Artist illustration of a Bishop Ring space habitat. Image Credit: Neil Blevins – 2018

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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.

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