On the forty-sixth day since they bypassed the warp ring, Naomi’s swollen ankles puffed up so much it was painful to walk. There was a ringing in her ears, a dappling of her vision. She’d tried to get out of her bed and fallen right back down. She felt a dampness and brushed between her legs with shaking fingers. Blood. Hardly any, but still red.

She called for Hart on the comms, who came and helped her limp to the med bay.

Naomi tried to quiet her panic, but she couldn’t. This all pointed to worryingly serious symptoms. Hart had gone silent, with a tightness around her eyes that was never a good sign.

Hart led her to the autodoc and instructed Naomi to remove her coveralls. Blood stained Naomi’s underwear and the skin of her ankles was distended and tight with water. “Bleeding. Oedema,” Hart said, clearly alarmed but trying not to show it. She brought up Naomi’s last scans, including her urine samples. All had been normal.

“The spotting might not be anything to worry about,” Hart soothed as she passed Naomi a cup. Naomi didn’t know whether or not to believe her. Embarrassingly, the doctor had to help steady Naomi so she could give the sample. Hart took a small vial of Naomi’s blood, still outwardly infuriatingly calm. Naomi looked away from the needle, pushing away memories of IV lines.

While they scanned, Hart barraged Naomi with questions about symptoms.

“Headaches?”

Naomi nodded. She’d had them constantly the last few weeks, but migraines had followed her even before pregnancy, usually triggered by stress. There’d been no shortage of that.

“Nausea?”

“No more than usual. No vomiting.”

“Any abdominal pain or tenderness? Or anywhere else?”

“My right shoulder hurts,” she said. “But Lebedeva did knock it. Might have sprained it.”

Hart pressed Naomi’s shoulder, and Naomi grimaced.

“Fatigue?”

“Yeah, but I’m sleeping badly, pregnant, and overworked.”

“Stop with the qualifiers. Any visual disturbances?”

“Bit of wobbling, like a migraine aura.”

A line appeared between Hart’s eyebrows. She took Naomi’s blood pressure—high. The samples finished scanning, and Hart studied them.

“Well, fuck.” Her calm façade had cracked.

Naomi’s heart rate ratcheted up. “What?”

“There’s protein in your urine. Your blood pressure’s high. Your body is breaking down red blood cells, elevating your liver enzymes, and your platelets are low, so your blood’s going to have trouble clotting. You have HELLP syndrome, a variation of pre-eclampsia.” She hissed a breath through her teeth. “This is something the literature warned could be a side effect of pregnancy in space, but gravity should have mitigated a lot of the issues. I have been screening for it specially, but you haven’t shown symptoms before this. HELLP rarely develops before twenty-four weeks’ pregnancy, but the odds are better after thirty.”