Osamaru

  “Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Alpha yelled as Alphantonso IV fell out of the colony entrance and into the open air above the giant forest.

  The antborg tumbled head-over-heel for several dozen meters before it could tch onto the rocky surface and arrest its momentum. It clung to the wall for a moment, still as a stone, as Alpha mentally patted the creature.

  Controlling a borged insect wasn’t like controlling a drone. It was more akin to the primitive experiments on insects on Old Earth. The trick was convincing the insect that the orders it was receiving were its own.

  These super-sized ants, and thus Alphantonso, were far more complex than typical insects. So much so that what he was doing bordered on the Federation’s ban against borging non-consenting higher-lifeforms. You could augment a beetle, but you couldn’t augment, say, a pet dog outside of medical reasons.

  On paper, these ws were there to prevent unnecessary cruelty and unreguted experimentation. In practice, they were used to control the creation of borged bioweapons and other monstrosities. Not that such things didn’t happen, of course; a rge portion of the Federation’s military budget went to tracking down and eliminating rouge bioweapons.

  The ants were technically insects and so fell outside the stiputions of the ws. Yet Alpha couldn’t deny that they were more than just insects.

  Hurrah for loopholes!

  With that in mind, controlling a borged creature like Alphantonso was tricky. Alpha hadn’t totally erased the antborg’s instincts. That let it better blend in with the colony. That meant getting it to go where he wanted and do what he wanted was a careful bance of sending it ‘fake’ pheromone signals and the right muscle controls while ignoring the real signals it wanted to follow. Alpha was still… learning that part.

  Alpha could take direct control, as the sub-brains reguting movement had been repced, but doing so would put a lot of stress on Alphantonso and could be like wrangling an unruly horse.

  That fumbling at the controls, as it were, is what led to Alphantonso’s tumble down the exit tunnel and surprise aerodynamics test. Alpha was gd he’d been able to tch onto the wall in time. While he was almost certain that the antborg’s improved exoskeleton could survive such a fall, Alphantonso V and the next batch of antborgs weren’t quite ready enough for him to test that theory. The next generation of antborgs had seen vast improvements thanks to the data gathered through Alphantonso IV, but they were taking longer to bake as well.

  If they turned out how Alpha hoped, he could start the next phase of [Operation: Ant King]. That was a surprise for future Alpha, though. Present Alpha had a forest to explore!

  Once Alphantonso’s stress-induced octopamine levels receded back to normal, Alpha directed the antborg down the wall and through the ant’s clearing. It had expanded slightly since the bear-sloth war, though not by much. The clearing seemed to be more of a buffer zone for the ants rather than just the result of their collecting materials. They still did, of course, but the vast majority of the ant’s patrols favored delving deeper into the forest.

  Alpha let Alphantonso follow the pheromone trail left by one such patrol in the hopes of finding something interesting. Alpha was still decoding the ant’s pheromone signals. It was turning out to be far more complex than he’d originally suspected. It wasn’t at the level of a true nguage. Such a thing was squarely in the realm of sapience. Yet it was still comparable to the ‘words’ used by higher-order mammals such as cetaceans or primates.

  The information conveyed wasn’t just in the concentration of pheromones, but in other inclusions as well. Threads of silk, globs of wax, and even droplets of venom could all be id out periodically along the pheromone trail and provide new information or change the meaning altogether. The quantities used and how they were used together could even influence the final’ message,’ leading to a surprisingly complex web of interconnected ‘words’ and information packets.

  When Alpha wasn’t directly controlling Alphantonso, a monitoring AI was recording the antborg’s action and influencing it to come in contact with as many such combinations as possible. So far, this had been limited to the colony. Alphantonso was still ‘young’ by ant standards, and only the older ants ventured out to scavenge.

  That made locating an acceptable trail difficult, but Alphantonso soon located a trail Alpha was fairly certain was that of a patrolling soldier. One fairly fresh, too. Good. Alpha had little chance to study the soldiers. Other than those in the royal chambers, most of the soldiers did little else than rest in dedicated chambers while workers brought them food. Occasionally, one would stand and start patrolling the tunnels or head for the exit to scout the forest, but that was about it.

  Following a soldier’s patrol route would mean less of a threat to Alphantonso, who was still much smaller than some of the other workers, as well. Anything capable of actually causing damage will have likely been scared off. There was no guarantee, of course, but it was a better option than randomly wandering, at least.

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  Several hours ter and Alpha had come across little of real interest. Mostly, the soldier wandered around the area, marking down certain locations. The soldiers acted as not just defenders but scouts as well, with workers following to collect whatever they had found. Already, Alpha had stumbled on a few groups of workers collecting something or another. Sometimes, it was the body of a rge, unidentifiable creature. Sometimes, it was a field of small pnts, the ants gently digging out the roots and ying them aside.

  Most of it wasn’t useful to Alpha, though he noted several pnts he’d seen being grown in the colony. That at least answered where the pnts had come from. Yet, it begged the question of how the ants knew what pnts they could grow or how. Or why?

  As far as Alpha could see, the only things the ants ate were the mushrooms and the golden liquid, supplemented by a bit of protein now and again. He hadn’t even seen the ants harvest any of the other pnts other than to move them about or cull those that were wilting. Yet they continued to maintain little ‘gardens’ every few chambers. Alpha doubted they were just for fun. Even so, until he could get some equipment running, that mystery would have to remain just that.

  The only genuine discovery, if he could call them that, was a rge river to the northeast of the clearing,

  Wider than three TAWPs, the river cut the cavern into two parts: the rge forest that took up most of the cavern and a barren, craggy nd. The craggy nd comprised 1/8th of the cavern’s floor space, encompassing the entire northeastern corner separated by the river. Despite its size, it wasn’t something easily seen from a distance, being hidden by the giant trees and the dim light.

  Up close, the barren nd looked closer to what one might have expected from a cavern and was filled with stagmites of various shapes and sizes. The only growth visible were the rare, small patches of glowing flowers dotted around the area and what appeared to be mundane moss spotting a few stagmites here and there. Standing on the banks of the river, Alpha could see neither its source nor where it emptied into, as the various bends and turns hid them from view.

  Alpha marked the location on his growing map for ter exploration. It would be far easier to search bare rock for mineral deposits than in the forest and safer than along the cavern walls.

  Alpha followed the soldier’s trail further north and upstream from the ant colony until he came across the second discovery of the trip.

  Near one bend in the river, Alpha saw what could only be described as a mud cave. A huge mound of soil and stone had been dredged up from the river, forming both a small ke at the bend and a hill of mud. Said hill had then been shaped and hollowed out into a cy cave.

  “Huh… a cave within a cave… neat,” said Alpha to Alpha.

  It was obvious that the formation wasn’t natural, nor was the creature that had made it small by any measure. While the cave entrance wouldn’t have fit the TAWP, it was more than rge enough to accommodate one of the soldier ants. Like the ant currently lying just outside the entrance of said cave, its abdomen cracked open like a crab and its head missing.

  “Well, that’s not good…” Alpha muttered out loud.

  He’d seen how much force it had taken to kill these soldier ants during the fight with the bear-sloths. Their exoskeletons weren’t quite as hard as steel, but their flexibility made them hard to damage through brute force. Alpha didn’t doubt they could easily block small arms fire and maybe even tank higher caliber rounds if they were hit in the right pce.

  Yet, something had cracked one of them open like a nut to get at the juicy bits, and given the ck of blood or signs of a struggle, it had done some with far more ease than the bear-sloths had. Granted, he didn’t know if the nut cracking had come before or after the ant had lost its head, but it was still worrying. It wasn’t likely that the ant was killed elsewhere and brought to the den at a ter time, as the soldier’s pheromone trail led straight to this stop, but that was all he could tell.

  Part of him wanted to get closer, maybe study the soldier more or get a better look at the mud den, but Alpha decided against it. Whatever this thing was, it was powerful. Alphantonso might be stronger than a normal worker, but its exoskeleton wasn’t quite on par with a soldier (yet).

  Like the barren nd across the river, he would have to explore this pce ter, either with a more expendable [Wasp] or after he’d improved Alphantonso further. Alpha turned the antborg away and began making his way back toward the ant colony. Suddenly, the sound of falling water drowned out the gentle rush of the river, and a deep shadow fell over Alphantonso.

  The antborg froze, and Alpha sighed. “It’s right behind me. Isn’t it?”

  Alpha didn’t even have time to turn Alphantonso around before something rge and heavy stepped on the poor creature, crushing and grinding it into the riverbank.

  “ALPHANTSONSO IV! NOOOOOOOOO!” Alpha cried, heartbroken.

  Whatever had crushed the antborg lifted its massive leg and shook the gooey mess off. Luckily for Alpha, the ground was soft, and the antborg’s impnts, including its eyes, were made of tougher stuff. So Alpha got a good look at the creature through the damaged impnts as it walked away, not even bothering with the tiny ant’s remains.

  It was a rge, brown… fish? Or at least a fishlike creature. Like if someone took a mudfish, mixed it with a shark, blew it up to half the height of the TAWP. Then, to top it off, gave it a pair of draconic legs. The giant mud shark-fish thing waddled toward the den with lumbering steps. Before entering, it turned and roared into the nearby forest, a high-pitched yet echoing thing that shook the nearest trees and sent the hidden creatures nearby running.

  It then bit into the carcass of the soldier ant and pulled it deeper into the den until both vanished in shadows.

  “Well, now… that’s… different,” Alpha muttered.

  Their power source irrevocably damaged, Alphantonso IV’s (may they always be remembered) impnts slowly shut off one by one as Alpha directed what little charge remained to the eye cameras as he tried to collect as much data about the area as possible.

  Fishy boy may not have known it, but it had made an enemy today, and Alphantonso IV would be avenged.

  As the st bit of power drained from the impnts, a curious thing happened, however.

  The impnts… moved.

  Or, to be more accurate, they were picked up.

  The camera was swung around, and the st image Alpha recorded before the impnts died was the face of a dark-skinned humanoid creature, wearing a moss-covered fur cloak, staring curiously into the antborg’s former eyes.

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  Alpha swore as the video feed finally cut out. He’d marked the location on the map, but losing the impnts would hurt. Part of what made the antborgs so difficult to produce wasn’t just the time they took to incubate, but some of the rarer materials that would take a while to repce.

  He had pnned to send a few [Wasps] to recover what he could, but now that pn was down the drain. Alpha assumed it had been one of the goblin-like creatures he’d witnessed before, but with no way of knowing where it had gone, recovery was almost impossible. He made a note to add trackers to the next batch of antborgs in case something simir happened in the future.

  Alpha sighed and blipped his consciousness back to the [Wasp] he’d left in the medical wing. It had always been a risk to let Alphantonso IV out of the colony, but given how the ants seemed unconcerned with the dangers of the forest, he’d let his guard down.

  The mudfish-shark thing had proven there were still creatures in the forest dangerous enough to be a problem.

  For now, Alpha turned his attention to the five rge gss cylinders before him. In four of the incubation chambers, an Alphantonso IV-2 model antborg slowly grew. They were still in the early phases and wouldn’t be ready for pupation for another day or so.

  As for the fifth incubation chamber…

  Instead of a rge ant rva, a squirming ball of bck nanomatter floated inside. Alpha mentally smiled to himself.

  If this worked out how he wanted it to, then Alphantonso V would be… something special indeed.

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  The goblin, formerly known as Pitdigger, now known as Antchaser, stared at the strange metallic vines he’d plucked through the crushed remains of the small Demon Ant.

  He’d seen nothing like it before, even during those few trips to the surface world. It vaguely reminded him of a pnt with bundles of ‘berries’ all along its length. But he was pretty sure the Demon Ants weren’t part pnt. Nor did pnts grow from their eyes.

  The eyes were another oddity. He’d seen Demon Ant eyes before. They could be used for a few things if you were brave enough to risk attracting the ire of the colony. While they weren’t soft, per se, they weren’t like this. These ‘eyes’ almost felt like gss or some kind of metal, like the rest of the strange ‘vine.’

  The oddity of the situation almost made him forget what he’d come there for.

  Antchaser nervously gnced toward the Mud Drake’s den. The vilge had known about the creature since they’d arrived in this cavern. It was hard to miss, being the apex predator of the forest that not even the ants were willing to agitate.

  He stared for a long moment, then certain the creature wouldn’t exit for a while still, he turned and gave a long, wobbling whistle, simir to the local birds.

  Far down the river, dozens of goblins rushed out of the forest toward the riverbank. Some carried rge cy jugs, others nets, and others still woven baskets.

  The goblins got to work resetting fish traps or collecting water, pnts, and other forageables.

  The river was the only major source of clean, running water for the entire cavern. Sure, there were some smaller ponds or creeks, but none that could support a vilge their size. Unfortunately, it was also the territory of the Mud Drake, making it unsafe to approach most of the time.

  The only safe time was when the drake was resting in its den. Thus, his current duty as a lookout. It was dangerous work, as the drake was… temperamental. It would attack anything near its den without hesitation. As the small ant had found out.

  Lucky for the goblins, it wouldn’t wander too far away from the river, even if agitated. That meant as long as you knew where the drake was, you could stay safe.

  Ironically, that meant the safest pce was near its den while it was inside.

  It helped that the [Dragon Pool], even one built by a lesser drake, cleaned and purified the water.

  Antchacer kept his eyes locked on the Mud Drake’s den for any signs of movement. At his warning, the goblins would all rush back to the safety of the treeline to avoid the drake’s wrath.

  Even so, part of his mind couldn’t help but wander back to the strange metallic vine lying in the grass beside him.

  What could it mean?

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