to the Streamsider nest entrance. The jaws that serve as the hands of ants in times of peace and prosperity were now the swords of battle wielded with abandon by overwhelming numbers of the Supercolony invaders. The stings through which the ancestor wasps laid eggs were now poison-tipped stilettos of predation and war.
Within a few hours the ground was covered with severed limbs and dead and injured ants from both sides. The supply of fighters was limited for the Streamside Colony, as usual for their species, but not for Supercolony. The Supercolony army on the field increased as that of Streamsider declined. The minor workers among the defenders started to pull back into the nest, while many of the soldiers formed a circle around the nest entrance, heads facing outward, in the characteristic maneuver of their kind. The tactic, which often works for a strong colony facing another strong colony with the same methods of war, utterly failed this time. The Supercolony force grew to a size never seen in ordinary combat practiced by Nokobee mound ants.
The attackers broke through the Streamsider soldier ring and poured into the interior of the nest. They pressed downward into the labyrinth of subterranean chambers and galleries, subduing and killing every inhabitant they found. They located the mother Queen in the lowermost chamber, huddled beneath a mass of her praetorian soldier guards and minor worker nurses. The invaders pulled off the defenders and killed them all. A dozen seized and spread-eagled the Queen. A soldier cut off her head, and others began to drag her body upward on its long journey to the Supercolony nest, to serve as food. Barely an hour after they had launched the final assault on the Streamsider nest entrance, the battle was over.
The conquerors did not take any of the Streamsider pupae and newly emerged workers alive. Because of the prodigious reproductive capacity of their own colony, especially when enjoying the resources of newly conquered terrain, they had no need of slaves. They killed all the young captives on the spot and carried their bodies back to the Supercolony nest for food.
Only a few Streamsiders managed to escape the final battle and hide in nearby vegetation. Like the Trailheader refugees their own colony had driven out, most died within hours.
Other colonies along the Nokobee lakeside suffered the same fate during the remainder of the summer. By midsummer, the species and most of the rest of antdom across a quarter mile of shore at Dead Owl Cove had been replaced by a continuous, gigantic Supercolony. The ant empire had conquered all. Now there settled a strange new calm upon the region.
Peace and the stability of empire had come to this little parcel of the longleaf pine savanna. No more fighting among colonies of their species, no more wars, no more conflict within the colony over who had the right to reproduce. No more colony boundaries of any kind. Forget the old way of depending on a mother queen. There was now an abundance of surplus queenlets to take her place, any one of which could die without noticeable consequence. Peace across the land, perfect equality among all its citizens, and potential immortality for the empire were the rewards from a change in social structure.
In this one stroke, by intervention of a single micromutation, an era had ended and a new one begun. This part of the Nokobee ecosystem had been shifted in its governance and in the quality of its life.
24
YET, EVEN WITH its triumph, the Supercolony empire was not healthy. It was out of balance with nature. Its huge, dense population was too heavy a burden for the habitat to carry. Many kinds of plants and animals within reach of the worker swarms began to decline, and a few disappeared altogether. Among the first to suffer were other kinds of ants. Those that occupied soil nests similar to that of Supercolony were driven away, or killed and eaten. Those that depended on similar kinds of food found their supplies declining. Their scouts and harvesters were beaten to new food sites by the ubiquitous Supercolony workers. Spiders and ground beetles that once ranked among the chief predators of the Nokobee anthill species were now themselves hunted down as prey.
Supercolony workers were driven by the need for ever more food to supply the unrestrained egg production of the queenlets and the nurseries of hungry grublike larvae located throughout the giant nest. They penetrated parts of the surrounding environment once shunned as