Derpy felt the other ponies place the necessary equipment on her. Her suit, bleached white and pressure-controlled. Her helmet, clear and polished to see through, and crash resistant. Perfecting its tempering had taken a while, but during testing she smashed more than a few prototypes until Doctor Hooves settled on the best material-forging process. She also had her belt and the new radio control: a two-way Hoarse code transmitter/receiver. She'd be able to communicate with Mission Control when Equestria was pointing the right way, although there would be a delay.
Then, her daughter was hugging her, and her husband was doing the same. And a crowd of support staff was cheering, and she was smiling. Only for a moment did one of her hooves move to her belly, but she closed her eyes and put that thought out of her mind.
She felt the rocket being strapped to her back, and she felt the oxygen-conversion tank being secured--not for her but for her rescuee, whose tank must certainly be breaking down. The added provisions were strapped to her back like many heavy sacks of mail. Water in a container for her and water in a container for Lightning Dust. Energy snacks in squeezable sealed containers--Doctor Hooves had perfected them seeking to eliminate the weight of the tins that Lightning Dust had carried.
Then she was alone, and the other ponies were taking shelter.
Then the countdown started.
Then, she was launched into the sky, through atmospheric layers.
Then she was in space. Farther than she'd ever traveled. Far in the distance were Marred and Lightning Dust--who had drifted beyond the point of no return. She would reach Lightning Dust and hopefully adjust her trajectory to turn around. It would work if she decelerated enough and if Lightning Dust was conscious to execute the maneouver. There was, indeed, a chance she was already dead. Derpy felt her belly. Maybe she never had a chance. But Derpy still needed to try.
And, she rotated in space and wondered: why.
Lightning Dust hadn't been kind to her.
Derpy didn't want to leave her daughter and husband alone. Doctor Hooves was kind. But he wasn't always attentive. Dinky was old enough to be on her own. But she shouldn't have to be.
Derpy rotated more and more. In the bleakness of space, among the darkness, punctuated by a visible distant planet here, and a star or a nebula over there, she blinked and took in everything. And she took a deep breath through her Device. Then she removed it and her helmet and took a test breath in space. Even after twenty breaths, she wasn't winded.
She bit her lower lip and checked her orientation. She was on target, assuming Lightning Dust didn't drift too much, she'd reach her in a few days. She closed her eyes and reflected.
She didn't have much except hope once her parents fell ill.
Hope that her parents would get well.
Hope that she'd be adopted by a loving relative.
Hope that she'd make friends at the orphanage. She'd had a few. Doctor Hooves was one. A cool stallion a few years older. He always made her feel valued. And he had such interesting ideas--wondering how ladybugs flew, how narwhals sang and why they weren't magical like unicorns and if they were related.
But late at night, even though she thought her bubbles were about hope--everypony kept saying they were--she cried a lot. She especially cried when she was being insulted or left out because ponies thought she couldn't fly right. She could, but she sometimes had problems with depth and focus--but so did other ponies when the sun got in their eyes. She just needed to take things a little slower. And that allowed her to see dangers they couldn't view.
Lightning Dust continued drifting. And her stomach churned. The last food she had put in was a quarter of a rations bar. She had three left and had no idea how long she needed to make them last. She could take them all, then starve all at once. Or, she could drag out rations and die by pieces.
She'd checked her distance and was beyond the no-go point. She could activate a maneouver with her little remaining fuel and try a loop-de-loop to slow herself and hopefully send herself back to Equestria. But without an object with sufficient gravitational force around which to maneouver, even if she managed to use her thrusters to turn, she might end up pointing the wrong way and drifting even more distant from any rescuers.
The procedure for being stranded was to cut the engine, preserve fuel, and continue floating in the same direction, then, when a rescuer could reach the target, to use the fuel's propulsion to turn around.
But was anypony coming? She was past the no-go point. She wasn't sure anypony could save her. Only Spitfire was able-bodied. Even though she was old, she'd raced in the Ponyditarod--Dust figured was still the toughest of the Wonderbolts. But shoot. She didn't want to be saved by a Wonderbolt--they'd kept her out of their little club and she'd made her own stunt empire that put on shows that were more technically impressive than the best the 'bolts could manage. And now she was going to be dependent on a Wonderbolt for everything.
Hallucinating in the cold of the void, Lightning Dust shut her eyes and tried to imagine herself anywhere other than space.
And her life flashed before her.
She was on the ground, at the training grounds in a classroom. Derpy Hooves, the Program's test pilot was trying to provide advice and feedback to ponynaut candidates. And Lightning Dust was laughing at her.
"Before trying these rockets, you were launched in a trebuchet."
"Yes!"
"We use one in our show."
"Great!"
"Yeah, and nopony would ever think one of those would get anywhere close to space. Like, how high did you get?"
"A few hundred fetlocks."
"Didn't Doctor Hooves do the math?"
"He wanted to double-check the angles experientially. He wasn't so sure about some supposed mathematical constants."
"I think he just wanted to see you slammed against the ground. Or some tree."
"I hear ponies pay good money to see that happen to your group of rockheads," Spitfire said to Lightning Dust.
"No, no," Derpy shook her head. "Doctor Hooves isn't like that. He wants to confirm all the possibilities before determining the proper route to take. He needed to check the math--to determine how certain adjustments could affect height. He was learning about how applied science related to theoretical. I think."
"I hope he was paying you well."
"No payment!"
Lightning Dust snorted, "Guess it was a lover's payment."
Derpy blushed. Rainbow Dash hooted and Soarin laughed.
"Somepony's got to be pretty dumb to get herself into something like this for free."
"I'm... I'm not dumb."
"What a little fan of Doctor Hooves. Fangirl. Ha!"
"I'm not little--"
"A big fan, then."
The whole class was hooting.
"But it worked out--they got married!" Soarin noted.
"You two definitely had something going on before you washed out, though, right?" Spitfire asked.
"I'm. I--I was focused on Dinky. My daughter. And- I-"
"So *that's* what you were thinking about when you were saddling him?"
"I--ah--"
They laughed and somepony threw a paper rocket around the room.
"That's all for today. Sorry." Tearfully, she trotted out of the room.
"Not cool," Rainbow Dash glared at Lightning Dust.
"You joined in too," Lightning Dust said.
"We've done worse in the barracks," Spitfire noted, "but that one's a civilian. I'll apologize tomorrow."
They said their apologies. And Derpy accepted them. But that hadn't been the only time Lightning Dust teased her.
Before that teasing session, Lightning Dust had criticized Derpy's lazy eye. At the time, she'd just thought the Doctor was finding a make-work job for his wife--wasting their time.
Later that night, during a bull session with the other ponynauts sitting around and playing cards, she discovered she'd been wrong.
"You feeling better, Soarin?" Rainbow Dash handed him a glass of water.
"Sure," he wheezed. "I never thought breathing at high altitudes would be so tough."
"Yeah, well, Doctor Hooves said he's working on a device to help with that. It's going to cost us weight, though, he says, so it might take longer to reach Marred. So, we might be grounded until the rockets get more powerful."
"How do you know?" Spitfire folded her cards.
Rainbow Dash smiled, "Princess connections." She pumped her left wing up, then her right wing. Then, she repeated the jaunty procedure.
"Fine!" Lightning Dust flared up her wings and jumped into the air. Rainbow Dash circled her cautiously. Then Lightning Dust pounced, darted around, and slapped Dash's rump. Dash twisted her head and shot out with a foreleg and grabbed Lightning Dust's left front foreleg and dragged her down. Lightning Dust nipped at Rainbow Dash's neck and they tumbled into the dust.
"Enough!" Spitfire pulled Rainbow Dash away. Soarin tugged at Lightning Dust.
Lightning Dust chuckled, "You may have Princess connections but those connections added a bit of cake to your rump, slowpoke," she whinnied.
"You mother-bucking nightmare!" Rainbow Dash hissed.
Lightning Dust chuckled some more and waved off Soarin who, despite a worried expression, let her go. Lightning Dust proffered a hoof to Rainbow Dash. "Just wanted to let loose some tension. We're all teammates. We want everypony to succeed. None of us are going to sabotage anypony, right?"
Rainbow Dash's eyes narrowed, but she accepted Lightning Dust's proffered foreleg and shook. "You do realize, friend, that you've opened yourself to pranks?"
Lightning Dust licked her lips. "Bring it on." The two of them sat back down.
Soarin changed the topic. "Let's talk about something less controversial. Something that can bring us together. Like politics."
"What about 'em?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"There's growing interest from the Griffonian Socialist Creatures Republic in a space program. Newspapers report they've hired kirin to power their rockets. Somehow the kirin are using their nirik energy--Griffons have been storing the power. It might be more powerful than the fuel we're using."
"Propaganda!" Spitfire shouted.
"Yeah! They just want us to go too fast and have a rocket blow up," Rainbow Dash said.
"Why kirin? Why not griffons?"
"The Socialist-whatever griffons' country is surprisingly multicultural! Not as much as Equestria, of course, but as a colony, it saw a lot of immigration in its hayday. Apparently, a group of kirin were living beneath them for millennia, separated from society until quite recently."
"Seems to be a trend for kirin..." Spitfire commented, referencing how the other known group of kirin spent several hundred years isolated from Equestria.
"So, they've got kirin powering their rockets, diamond dogs supplying materials, and minotaurs hammering it all into place."
"Cool," Lightning Dust nodded. "And we've got the best flyers in the world!"
"With equipment validated by the best tester in the world." Soarin said.
"What?"
"The best tester. You've seen her. She was talking with Doctor Hooves."
"The blonde one?"
"That's her."
"What equipment did she test?"
"Our rockets. When she reached the same level of the atmosphere I did, but she didn't have any breathing problems. Apparently, she's a high-altitude specialist."
Lightning Dust chuckled. "You're telling me that shrinking violet mare, the quiet one with the weird eye, strapped hundreds of pounds of highly flammable rocket fuel to herself and shot into the air with barely-tested equipment?"
"You deaf?" Soarin chuckled. "Derpy Hooves tested everything. The Doctor says she'll be providing us lectures and Q&As soon."
Lightning Dust blew a low note out from between her teeth. "I'll be a horse's niece. It wasn't just my stunts that have been getting overlooked. Even ponies with weird googly eyes are tougher than the Wonderbolts!"
"Hay. Hay! The Doctor didn't ask a Wonderbolt to test the equipment. We'd have done even better than... you know who, and the program would be even farther along--we would have figured out the need for the breathing device sooner, and we'd be well on our way to Marred!" Rainbow Dash said.
"Hard to say," Lightning Dust spread her cards, being contrary to Rainbow Dash's position out of spite. "Just like it's hard to say if you can beat a full house."
Rainbow Dash angrily tossed in her cards and Soarin folded his without comment.
Lightning Dust chuckled as she raked in bits from her professional rivals. "I'll be the one first in space in the end, just you see. This Derpy and I, we're the ones you got to watch out for. Never see us coming."
No pony was going to remember Lightning Dust because she'd bucked up--exhausted her fuel. If not for the loop-de-loop, she would have been able to make the trip despite the unexpected drift from her flight plan--which she'd fixed at the cost of her fuel reserves.
Every pony was going to remember Lightning Dust. She was the first pony to perform a loop-de-loop around their moon and she was the first pony to get stuck in space. First dead pony to orbit Marred. She smiled a rictus smile. That made her decision. She wasn't going to try to manoeuver back to Equestria. She'd follow the official plan. Even if she died, she'd become a historic satellite.