My findings about the invasive lifeforms I sampled in the other ring set off a full-on panic response in the crew. Our engineers are speeding up their plan to detach our ring from the ship entirely, hoping to keep our biological archives from being contaminated.
Everyone's afraid to talk about what might be happening to the human colonist cargo in our sister ring because that's too horrible to think about.
Whether the transhuman entity that visited our ship is still with us, or whether the artificial intelligence she left behind took over half of our systems, something is using the ship as a petri dish for engineering exotic and dangerous new lifeforms.
For the first time since our ancestors left Earth parsecs behind, we might be fighting-and losing-a war with a hostile transhuman force.