Time was now ticking against you. You had undergone drastic physical changes and even emotional and instinctual ones. You had gone from being a human woman to a Divine Fire Ant queen, and now the inside of your abdomen was filled with your drone, Hank Pym's sperm. You would soon begin to lay eggs. Eggs that would hatch into worker ants that would serve and protect you. The part of your mind that had once been horrified by the prospect of this was quiet now. Being an ant queen had given you quite the escape from previous problems that the ant instincts you had gained reinforced as things to get away from. They hadn't been life threatening problems, but still difficult, and now they weren't a problem at all. You had Hank, who loved you and would ensure that you would always have eggs to lay, and together you'd be able to look at ant behavior in a way scientists could only dream of... AS ants. But, at present, your chief need was a nest. An underground sanctuary where you could lay your eggs in peace and not have them stolen by any vertebrate, or even invertebrate predators.
You noticed a small stream nearby and moved to a more sheltered area at some distance from it. It was close enough that you could walk to it and get a drink, or have workers collect it and bring it to you, but far enough away that it wouldn't flood your nest. Hank followed quietly beside you and you could sense his eyes on you, just as you could the colony below you. Eventually you stopped near the base of a large tree nearby and brought your head and mandibles toward the ground.
"Here, we will build my nest here," you announced as you pushed your mandibles into the ground.
They easily sank in and you could feel the semi-wet earth squish together as you began to close your mandibles. The earth came up in a fairly decent sized clod, by human standards, as you lifted your head and then moved it so that it would begin to form the beginning of a new anthill... one big enough to hold giant human sized ants.
"Let me help you, Christine... my Queen... let me help you," Hank then spoke as he set his bags down and moved to put him then opposite you. His abdomen and rear legs actually pivoted up the tree you were beginning your nest near. He then caressed your antennae with his. "They will be my daughters too."
"Thank you, Hank," you replied, feeling some contentment and a great deal of love for him for his help.
The two of you then went straight into digging. Clods of ground was pulled up put in piles around a growing hole that you and Hank were excavating. The normal sized ants, the ants that had stung you and than Hank, transforming the both of you, dug with you and moved what small pieces of ground that they could in their effort to help you and Hank. Their work didn't escape your notice, and you found yourself loving them even more for it. Essentially, their mission was over. You were a queen ant, Hank was a drone, and you were pregnant. They were too small. Their drones couldn't mate with you, and while there were many of them, they could probably never gather enough food to feed you and Hank quickly. The food they had brought you before you had begun your trip to Brazil had been stored since the colony had arrived in America. They couldn't serve you and Hank in the way both of you would need it, and yet they continued to serve, without question or complaint.
"Thank you, my loyal colony," you spoke to the normal Divine Fire Ants, "thank you so much for your help."
"It is OUR pleasure, your majesty," one of the colony's original drones answered, "You and your drone may dwarf us in size, but you are still our Queen. We will live and thrive here where we are safe..."
"Provided Doctor Benjamin doesn't have us nuked," you gave half a shudder as you placed a clod of dirt on the ground where the beginnings of your anthill... your colony was now becoming obvious.
At the moment, Hank's human partner, Doctor Benjamin was the only real threat to you. He had seen you and he had seen the colony. His discovery of you was why the colony had fled away from the company sight and into the jungle so quickly and so far. Doing so ensured your immediate survival, but if he lost contact with Hank's cellphone or Hank failed to contact him with new research, he could send in search parties, and while you had the intention of making sure your nest would be well hidden, you figured a human search party could find it and potentially fumigate it if they really felt threatened.
"The two you left behind should be able to monitor what he's doing," Hank commented, "and if he really creates a stir... they can sting him..."
"And once HE is a drone, he will have to join the colony for his own safety," the normal sized drones spoke from below you.
You paused and lifted your antennae to the northeast, where you and Hank had left, or at least you figured you had left. Two of your colony had been deliberately left behind, but for a good reason, brought on by Doctor Benjamin. The telepathic connection between you and the colony, now including Hank, could feel the two on their spying mission. In that you could tell they were alive, but they were far enough away that you couldn't fully tell what they saw. Finding a direct land route and then digging a tunnel TO the company headquarters might be something that would have to wait. If your spies were alive, that would mean Benjamin hadn't found them, and if you didn't feel Benjamin's presence, that would mean he hadn't joined the colony either.
And the present need to build your nest went above that. You could almost feel the development of the eggs within your abdomen. You figured you would only have a few hours before you'd begin laying eggs, maybe a little longer than that. You weren't sure on how ant pregnancies would translate over to you, since you had started your life as a human. But you were driven on to dig, and so you dug. Dirt was grabbed and moved up to build the hill.
By now, between yours and Hanks efforts, the hill was now becoming visible and there was a tunnel with a vertical shaft going down about two feet. The circumference of the tunnel was wide enough that you and Hank could fit in it back to back and wing to wing and not feel cramped. Part of you was amazed by how well the two of you had figured it out instinctively. However, that pride was soon interrupted with a comment of a different nature.
"I'm getting rather hungry," Hank spoke up after a few moments as you watched him place down a piece of the tree's root system on a section of the hill that was being built around the entrance to the nest.
That actually sent a small pang of guilt through you for eating the Bushmaster that had tried to bite him. The food the colony had gathered while in America was left behind when you had left, and when the snake strike at Hank, and you took the snake's attack, you ate it. Now, that snake could have been food for your newly transformed drone. You didn't want him to die anymore than you didn't want to die yourself.
"Can you gather food for Hank?" you asked to the normal sized ants below you, "I am not hungry, but we are both busy with the nest."
"Of course, your majesty," several workers stopped their efforts to help dig and began to move off, "what shall we hunt for the colony?"
"Make it an invertebrate," Hank spoke up, "Make sure it isn't something that could come and try and eat Christine and I..."
"Drone," one of the workers addressed him, "You and the Queen are so large that no spider could ever kill or eat you."
"If you were only biting it, that would be true," Hank answered, "but I want to see what your venom does against an invertebrate. You've said that it can transform mammals like Christine and I were into Divine Fire Ants... but what does it do to invertebrates?"
You watched the workers look at each other and wiggle their antennae about between themselves.
"We do not know," one worker spoke, "our jaws have been strong enough that even the largest spiders and scorpions can be dismembered by our jaws."
"That is why I want you to test your venom," Hank answered.
"We see," the workers answered.
You resumed your digging while about half the colony ventured out with their hunting orders. Part of you wished they could find a grocery store and bring back packaged meat or something like that, as the human part of your mind was not easily keen on eating things like snakes and bugs. You'd only eaten the Bushmaster because it threatened Hank. But, that wasn't likely. You'd fled out into the remote rainforest to avoid being caged and/or dissected. You wouldn't have much choice, other than eating the vertebrate animals of the Amazon that couldn't breed enough to feed ants of your size for long.
The nest's entrance continued to develop while the hunting party was out as you and Hank and the workers and drones that didn't join the hunting party continued to work. Soon the shaft was approaching six feet deep and you and Hank were clinging to the sides of the shaft with your six legs and then backing out to exit the shaft. Hank did a good job at ignoring his hunger and worked just as diligently as you were, which made you proud and made you love him even more. You needed the nest to be finished, in pure theory, if he acted as a human male, at least the human males she'd known, he didn't need to focus so hard on helping her.
"Thank you, Hank," you said to him, "thank you for all your help."
"Hey, I promised I'd stay with you right?" Hank answered, and caressed her with his antennae, "and I will keep that promise."
You paused him to caress him with your antennae.
"How do deep do you think we should go before we start excavating a preliminary chamber?" you asked him then.
"About another six feet, I think," Hank answered, "from what I observed in the terrarium, Divine Fire Ant "saliva" operates as a sort of natural bioluminescent substance, but it's only placed in the tunnels that aren't easily seen by those that would come over the entrance to the nest. We don't one anyone to come over the nest, look down and see you."
You nodded, as telepathic shouts came to you.
"My Queen! My Queen!"
Grabbing a clod of dirt and backing out of the shaft you climbed up to see a Divine Fire ant. It was obviously a worker ant, but it was half your present size. You could see the join in the center of its back expanding and contracting, just as yours did, just as Hank's did.
"My Queen! Something AMAZING happened!" the worker spoke and approached you and rubbed its antennae to yours. The contact confirmed that it was one of the hunting party.
"What happened to you?" you asked the ant.
"Our hunt was successful, my Queen," the ant answered, "We found a beetle with long antennae, an invertebrate that could not eat you or your drone. We stung it, as requested and it grew."
"It grew?" Hank asked as he emerged from the tunnel.
The other ants had also gathered in curiosity.
"Yes," the grown worker answered, "It is even bigger than you are now, my Queen, but it couldn't breathe and died."
"Fascinating," Hank answered, "I'd suppose that will solver our food crisis... we don't need to decimate the mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds, we just grow insects and arachnids till they are big enough to feed us all."
"But since we know that you and your drone can breathe at your size, my Queen, we realized that if we stung each other, we would grow too, and we could breathe," the worker finished her report.
"And so you did," one of the other drones spoke.
"Yes," the worker answered, "am I pleasing to you, my Queen?"
You and Hank looked up to see the rest of the hunting party returning with the beetle, which was indeed huge. It would feed you and Hank for a week, and the colony as it was for a year.
"Yes," you replied in a very positive tone, "and now we know, Hank..."
"Yes," Hank nodded, "did the stings hurt?"
"Not too badly, Drone," the worker answered.
"Then... colony... you have your Queen's permission to grow to match the hunting party's size," you commanded, "make sure the drones get to grow too!"
You and Hank then watched as the colony seemed to swarm itself. Your antennae again picked up the pheromone demanding you to sting. And then you watched an amazing amount of growth. All of the ants grew larger and larger. Soon, the hinge on the backs, which wasn't visible at their normal size opened as they needed to draw in more oxygen to fit their new sizes. The workers grew until they were half your size. The drones grew even further until they were as big as Hank. As they finished growing, they came up to you. They of course started where what was truly your colony was beginning, your abdomen.
"We love you, my Queen," one of the drones said to her.
"I know," you replied to them, feeling silently overjoyed to have them at Hank's size, "but my nest must be completed before I will mate with you all... for my eggs by Hank are getting closer and closer to being ready to be laid."
"Of course," the drones answered and then approached Hank.
"You won't mind us?" one of them asked Hank.
"Do you love her?" Hank questioned.
"Of course, she is the Queen, don't you?" the drone answered.
"Yes, but not only because she is the Queen," Hank answered, "but, since you love her, I do not mind."
"And workers, you may now truly assist your Queen and Drones in digging my nest," you announced.
The nest's construction accelerated much more now with the army of larger workers and drones to help you dig.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Future chapters...
Through your link with the colony, you're now able to see what your spies are doing.
Your nest is completed and you mate with the other drones
You begin laying Hank's eggs
Hank sends a text message on the Divine Fire Ant's venom's effect on invertebrates.
Old problems come back to haunt you...