick webs of silk. A mega colony. Two, four, six—Unknown! More sections than they had legs, it was past the number Styggy could grasp. He was no mathematician after all.

The weavers quickly attached silk lines to the scouts and tethered the other ends to their colony rock. A pair of warriors cycled out of the lock and took up a position at the nadir between them and the colony above. They looked up at the enemy. For a moment, their colony cast a tiny shadow on the enemy city. They saw a huge central mass, with many smaller sections slowly descending like claws.

It was hopeless. Their colony’s diminutive situation meant certain death, but space-ants never say die. They fight for queen and colony until the harsh empty blackness overtakes them. They hadn’t escaped a planetary apocalypse to quit now.

Into battle! Their instincts commanded.

Styggy and the pupae jumped. It was a numbers game for sure, but there was also room for cunning if they struck quickly. The three landed and their arrival shook a tiny outpost rock on the mega-colony’s periphery. Down the enemy’s silk line, a signal vibrated. Disturbances! . Immediately, enemy warriors emerged from the center and skitter over the braided line.

Styggy could feel enemies on the move, coming fast, as he placed his sharp mandibles on the other end of the enemy silk line.

Slicing and sawing, he severed the silk, sending two enemies snapping back home. Perhaps they got flipped off into the achromatic death of an off-plane trajectory, to suffocate in the blackness. Perhaps they lived and found a way back into battle. There was no time or capacity to ponder that.

With the small rock in their control, the scouts ran back over their newly laid thin line the weavers had built up. Styggy and the scouts tugged as firmly as they dared to alter their home’s trajectory away from the slowly encroaching enemy behemoth. It was all guesswork for sure. Ants attempting to fly loosely tethered asteroids with silk string, is as random as imagined.

By the time the three scouts returned to their home, they could see the assault bridge forming. A chain of enemy ants was coming, one by one, their workers interlocked to span the void.

The living bridge grew. Dozens of enemy warriors twitched, waiting to storm the colony. Styggy and his caste fell in next to their allies.

Battles began with small skirmishes. A few enemy scouts dared to board prematurely, searching for weak spots, only for allied warriors to swarm them. A few were dismembered instantly as many mandibles tore through exoskeleton. The fortunate were flipped back off into space, only for them to try again if still tethered by safety silk.

But Styggy stayed in a position nearest to the landing point under the living siege bridge. He noticed their colony’s trajectory had changed and now looked as though the distance was increasing. Hope? Perhaps the weavers had cut the line to the newly conquered rock, or the dumb luck of unplanned trajectories had caused them to drift away. Styggy did not know; he was no orbital mechanic. He was made to scout and was ready to fight. What is, is, and what was to come; fate, was finally here today.

The gap narrowed. More enemy workers poured out of airlocks, and the bridge grew faster than their relative speed. The articulated structure wavered slightly in zero-g, but grew longer (and stronger) with each interlocked leg.

Enemy warriors twitched when the distance became an easy leap.

Down they jumped, twirling their antenna to control rotations. One, two, six, or more and the clash began.

Styggy fought with his brothers and sisters. He tore into the tibia of the first warrior he could reach. One of his nearby scout pupae was flung off, perhaps still tethered, perhaps not. Styggy’s tiny mind could not contemplate. He was busy severing limbs while avoiding spurs, stings, and other jaws.

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He grabbed an enemy’s femur and held it down as a warrior cut through its back. The exposed innards boiled off in the vacuum. Gore and the dead piled all around the colony rock. Air hissed from the sacks and trachea of the dead, propelling bodies haphazardly around the battle space. But more enemies rained down in the drop assault!

A large enemy warrior landed on top of Styggy, pinning him to the colony rock. And then Styggy was stung. He went limp. Allies wrestled with the enemy ant, who in his frantic final act of life, kicked the paralyzed Styggy off with the floating dead.

The siege bridge was finished and hordes of enemies swarmed over. Their colony was done for. No hope for victory, nor room to escape. Only death awaits.

Styggy floated off, but the enemy had not delivered its poison correctly. In the silence, Styggy regained control slowly. He wriggled his antennae. Then felt the faintest percussion from his small silver safety cord. It went tight, and now he sailed back slowly, back towards his embattled colony.

He rotated his limbs more to cancel the spin and faced the battle. Down below, he could not distinguish friend from foe. It was a living carpet of struggle. Ants were writhing, sawing, pushing, and flinging others off the rock.

An occasional body would float past him, trying to reach out desperately to not be cast off into space, but he evaded them by tugging deliberately on his silver cord. Frantically, he coiled up the length of silk and headed back toward his colony rock. He landed amid the bulbous bodies of their greenhouse ants.

Styggy ran to the door-ant. He was on the verge of panic, but knew he needed to get back to the queen. However, now the front line of enemy ants had already pushed the thinning phalanx of defenders away and into a small perimeter around him.

Then he felt, or heard, the death whistle of lost air. Their door-ant had been breached. He saw a broad head floating off into space, and observed thin streams of fluids which sprayed out and instantly boiled off.

And so Styggy did what was brutally logical. He made a new hole. He bit and sawed into the body of his colony's largest greenhouse ant. It's severed abdomen slowly jetted off as he now scratched, chewed, and clawed at the rock and foregut of the greenhouse ant, and made a new hole into the colony. Styggy pushed the rest of the dismembered greenhouse ant in, and ran along the tunnel walls to the queen’s chamber.

She was alarmed and ready to kill.

Whether it was the tapping of a signal, or the faint pheromones in the airless space, the Queen halted her anxiety.

He went over to her. Overrun. Death. He seemed to say to the queen.

Flee. Final plan. She said back. Then she picked up her enveloped royal egg, and gave it to Styggy.

It was covered in copious amounts of insect jelly in clear segmented nodules. A worker came with him, and portered another large clutch of jelly pearls. Then the queen left her nesting chamber for the first and final time to fight to the death.

Enemies were already in the colony and advancing to the chamber. The Queen took up an entire tunnel’s width, blocking the advance. There she bit and clawed the oncoming soldiers. Styggy and the worker advanced back up the hole he had chewed. It had gone unnoticed amidst the heap of dead bodies stuck to the rock surface.

Outside on the colony rock, fighting was almost over. Styggy found himself in the center of the last few warriors, assembled at the colony’s rear tip. He stuck the royal egg on top of the abdomen-sheathed hot-rock. Around it, the worker packed in more jelly into every crevice inside the gutted abdomen. Finally he chewed at the little silk tether holding Styggy and the objects to the colony rock.

With their strong legs, the last warriors and workers pushed Styggy and the package forward and out. Away from their defeated colony. Off to where life might be easy, towards hope. Out was life, in was death. It was instinct.

All was quiet for Styggy. The vibrations of battle were gone, and he peacefully floated away. There was a beautiful immensity of bright specks in the black.

His breath grew stale, but he thought he could make it to nightfall. He planned to kick off the hot rock and land on the nearest largest shard of water-ice. Another chance for life, for a new colony to flourish among these middle rings.

He readied himself for the final push. Then he noticed an off-center spin which required him to counter with all his limbs and antennae. When he looked down, he saw a thin stream of water, (or steam, or whatever). Styggy wasn’t a rocket scientist, but knew when he was experiencing thrust. Then it stopped. He rearranged masses and pushed a jelly sphere into the top of the dead door-ant’s abdomen, and in a few moments, there again was more thrust.

By holding the rock-abdomen in a certain way, he placed the thrust inline with his center of mass and it propelled them forward. It was a slow, steady power—easy for him to maneuver.

And so he did. Slowly, outwards, an exodus to the outermost rim looked plausible. Out to the bejeweled speckled orbits the watchers had told him about, a place far past the threat of falling back into their gas giant. Where the ice was plentiful and enemies appeared few.

Maybe they could fly past the rim, to the large light, a silvery ice moon. A sphere of infinite water, (and well past the Roche limit). Where ant did not need to rob ant of water and momentum.

But not this orbit, and not Styggy. He looked one last time at that shining light then looked around him. Time was running out. The lack of air stressed him. He would soon panic. There was time for only one more push before he passed out.

Ahead, he spied a beautiful, silver blue pearl. A mass of pure ice; he did not even need to make it to the ice-moon. The new queen and colony would be fruitful here. Perhaps, once established, some future scout would make the jump to the fabled ice moon.

He took the royal egg and the clutch of remaining insect jelly and kicked off the makeshift steam rocket towards the largest chunk of ice he could reach.

He flipped around for the last time. And stuck the landing. Then he wedged the clutch into a partial cave, and pushed his claws, legs, and hairs into every crevice, trying to secure the seed.

His last image was the colony egg, secure in a beautiful place. Then all went black.