The once fat queen had slimmed down. Nearly sixty-five percent of her old bulk was gone, and mostly to the eggs. Her claustral isolation ended when she finally birthed a new brood; new female workers.

Hexalyn was a handmaiden ant. The sixth. Her one and only job was to work, but that was no problem, because none could ever accuse space ants of being lazy. From first light until the final silent black overtakes her, Hexalyn would have a lifetime of purposeful activity. The handmaidens were generalist, who could fight, forage, or feed, depending on the need of the fledgling colony.

Right now, in these early days, she was never far from the queen, and never far from her sisters, the five other maidens.

Her carapace was white with youth. It had not hardened yet, and she crawled around the tiny enclosure. As a caretaker, she instinctively tended to the queen. She ripped off nodules of their stored insect jelly and fed them to the queen.

Good, the queen tapped on their antenna as she ate. There were many more eggs to lay.

Their enclosure was cramped, and she dug with her sisters into the ice and rock, slowly excavating new chambers for the colony. They also recycled the body of the dead ant, the male jumper drone, which landed them here. She tended to the translucent domed wings of the queen that housed them. And of course, she tended to the eggs. And the next clutch was nearly ready.

When the darkness fell upon them, the six handmaidens rested to conserve oxygen, as the blue-green algae stored in the jelly stopped making air. But the night was brief in their wide orbit, this far from their gas giant.

On the outskirts of the queen, a membrane encompassed them all, a simple thin film, which kept in the low pressure atmosphere against the hard vacuums of deep space. It was a colonial placenta of sorts. Soon it would harden, but for now it was flexible. They were the domed wings of a hatchling queen. Wings which had once allowed queens to fly in nuptial ecstasy with her drone when their moon was still alive. Over the many generations of the space ant’s hard forging, it had morphed far away from its original purpose of flying in their moon’s once great atmosphere. That sky was long dead, but nature never gives up. It recycles structures, ideas, and chemical reactions, like it recycles bodies.

Night was over, and Hexalyn tended to the eggs. She cleaned them gingerly with her mandibles and stored them in the protective tunnels. Though radiation was of less concern in the outer rings, it was an instinct they carried. Then she shuttled the nodules of blue-green algae out of shadow and into sunlight. Hexalyn was busy, and as soon as she put one in sunshine, it would soon be shadowed by their nest’s slow rotation. The movement of their bodies around the small space was enough to have caused the structure to slowly rotate one way or the other. As soon as it stabilized, some other handmaiden destabilized it. Each sister would require another to go about her task in the opposite way to counteract spin.

And so the six would dance. Every action required an equal and opposite reaction. Coordinated and opposing. To keep the translucent winged dome pointed towards the sunlight, to keep the blue-green algae pumping out oxygen. Darkness was death.

But onward they worked. Never quitting, except for a night’s rest. Never doubting, only searching. They dug, and mined and moved things around, busily hollowing out a nest amongst the ice. Their home turned out to be far dirtier than expected. Bits of rock, frozen mud, and ice. But ever ingenious, they combined it with their waste and coated the tunnels for insulation, and to plug any little holes that might steal their atmosphere. Every act was a tiny scratch toward victory.

Anything for one more orbit.

Tenacious.

Good girls, the queen said to each of them when they got in range of her antenna. Help now.

Her membrane had grown to its fullest extent. It was time to move. The queen struggled and heaved as the maidens bit at the wing’s joints, severing the great mother ant and freeing her from the hardened wings.

And down she went, into the excavations. Into her new royal chamber.

And so the colony grew, and as greenhouse ants were birthed, the maidens placed their bulbous rear end to the bottom of small tunnels, and allowed them to inflate and break out of the mound into hard vacuum. There was, of course, a second line of defense, a mucky mixture of their own refuse which they built into a black wall.

Now there was air, light, water, and growth.

They handmaidens exoskeletons darkened with age and sunlight. They were adults now and would be soon responsible for managing the hundreds of other ants soon to be birthed.

Raw evolution told them that inwards was death, and outwards was life. But evolution could not tell them that danger still lurked in the quiet orbits of the outer rim as it did in the inner. It had no knowledge of the great power that smashed their world, had and would do it again.

Outside, their dim eyes had spied only glimpses of it. Whatever ‘it’ was, that the previous dead drone ant had seen it and guided their colony egg towards it. It had been ‘hope’ for them that this shiny white rock might be fortuitous. And that the massive sphere of ice, far on the horizon, might be a home to hope for.

But the previous colony had not known of the orbital complexities. They were ants after all. The massive ice-moon, which the previous colonial watchers had seen, was more dangerous than anticipated.

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

Every so often, the white mass loomed large in their sky, and its distortions disturbed many things.

Hexalyn was awoken to the shudders of multiple impacts. The shake and reverberation were startling, but then she felt or heard the most horrendous of sounds: the hissing of lost atmosphere. She inhaled as much as of the now rarefied air as possible into her black hard exoskeleton. She scurried out from the dark interior hallway and into the new light, shafting through holes in the wrong places.

Her sisters all instinctively knew the same thing without the dance of antennae. Vibrations of legs scurried around as they poured from the center out into the outer shell.

Pressure Loss.

Light stabbed through the previously hardened mud which formed the protoskin of the colony. They did not even have a functioning door ant yet, and Hexalyn threw herself at the holes.

Not today Death! She placed the ends of her six limbs through all the holes. There, splayed in an awkward shape, she stopped the leaking atmosphere.

One of her sisters came in the dark and dabbled a mixture on one leg. Hexalyn retracted that leg back in and the slurried patch expanded out and sealed. Again, five more times, they repeated the process and sealed the holes. Hexalyn and the handmaidens crawled over the transparent dome, searching for more holes.

None were found. Atmosphere was lost, but the danger was temporarily halted.

Next, Hexalyn crawled down the individual holes where the greenhouse ants were wedged.

Her feelers ran over something wet. All around the tunnel were the rapidly decompressed fluids of another ant. Again, she investigated. It was one of her sisters. Sliced open along the gastor. The sister twitched in near death. Her dying antennae seemed to tap out, recycle me. Though it was jerky and incomprehensible to words, for queen and colony was implied. Just a fleeting thought to still be of use, even in death.

But Hexalyn could not comfort her—Hexalyn had a mission. When greenhouse ants (and all ants, for that matter) detected the loss of pressure, they too had inhaled as much as possible. Their outward facing abdomens were swelled with extra atmosphere.

Danger Done. Hexalyn’s antennae danced over there’s. One by one she repeated the message, and slowly they exhaled some of what they had stored.

She ran back into the main hall of the fledgling colony to check on the queen. Running back over the dead sister, she encountered a big-head ant. It had done her job. The queen was safely sealed in her chamber. Big-heads were a breed of door-ants who were interior stoppers, which prevented a catastrophic loss of air from the queen’s chamber.

Hexalyn ran her antennae over the door ant. Good, she communicated and went to the queen. Safe? she questioned the queen. The queen affirmed, though Hexalyn knew she was stressed. Stressed queens lay fewer eggs.

Out of the royal chamber, Hexalyn ran out and back to the hallway.

The tunnel was full of many mixed scents. Of death, of boiled blood, of old scent trails. Chaotic. So Hexalyn felt around the body with her antennae. There in the split abdomen she found a heavy shard. The thing that had pierced their colony’s thin cover and killed her sister.

She inspected the body. There was a clean slice through the abdomen. Surgical would be the word, but space ants did not have that in their lexicon. They was no medical caste yet.

Her antenna danced over the shard inquisitively. Then she felt pain after running one antenna straight over the edge. Rock of pain? She wondered and inspected the body again. Rock slice straight?

The shard was long and sharp. Uncertain what to do with it, she left it in the wounded abdomen and dragged her sister to the trash heap.

This room had yet to be fully excavated, so she began to dig. She scraped away at the hardened mire and gnawed at the ice. There was little room in the tiny space. Aggravated by the slow progress, she went back and dismembered her dead sister to better fold her corpse up into what space existed.

Since this dump was for organic matter, the shard had to go. She wrested it from the body. Her mandibles held it, then tried to exit, but only wedged it into the ice. The point penetrated, but not much farther than expected. Then stabilizing herself with legs sticking all around the small cavity, she spun her body around to get to the room’s exit. To her surprise, the shard seemed to easily penetrate the ice now. Fragments of ice floated up and hit her face, smacking into her sensitive antennae. She tried again, placing the shard into the ice, then spinning her body around and rotating the shard. Again the ice broke faster.

This was far easier than when she chewed on the ice. Her tiny mind made the jump, a stinger for hardness. One that could pierce the hard ice.

Ice was cold, and ants did not generate heat very well, which is why they coated their rooms with mud to insulate their tunnels. So they very much did not like excavating ice directly with their bodies. Although the shard was dense, it was more pleasant than putting mandibles to ice.

During their searches, the other handmaidens found refuse and brought them to the correctly sorted dump piles (the ants were fastidious). Hexalyn searched in the inorganic pile. Whenever she found shards of nearly any size, she showed to her sisters, and the new batch of workers, how to use them to drill into the ice and loose rock.

And so the colony expanded. Weavers, and workers; soldiers and male drones, they all were produced in abundance. Tunnels were bored straight through the ice. But the shards dulled or broke.

When their moon died, large bursts of lava were squeezed out into their cold ocean. Again and again the tug of their gas giant squeezed their planet like a soft aphid, spurting its fiery interior out into the cold water of their once liquid oceans. That fast frozen silica, the magma interior of their moon, was broken up, thrown around their gas giant, all throughout their ring system. And in the presence of the nearby ice moon’s gravity perturbations, some fragment spun around the gravity well and back in the opposite direction of the ring’s general rotation, and collided.

With Kessler-syndrome like efficiency, shards peppered everything, and over the thousands of unobserved orbits, the colony’s ice rock had been struck with a million super-sharp fragments.

But this was a secret blessing. As they colonized their asteroid, either venturing out, or digging in, the space ants found more shards. Some workers were injured handling them, others had their appendages or antennae sliced clear off. But as they learned, they shaped the obsidian so a dull end could be gripped while the ‘stinger’ end remained sharp.

When colonies grow, they pull in new floating rocks. It’s in the odd way the clumps move together, that makes it obvious. They float in an unnatural formation, bound together, but not contact binaries.

And growth attracts attention.

But out here, density was far lower than the constant stream of rocks in the inner ring. The long stretches altered their search patterns. Where previously the colonies tried to be fast moving and send out many scouts, here they relied on the thin, frail ecosystem of cyanobacteria and light, fungus and iron, and time.

So when the sighter bugs see any rock, they relay that information back. And when the distributed brains of the ant colony identify and conclude that orbit will intersect (as near as chance allowed), each colony knows it must send at least one scout to explore.

They looked and concluded. The trajectories will get close. Now they waited.