Space Ants had survived the airless surface. Unshackled by water constraints, the colonies grew and expanded to every point of the moon. From Leading to Trailing, to the poles North and South, to Bulge and Farside, Space Ant colonies took hold on every surface. The many families of Black-Sting now ruled. They even gave their moon a name: Overwater, which was also the name of the first colony.

Each long orbit around their gas giant took several sleeps, though during the long cold nights, most slipped into torpor to save oxygen. During the equally long days, ants could nap between long marathons of industrious activity.

Space Ants had founded their first colony at their landing site, which was halfway between Trailing and Farside with no view of their gas giant.

The prolonged exposure to cold had transformed Space Ants. Signaling pathways were activated, spontaneously producing latent factors in their DNA. The genes expressed themselves in follicle development and encodings for keratins. These fibrous proteins produced more hairs which trapped air as they burrowed in the ice.

Primordina was a queen. An old queen, the oldest on the moon, though she did not think about that. She was conceived in orbit and her egg survived landfall. She had outlived every landed ant. Now her children and grandchildren, including her many other daughter queens, populated every crag of ice. She was the great-grandmother ant to all life on Overwater. Even the fungal spores and other creatures which space ants cultivated might call her a mother of sorts.

The old queen sat still as her handmaidens clambered over her. They ran their antenna over every part of her body, inspecting her health. She could tell from the strange reactions they gave to each other and the quiet worry in their antenna that her time as queen was nearing the end. Another drone would soon arrive, and she had to look and smell her best.

The room was large and dimly lit. It was daytime outside, and the light diffused through the ice and the thin waxy material which insulated them from the frigid ice shell of Overwater. Scores of newly laid eggs sat on silk mats. Primordina’s bug eyes (sensitive to infrared) saw they were still warm. She saw workers come in and carry the eggs off to one of the hatching chambers.

A handmaiden also exited the royal chamber.

Primordina watched a medical worker come back in, escorted by a handmaiden. This was not a good sign. She was no longer a young queen; she knew that, but she did not feel sick. Though near the end of their night, she felt the cold chilled her more with each passing orbit; so much so that even her thick coat of hairs could not keep out the draft.

The medical worker came over to the queen, her mother, but gave no reverence.

What? The queen’s antenna tried to inquire, but the medical worker crawled out of antenna range. She, the queen, had to submit to inspection again. Primordina craned her head, trying to see around to her, which only confirmed what she suspected.

The medical worker talked to the handmaidens and then returned to the queen’s front.

Primordina reached out with her legs, pulled the medical ant in, and held it in her mandibles. What! She interrogated it.

Mites! The terrified ant replied. It squirmed and twisted.

Primordina dropped the worker.

It was their age old nemesis. Those blood suckers who leeched off the ant’s hard work and life! Mites were not symbiotic, only parasitic. They had no concern for the whole—no idea how thin of an energy margin the frail ecosystem that Space Ants stewarded. Contribute or be excised.

The medical ant and the handmaidens went to work. First stop was the patient’s front-right femur.

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Primordina turned her head to watch the process. The duo scraped and prodded parts of Primordina’s exoskeleton with small tools. They moved to her underside, only to return to the mother ant’s face, and stopped in easy reach of her large mandibles. Slowly they approached, careful not to anger the large queen.

Where? Primordina asked the staring pair.

The medical worker placed its antenna on a spot between her eyes, below her ocelli. The other ant guided Primordina’s antenna to the spot. She felt a bump. It did not quite feel like her body. Her other antenna touched the medical ant. Here?

Yes.

Bloodsucker! Right between the eyes. What a dishonor. It would have been painfully obvious to any drone with half an eye that she was old and sick. She burned with anger at the parasite. In a rather blurry manner, she watched the medical ant come close. It held the tip of a small spine in its mandibles, while the handmaiden held an obsidian blade.

Now five other handmaidens came over. Four held her legs, while the fifth held her head in its jaws.

Worry overtook Primordina. Was this it? Were they going to execute the sick queen? But the handmaiden placed the obsidian blade lightly under the bump. Slowly, the medical worker guided the small spike directly into the mite and rested it on its idiosoma.

The medical ant tensed. Primordina went cross-eyed.

Stab! The spine skewered the free rider, piercing its exoskeleton and stopping at the obsidian without injuring the queen. The vile creature recoiled from its host, squirmed, then slowly died.

Everyant released a collective sigh.

For a long time Primordina ran her sensitive antennae over the subtle difference between scar or natural bump, wondering if the drone would notice. If it were an enemy drone, well, they would be forced to give up their spermatozoa with no concern to looks. Hybridization had, in fact, been a method to pass gene lines between different ants. There also existed another way. When a queen held the sperm of two different ant lines in her pouch, her cultivated viruses could also enable lateral gene transfer.

The mites must have been transferred from Green-Sphere, or a free rider on its holobiont seed. Either way, she knew she was at the end of her reproductive life.

Another queen would soon be hatched, and then what? Exile? Her tiny mind contemplated. They would not kill a matriarch past her prime, but they would strongly encourage her to leave the nest. A queen’s egg was already being hatched in another chamber, far from Primordina’s jealous gaze. She had already birthed many queens, which had been spread across Overwater, but one waited in an underchamber to inherit this nest.

She knew her time was short, but perhaps she had one more orbit of motherhood in her.

She woke from her nap. Her ocelli told her the sun was still out, but almost imperceptibly she sensed sunset was near.

A handmaiden approached. Mate Arrival, her antenna, declared to the queen.

He came into the chamber and stopped immediately. He was a new drone, one she had never seen before. On his back, a bundle of silk was tied. Drones carried more than genetic material between the colonies. They also carried information in the form of knotted silk.

Primordina watched the mate stare at her. Her mantle had grown, that was for sure. Over the many years of growth and regrowth, the plates of her exoskeleton took on strange shapes. She was many orbits from a smooth, newly hatched ant with its fresh white exoskeleton. As her plates had grown, at the joints where the plates met, protrusions formed, physically announcing one’s age. This was not unattractive, or so she thought. She was still symmetric. And the face, where the plates left holes for the antenna to move, had the most pronounced growths.

But Primordina must have exuded a scent of incredible age, because the drone had to be dragged further into the chamber by her handmaidens.

Name? Primordina’s antenna inquired of the drone.

Runno. He replied. His antenna was terse and did not wish to talk anymore to the queen. His attitude spoke volumes more than the words. He rejected her. He would not commit his genetic material to this nuptial. The queen was far too old. The handmaidens sensed his decision immediately and let him go. He backed away to the entrance of her chamber.

Short of dismembering him, they could not refill the queen’s spermatheca.

Primordina’s head sank. No More. The thought entered her tiny mind by itself. This was the end. She had already laid her last clutch.

And so it began. The hive rejected Primordina as their queen. Ants were never ones to waste time. Chemical trails were laid down in the dimness, and soon a living wave of ants entered her royal chamber.

First, the recyclers detached her from her ovipositor. Other workers came to remodel the room. The hive, her child, all her children, were busy and content to scurry around without even paying her the slightest of attention. The royal chamber, her chamber, was now being prepared for a new purpose as directed by the hive mind, which neglected to give Primordina any orders. She was utterly devoid of purpose.

Finally, she was pushed out of the room. And then, with no fanfare or direction, she entered the vast network of tunnels that was her colony. She was now her own ant.