Hexalyn’s colony was ready, and in fact were courting invasion by concealing their numbers. Workers had used the mud and the filth to craft crude exterior tunnels. Those had no atmosphere, but the sunlight warmed them, and most importantly, hid the swarm.

They also grew more door-ants under these tunnels, which could allow more warriors to exit at a moment’s notice. Warriors which stood at the ready with their crude weapons, shiny black stingers of obsidian. Better than mandibles, which required ants to chew and scissor a limb, these could slice an ant clean in two. Longer than stingers, they could reach ahead and strike first.

There, in the distance, the colony saw it. Another mass of rock migrating together. Impossibly grouped rocks. These were not contact binaries, or gravitationally bound. It was another ant colony. The sighters told the signalers, and in the great colonies distributed consciousness, the colony knew. Prey.

The unsuspecting colony floated closer. Their male scouts jumped off their rock and slid through the void. The drone males were secured with thin silver threads of silk to their home rock.

Hexalyn waited with great anticipation in one of these exterior tunnels. They all held their breath. Antennas all checking with each other. Then she felt muffled thumps as foreign ants hit their rock.

Now, the signaler ants communicated.

The counter assault began. Warriors and workers swarmed out of the exterior tunnels. Hexalyn was carried along with the wave of bodies out the tunnels, and quickly each enemy scout had six allied ants to them. Each pulling at an appendage, immobilizing and overpowering the hapless enemy.

Hexalyn and a signaler ant came up to the nearest captured drone.

Which Tribe. It inquired. Which was not so much a sentence, and more like the automatic response that each ant gives each other to find out who’s who, and if it is a friendly colony. The scout’s response was truly indecipherable. They were not even a distant relation. Though perhaps we’ll call them the White Moon tribe. The actual communication, the very specific dance of antennae, like a secret handshake for ants.

The signaler ant came back to Hexalyn, communicated what the trapped ant had said. Hexalyn herself went over and ran her own antennae over the enemy, careful to avoid the mandibles which the enemy was now biting at anything.

What Tribe?

White Moon.

White Moon? Hexalyn memorized the dance of antennae. White Moon. She communicated back. Then she took her shard and killed the enemy in one slice.

Other scouts of White Moon tried to flee back up their silken lines once they discovered Hexalyn’s colony rock was not lifeless. Far from it, Hexalyn’s colony was much larger than anticipated.

While the ants pinned the hapless drones to their home rock, weavers scurried up the safety lines, weaving them thicker. Behind the weavers were allied warriors.

It was a rather unorthodox attack, but Hexalyn’s colony was new to this orbit, and carried new strategies. Apparently White Moon had some sort of intellectual bottleneck, which colonies of the inner orbits had not the luxury of keeping. Hiding your numbers was not a commonplace strategy known out here. The opposite was true: making one’s colony seem larger than possible to scare off invaders was the common tactic.

White Moon threw most of the weavers off as they tried to braid the thin lines. One intelligent enemy ant simply chewed the safety line, dooming their drone to a death it was already going to encounter. But two allied weavers secured one silk cord and reinforced it with braided line. Now the two colonies were joined.

Those weavers tried to fend off an attack.

Hexalyn followed the swarm to the one good line. She had her orders.

Two large allied soldiers were already ahead of her. They landed while she was mid-way. Now there were four allied ants on the enemy rock and they formed a bridgehead. Enemies from White Moon ran and communicated back to their colony. They were now under attack. In a few moments, a coherent battle line was formed.

The weavers were pulled into the enemy melee, one to dismemberment, the other probably flung off into space. But the two soldier ants carried obsidian. They immediately skewered a White Moon soldier ant, and caused the cautious enemies to dance around the sharpened points, trying to outflank the glinting black points.

The sacrifice of the weavers was a worthy delay. Hexalyn was down the line and stood with the soldiers. She scurried over one and caught an enemy in the side, immediately slicing off two legs. The injured creature flailed, lost its footing, and floated away with its severed appendages.

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Two more allied soldiers scurried over the silk line, their bodies red in the reflected light from their gas giant. Now the four formed a team, a beachhead on enemy territory. They stabbed and killed and pushed back. One soldier lost his obsidian blade inside the body of a dead enemy warrior, then grappled the enemy ants over the bodies of the slain.

More warriors came, some armed, others only with their natural weapons, and a stable perimeter was formed.

Hexalyn halted her fight. She took her obsidian and drilled directly into the enemy rock. It was like theirs, loose collections of frozen water, dirt, and rubble. The obsidian drilled straight. More allies warriors crawled over her and expanded the assault, keeping her securely in the middle of now ten soldiers.

She twisted and twisted, and the drill kept boring a larger hole.

Another worker came down the line with new obsidian. She let her now dulled point float away and took the worker’s new sharp blade.

She dug until she heard the sharp hiss of air escaping. She had pushed into the enemy colony and exposed a tunnel.

The worker assisted her and clawed the hole open. Bits of debris floated off with the limbs and the dead. Now the space was wide enough for her to enter.

Hexalyn met an enemy worker whose antenna demanded her to identify herself.

White Moon, she replied. At that, the worker seemed placated, unsure of anything happening with the battle and concerned only with trying to patch the new hole.

Hexalyn was careful not to stab that worker with the obsidian she was holding and instead pushed it against the wall. The worker walked over her and investigated the hole.

Hexalyn carried on. She was looking for the royal chamber. With zero air pressure, it was hard to catch the scent of the queen. Her compound eyes looked for clues in ultraviolet or infrared, but the scurrying of other workers, who questioned her identity each time, made things confusing.

She crawled around the enemy's nest until she found an egg chamber. Her antennae danced over the mounds, but she could tell these were not new eggs. Pupae here were old. They writhed with worry from the lack of pressure. These eggs had been moved from the queen’s chamber long ago.

Over walls and down tubes, she headed for the center, where most of the time space-ants queens could be found.

She encountered a bid-headed ant, which blocked her passage forward.

Identify, it seemed to ask.

Hexalyn replied with obsidian’s sting. She stabbed it in the head. Its mandibles made a feeble snap, but Hexalyn had killed it almost outright, or at least immediately severing the facial nerves. Then she pushed the head in and felt air slowly leak out. She was now so far in that either the hole had been patched or the tight tunnels allowed little air to escape. Hexalyn shoved the dead ant’s big head back. Though dead, it was still coiled like a spring with enough force to keep the pressure out.

She took some deep breaths and felt only a moment’s relief. Now she could smell the enemy queen ahead. And she was sealed in here. It was either death or victory from here on out.

The passages twisted, and after one last turn, she saw the queen’s features lit up in infrared. The massive beast was easily three times the size of Hexalyn, but was immobilized by her girth and ovipositor. Around the chamber, the warmth of freshly laid eggs glowed slightly in infrared.

The queen smelled Hexalyn’s foreign stench in the thin air. There was no fooling her with the copied antennae dance.

The queen screamed and pounded her legs, trying to call for help.

The room was pitch black, but the thumping vibrated the rock and shook the thin air and Hexalyn’s hairs, allowing her to perceive the wretched queen.

A frontal assault would not win. The queen, though not a warrior, still had considerable size and strength advantage.

In the darkness, Hexalyn darted between newly laid eggs and over to the side. She could feel the frantic queen uselessly flailing her midlimbs to search for the intruder.

Hexalyn clung to the back of the queen, who tried desperately to reach behind. It was panicked and then tried to bounce or slam Hexalyn against the walls of her royal chamber, which was too spacious.

Hexalyn went to slice off at the joint of the petiole and alitrunk. She missed. Instead, she sliced a femur cleanly with her sharp blade. Blood floated around, gently spraying the wall with a gore graffiti announcing ‘the queen was here.’

The old queen tried to turn her head behind her to bite Hexalyn, but could not. The five other limbs reached behind, but the joints would not allow. She tugged and tried to rip her ovipositer and detach her body from the egg-laying structure. Screams of one in the violent battle between life and death rang through the colony.

Her colony tugged and opened the big head of the interior door ant to rescue her.

Hexalyn crawled on top of the queen and shoved her blade into the giant carapace. She twisted, severing the head. The queen died and more blood oozed out of the pronotum.

There’s room for only my queen. Hexalyn thought. They never were a polygyne colony.

She covered herself with the queen’s scent and hid.

Other ants had come into the room, and searched, finding only a freshly dead queen. Slowly, Hexalyn exited the royal chamber. She was covered in the queen’s scent. Soldiers from White Moon came to her, smelled her, and listened to her claim to be the new queen. Everywhere she went, she pacified the warriors. The violence ended swiftly as she walked all over the enemy's nest.

Nature’s willing to fight to the death, but it hates waste. Its violence was as swift as it was terrible. Merciless in battle, but abundantly graceful in peace. In reality, Hexalyn had saved two colonies. The energy margins were two slim for long wars of attrition.

They were not so genetically dissimilar. And even if they were, had they not cultivated fungus, aphids, bluegreen algae, and a myriad other species?

They had won. Prevailed against a larger colony, with wit, tools, and the desire to win.

Afterwards, the two colonies were hauled together. Forming one of the greats out within the outer rim of the rings. Over time, the watchers in both colonies (now merged) saw strange things. Orbits gone weird. Outward was life and inward was death, but now they were once again falling inward. But not inward to the gas giant. Inward to the white moon.

The colony knew this in a collective distributed sense, but none knew what to do.

They were captured in a horseshoe orbit of the ice moon.