She climbed along the long spoke to the centre of the ship. Her hair had grown out enough that she could feel it rising from her skull like a bristle. Hixon and Lebedeva were there, alert and working on the main controls. Valerie and Hart floated in just as the lights stabilised again.

“Radiation spike is my guess,” Hixon said. “Leaked through the shields enough to mess with the systems.”

“Not in my lab,” Naomi said.

“Somewhere else, perhaps. See to it,” Valerie said, voice tight.

There had been little else Naomi could do, so she’d floated back up to solid ground and spent a few hours in her lab before catching a handful of hours of fitful sleep.

By the time she’d woken up again, Lebedeva and Hixon had run full diagnostics. All looked fine.

Yet over the next two days, alarms dinged through the ship. Oxygen levels started to dip, slowly and inexorably. Naomi, Hart, and Valerie helped Lebedeva and Hixon with the checks. They’d checked the ship again from top to bottom but couldn’t find a fix. The filters were fine, as was the shield. No one was panicking yet, but it was similar to when Naomi’s algae was infected—if a solution wasn’t found soon, they were scuppered, to use one of Naomi’s father’s favourite sayings. No one spoke much. The full wattage of the team was focused on solving the problem.

Lebedeva found the issue on the morning of the third day—a subsystem in the main body of the ship was leeching power, affecting both the life system and fuel efficiency. Hixon was isolating each subsystem to find out more detail.

Valerie had delegated communication with Earth back to Naomi as she helped Lebedeva and Hixon. Evan had sent through what additional information he could, but there wasn’t much that wasn’t already in the repair manuals and detailed diagnostics on board. He kept saying he wished he could do more. She’d dryly responded that she wished the ship would stop trying to kill them.

The lower oxygen left the crew sleepy and sluggish, with heavy limbs and constant headaches. Those on the ISS or the Gateway had suffered lower levels and been fine, but Naomi went to the medical lab and gave herself another scan in the autodoc, alone, just in case.

At twelve weeks, it was a foetus rather than an embryo, her body easing from the first trimester to the second. The thing inside her was now the size of a peach, forming into something more concrete—bones and cartilage and buds of teeth.