The problem was, she knew, serious. The animals were dwindling, and her hunters had been unable to determine the reason. They knew better than to overhunt; the animals that they observed were not sick; there were simply less of them. With fewer animals available, more plants would be needed, and the more plants her harvesters took, the less there would be for the animals to eat.

Balance was sometimes so very difficult to maintain, and while she had the memories of her sisters and mothers (and mothers’ mothers, and back and back), there was something to be said for personal experience, and she was young yet. She would have to ask for advice. Perhaps the issue would be something that a more experienced Queen would be able to handle with ease, a bit of common knowledge or, more likely, common sense that she simply didn’t have yet.

Or perhaps it had something to do with those holes in reality.

Either way, she needed help. As the youngest of the Queens, she had only a single point of contact, her spawning mother, and so she only prepared a single copy of her message. It contained every piece of relevant information on the problem she was facing, along with her sense of frustration and worry about it. The only solution that she herself could think of was to relocate, and that held its own dangers, an act of last resort, even if she was still small enough to manage it without self mutilation.

A courrier was selected, the fastest hunter she had. It was given the message along with strict instructions to bring it to her mother as quickly as possible. To help speed it on its way, she assigned a contingent of two soldiers and a gatherer laden with food for all of them. Even if the gatherer was slow compared to the rest of them, not having to stop to hunt for food would make the journey faster still.

Satisfied that an answer would come soon enough, the young Queen turned her attention to other matters, such as her research into why some plants grew better and stronger than others of the same type. Perhaps if more of the plants grew faster and larger, the animals would return.

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The hunter accepted the message core from its Queen. It had never seen one before; its previous Queen hadn’t made one since before it had joined Her Hive, and it had never expected the great honor of being presented with one and entrusted with carrying it to the next Hive. It weighed the soft, fleshy chunk of memory and thought in its tentacles, finding it light and easily held, before bringing it close to its back and wrapping its tentacles around it, careful to keep the barbed tips clear of the delicate core.

Turning to the soldiers that would escort it, it used a foreleg to gesture to the smaller of the two, leaving the larger to guard the slow, plodding gatherer that carried their supplies. The group would have to stop and rest at least seven times before reaching the nearest Hive, and having a soldier go ahead with the hunter would allow them to find and secure a resting place with time for the near tireless gatherer to arrive.

Having done the bare minimum of planning for the trip, the hunter turned toward the other Hive and took off at a run, the startled soldiers racing after it, trampling the underbrush under their heavy feet, leaving a clear trail for the gatherer and its guard to follow. The hunter barely paid attention to the crashing of the soldiers that followed after it as it tore toward its destination, only listening enough to ensure that it didn’t leave them completely behind.

The hunter bounded from tree to rock and back to tree, leaving clawed scratches in wood and dust as it hastened through the thick forest, all six legs pumping hard. Beasts scattered at the sound of its passage, heard but not seen, rustling the underbrush in their wake, as the broad, armored soldiers tramped after it. It was so focused on moving as far toward its destination as it could before the light began to fade that it almost, almost, failed to notice the weight of its precious cargo vanish from its grip.

The hunter stopped and turned so quickly that it nearly fell over. There was a hole in the world, just where it had been, that must have appeared inside of it, hanging in the air. As it watched, the hole vanished, leaving only the familiar reds of the forest, taking the message core with it.

The hunter was still standing there, motionless, when the gatherer and soldiers caught up to it. The soldiers had to pick it up and carry it back to the Hive to explain what had happened to the Queen, so shocked was it at a portal appearing inside its body to steal away the core it carried.