“Thank you, and you’re welcome, pal. Okay, lean back into the pillow and try to relax that neck. I’ll be back with breakfast shortly. Then some more analgesics, and the ice pack.”
Detective Callista Ames was struggling a bit; her baby bump was large enough now to get in the way, given she was only a few weeks from her scheduled delivery. The weight on her bladder did her no favors, either. Worrying about Nick – the news he’d been beaten by one of the other consuls, and was almost discovered as the spy he was trying to be, stuck in her head – was not helping her situation.
“Damn, Cally, again?” Detective Timothy Jones chuckled as she got up for the fifth time since lunch to head to the ladies’ room. “How many gallons did you drink?! You’re worse than a camel – except camels don’t piss that much!”
“It’s hot out, and I have a big baby sitting with her butt squarely on my bladder,” Ames shot back, irritable. “If you can handle that any better – especially with the baby kicking and bouncing – then I’d like to see you try.”
“It is hot out for this early in the season,” Brigadier General Maia Peterson agreed, as she came through the bullpen area. “But Cally, sweetie, you really might wanna see the obstetrician. Tim is right, at least to a point: you’re sucking in water and peeing it out like a racehorse. Gestational diabetes is a thing, you know.”
“Yeah, but if I had that, my nanites would be fussing.”
“And are they?”
Ames huffed and headed for the ladies’ restroom.
As Ames relieved her aching bladder in a stall, she worried. Because my nanites are fussing about it a little, she admitted to herself. Maia has a point. I guess I need to see about getting in to see the obstetrician after all.
As she washed her hands at the sink, she popped off a VR message to her obstetrician – simply noting that, in the heat, she was drinking a lot of water, with the subsequent bathroom trips, and the nanites were flagging a few things that warranted looking at – and obtained an appointment for Thursday of the following week.
She rubbed her eyes, which had been bothering her for several days, massaged her temples to ease the looming headache, then headed back to her desk to finish her case report.
Two days later, she and Inspector Gorski were interrogating her most recent collar, a convenience store shoplifter who was not cooperating and was, in fact, quite belligerent. They had been there all day, right through lunch and most of her snacks, and the best she’d been able to do for food was to grab a candy bar out of the vending machines in the break room, wolfing it down in a few bites with a cup of black coffee. She was not a happy camper – grumpy and irritable, with a hungry baby bouncing up and down on her internal organs – and the perp was not helping her frame of mind in the least.
“Yeah, bitch,” he snarled, “you ain’t gettin’ nothin’ outta me. You an’ that bastard brat in your belly don’t even need t’ be here. You oughta be home with your man, cookin’ an’ cleanin’ an’ shit. You don’t got what it takes t’ be a cop, let ‘lone no damn detective.”
“And yet she caught you,” Gorski remarked calmly, as Ames flushed a deep red in anger. “So who is it who has what it takes, and who doesn’t?”
“Feh!” the perp said, spitting at Ames and Gorski.
Much to Gorski’s surprise, Ames leaped to her feet and stormed out of the interrogation room. He turned, nodded to the beat cop guarding the door before jerking his head at the perp – watch him – and headed out after her.
He found her down the hall and around the corner, but instead of hitting something in anger as he’d half-suspected, she was crumpled on the floor against the wall, holding her head, and grunting in pain.
“Cally?!” he exclaimed, crouching beside her. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
“N-no,” she gasped. “Got… got real problems, Stefan. I…”
Just then, her nose began to bleed.
“Oh shit,” she continued. “Stefan, call doctor. Get Nick. I got, I got… my nanites are screaming at me!”
“What are they telling you? Cal, what’s wrong, honey?”
“Blood pressure out the roof, blood sugar all screwed up. Baby in distress. Danger, danger… help me…”
Gorski scooped her up in his arms and ran for the door, contacting Maia Peterson and Lee Carter as he went.
“No, it’s not good,” the emergency room obstetrician told Gorski, Peterson, Carter, and Cally’s parents a while later; the neighbor, whom the elder Ames couple had gotten to know well, was keeping Paul. “She had a brief hypertensive crisis. Fortunately, we got her blood pressure down before it caused any serious damage. We have her stabilized for now. But she seems to have developed gestational diabetes, which in turn has apparently triggered rather severe gestational hypertension. We don’t see either one very often these days; I expect her busy lifestyle as a police investigator likely set her up for it. Plus, the baby looks like being pretty big, which is sometimes considered a factor; the baby is still a good five or six weeks from normal term, but is around full-term size now. But it’s a dangerous situation. In my professional opinion, she is teetering on the brink of pre-eclampsia, and that puts both mother and baby at high risk. It’s a potentially fatal condition.”
“You mean they could die? Both of them?” Laura Ames whispered, horrified.
The doctor simply nodded.
“I have called in her regular obstetrician, who is examining her now,” the doctor said. “But I will be surprised if she doesn’t conclude the same thing.”
“What do we do? How
