Members of mission control swarmed all around the crew compartment when Lira arrived. Apparently, she was the last straggler, although it was hard to feel too rushed about it. She'd been through a lot of launch simulations and she knew they'd be in a holding pattern for the next ninety minutes while the pilots on the flight deck completed their pre-launch checks.

"Dr. Salonga, we have your seat for you right here," Bart said, pointing to a spot next to her prodigal coworker.

"Dr. Bello, I thought we were meeting in the rabbit compartment before launch," she couldn't help commenting as she strapped in. Then she did a double-take. "Your hair is short."

Uchenna Bello had had glossy, wavy extensions that hung down to her mid-back the whole time they were training together. Her makeup had always been meticulously applied, even at buttcrack-of-dawn launch simulations. Now, she wore tight curls short around her face, which was fresh-scrubbed without so much as a lipgloss.

Actually, Lira thought the no-makeup look allowed the fullness of her lips and her high cheekbones to shine.

"You cut yours too," Dr. Bello pointed out.

"Last week," Lira reminded her. "I thought you loved your hair long."

Dr. Bello just shrugged. "You had the right idea. Six months is a long time to go without a retouch." Her hand went self-consciously to the back of her neck, then she said, "Sorry I missed the pre-check. They all okay?"

Lira grinned. "We've got a new name. Buzz, the black rex in thirty-five. He's a feisty one and we're gonna have to do a better job of rabbit-proofing the cages than the habitat engineers did."

"Because we're better qualified for that job than they are," Dr. Bello said with a smirk. It made a faint dimple appear on her cheek and Lira didn't think she'd ever seen the woman smirk before. Was she finally lightening up after six months of training together? Miracle of miracles!

"I put a piece of tubing around the wire for now but it's not a long-term solution. Hopefully their habitat on the Exodus will be better suited to sharp teeth and stubborn lagomorphs."

Somewhere beneath her seat, Lira felt a low mechanical rumble – a thruster alignment test, if she remembered the launch sims accurately. Dr. Bello’s face went serious and she gritted out, "Let's just get through the launch, and then we'll figure it out." 

"You scared, Dr. Bello?"

She shot a side-long glance at Lira, her normally warm brown skin taking on a gray hue. "Call me… Uchenna."

She said it like it had been painful, and Lira raised her eyebrows. So they were on a first-name basis now? The woman really must be scared.

"I get it. We're about to ride an explosion of three thousand tons of rocket fuel a hundred kilometers straight up out of the atmosphere," Lira said. "Plus I'm a veterinarian, not an astronaut. I'm not supposed to be weightless."

"I'm not scared," Uchenna said, her tone sharp. "Just… concerned about the animals."

Lira played along. "Rabbits were not meant to experience zero G either. They're okay, though, I made sure they're all sedated and as comfortable as possible."

During training, she'd asked mission control if there was any way to move her launch seat into the rabbits' compartment. They would all be pulling up to four Gs and there was nothing she could do but monitor the rabbits' sedation levels from her seat – if she was even alert enough to do that – but she didn’t like the idea of them experiencing the terror of launch all by themselves.

She'd been overridden by logic, of course – it was safer and easier to keep all human crew members centrally located during the most dangerous part of the trip. The rabbits were an addition unique to this particular mission, after a years-long debate over the relative risks and merits of including animals in the colony. It had been determined that dogs were too resource-intensive and cats presented too much of a health risk. The threat of Toxoplasma gondii was too great, especially without knowing how the Martian environment might mutate it. And not many people wanted to cuddle up to rats, as useful as they were as research animals.

Rabbits had been a happy medium. Their compartment had been retrofitted into the shuttle in the only place the engineers could fit it, and there was no space for a bleeding-heart veterinarian to sit with them.

"Who knows, maybe floating makes them… hoppy," Uchenna said.

Lira looked open-mouthed at her. Making jokes? Now that was a side of the exobiologist she definitely had not seen before.

"Watch out, Dr. Bello, I think space agrees with you," she said, then when those dimples reappeared, she looked away, pretending to be so very interested in whatever Bart was saying to a group of materials scientists sitting on her other side.