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Cornell Jackson’s hands were shaking as he and Administrator Rosa Mendez were forced at gunpoint to disable the alarms on the secure wing of the Achyuta ring’s top security facility in the spinward end of Rama City.

“I want to see it for myself. You said you had the answer.” Hunter Moran had been a Major in Perumal ring’s defense force, but that was before the biospheres of the first four Bishop’s rings started dying. Now he was a terrorist. No, that wasn’t fair. Cornell felt the same panic as he did, as everyone did. After over a hundred-and-fifty years of developing the five colony rings in orbit around Alpha Mensae, their biospheres started to collapse. Excess carbon dioxide was impossible to purge, food crops were dying, and oceans and lakes on each ring were developing toxic algae growths. In less than a decade, almost all life, especially human life, would go extinct and no one knew why…well, almost.

Moran and his military coalition from the other four rings arrived two weeks ago. They had overridden the automatic meteor guard, landed their shuttles along the rim spaceports, and declared Martial Law on the last viable ring.

“Unlock the fucking computers. I want to see the data.” Moran along with his two lieutenants pointed their rifles at Cornell and Rosa menacingly. Cornell looked at Mendez but all she did was nod.

“Okay, but I don’t think…”

“Who gives a screw what you think. Hundreds of thousands have died and millions more are going to unless we can reverse this thing. Show me.”

Cornell’s fingers tapped out the required codes on the keyboard. A moment later, he received a text from the system on his handheld with the confirmation key. He started to reach into his pocket, prompting Moran to point the rifle barrel at his face.

“It’s the security code. I’ve got to use it to get in.” As if dual-authentication was some sort of mystery to fanatic soldiers.

“Yeah, okay.” Moran lowered his weapon but Dean and Katrina, each flanking him, remained at full alert.

The big monitor at the back of the room started running the recorded project summary.

“Centuries ago, an armada of colony sleeper ships left Earth’s solar system embarking on a 33-light-year journey to Alpha Mensae. Upon arrival, the central AI mobilized the army of massive construction bots to harvest raw materials from one of the system’s gas giants.

“The result was these five Bishop’s rings, ring-shaped megastructures each with the land area of India, circling the star perpendicular to their orbits, with a mirrored object suspended in the center of each ring, reflecting sunlight into the interior surfaces of the rings. Ring walls 200 kilometers high, plus the rings’ gravity-simulating spin, keep the air…”

“Skip the bullshit, damnit. Everyone knows this. What about the life form that’s been killing us?”

“Sorry.” Cornell cursed that his hands were still shaking. “Just pulling the data up now. It’ll be on the monitor in a second.” He pressed Enter and then turned to the screen behind him.

The scene shifted to their own ring’s Great Ocean which was actually a little smaller than ancient Earth’s Gulf of Oman.

“Samples from the oceans of all five rings confirmed the same life form compilation, each individually about the size of a microbe.”

The views shifted rapidly to a shoreline, then a sample container, then a scene through a microscope lens.

“Can you kill them?”

“Yes, easily. They have typical tolerances to temperature and acidity. Their populations were rather modest until the algae blooms and then they accelerated dramatically. We believe…”

“Shut up. You’re not teaching school.”

Cornell clenched his fists. He was nervous and talking too much. Maybe if Mendez would do her job, but she was standing behind him as still as a sphinx.

“There’s something you should know.” He was terrified of Moran, terrified of the guns, but they’d have to understand, to respect what they saw next. Cornell advanced to the next video.

“What’s this? Flashing lights?”

“The life forms we examined are capable of generating bioluminescence.”

“But that pattern…”

“It’s binary.”

“You’re saying they’re intelligent?” The last word choked in Moran’s throat.

“Maybe a collective consciousness but it can communicate. They don’t know any more about the biosphere die offs than we do. Even less in fact.” Cornell pointedly looked at Mendez who was now visibly anxious.

“It’s a trick.”

“I’ll give you full access to my records. No trick. They were transplanted here when the construction bots harvested the gas giant. I’ve traced back the record of their evolution. Their populations only started growing after the biosphere failures.” Connell looked at Rosa. “You should tell them.”

“They’ll kill us. They want a solution. We don’t have one for them.”

“We’ll die anyway. We’re all dying. Please.”

Moran growled, “Please what?”

“I need the keyboard.” After Cornell vacated his seat and stepped back, Rosa, using her emergency authority, entered her security code. Another file appeared on the monitor.

“This is Special Order A-117 originally issued by the U.N.’s Interstellar Colonization Authority five hundred years ago.”

Moran’s eyes darted back and forth as he read, his rifle barrel waving at the floor. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“It doesn’t matter, Moran. It never mattered. We were set up from the beginning, all of the colony projects were. Seventeen star systems, dozens of rings, billions of people. We never had a chance. The authorities who stayed behind inherited the only viable world…Earth.”

“They never developed a sustainable, artificial biosphere,” Moran muttered. “None of the colony rings were designed to last more than one-hundred-fifty to two-hundred years. It’s not the life forms killing us. It’s the ring.”

Cornell wasn’t teaching, but there was a lesson. “The rings will continue. One life form will thrive after we’re gone.” He reached over Rosa’s shoulder and retrieved the file of the lifeforms communicating. They were going extinct in their original home in the gas giant’s atmosphere. Now, they’d flourish for hundreds or thousands of years, for however long the rings survived.

Written for the SciFiFri prompt for Friday, January 12, 2024. I’ve never submitted here before, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The optional theme is “Rocket.” In this case, it’s more “Space Habitat.”

For more on Bishop’s rings, read the article How Bishop Ring Rotating Space Habitat Will Be Actualized in the Future.