Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Pastry Run

Written by Nancy Fulda

Illustrated by Ural Akyuz

It's a killer job, but the old lady pays good.

Charles de Gaulle to the Sea of Tranquility in three hours flat. You can't come late, and you can't bring yesterday's. She tastes the difference.

The air is crisp at 5:00 a.m.

From my seat in the cockpit I can see Chazz coming down the A1 motorway. He's pushing 200 km/h, weaving between cars on his motorcycle. He screeches to a halt at the launchpad and sprints up the stairs with our cargo.

We get the all clear from the tower, and I'm gunning the engines before Chazz finishes strapping in. We lift out of the city skyline, a dark wedge against the brightening clouds.

Back in the old days, they used to fly pastries from Paris to New York every morning in the Concorde. Heck of a grocery bill, but the connoisseurs said it was worth it. A New Yorker just can't make a real French pastry, no matter how hard he tries. It has to come from France.

Madame Rousseau takes the game a step farther. She hasn't eaten an éclair in her life that wasn't made in the pastry shop near her childhood home. The clock starts ticking as soon as Madame's little treasures come out of the oven, and it doesn't stop until we touch down on Luna. If the goods aren't delivered by the time she sits down to tea, we don't get paid.

We're out of French airspace now, up in the lower stratosphere, just a few minutes out from the slingshot. It has a fancy name, suborbital Lunar something-or-other, but what it really is is a floating ring of plasma and metal that plays games with relativity. You fly through the middle and—bang!—your velocity relative to the earth gets a kick in the pants, and you're headed toward the moon at .2 cee. If you aim right, you pass through a second ring at the other end and get speed-shifted back, all without feeling so much as a tap against the hull.

The angle is critical. Come in crooked, and you'll shoot right past the moonside device. Happens every once in a while: some drunk pilot doesn't watch his v-vector and gets booted out past Pluto. Sometimes the ships make it back. The pilots never do.

The whole shebang is owned and operated by the LTS—the Lunar Transportation Society. They run their contraption on a strictly first-come first-served basis, and they don't take bribes, which means you're always stuck behind a line of twenty to thirty lumbering freight ships waiting for a boost to the cheese ball. I suppose if you're just a celebrity or an important diplomat you can afford to kick your heels for a few hours and wait for your turn. But not if you're delivering Madame Rousseau's raspberry croissants.

Up at the ring I see the LTS watchdogs waiting for us, looking like big black manta rays with the fins curled down. Their engines flare sullenly as they pull into formation.

Watchdogs are muscle ships—lots of guns, lots of shield plates—but in the end it's mostly show. The only thing they're allowed to fire at civilians are gobs of circuit-chomping nanobots. I run my fingers across the controls and wait for the fun to start.

Chazz calculates our entry angle for the ring. Today's flight path shows up in blue on my nav board. We'll have to cut pretty tight around the nose of the freighter lining up at the ring, but that's nothing our pussycat can't handle.

A warning buzzer sounds, the nav board flickers and I pull hard to starboard. The corvette jumps like a frightened rabbit. A fine green line on the screen shows me the trajectory of the nanoshot as it rushes past my portside thruster.

A second buzzer sounds, interrupted by a third, and the dance begins in earnest. The corvette darts and spins like a ribbon in a wind tunnel. The stars reel and lurch in time with my stomach, but that doesn't bother me. I'm high on adrenaline, thrilling in the corvette's responsiveness, ears pricked for the next buzzer. It's moments like this when I feel most alive.

When the buzzer sounds again I'm already cutting port before I realize that the pitch is different. I see a flicker of yellow to my left. It's the EM detector spiking in the soft x-ray range; the type of surge that precedes a—

"Solar flare!" I shout, and pull hard about.

Chazz uses one of the words he saves for special occasions.

Flares are notorious for shorting circuitry up here past the Van Allen belts, and since we've stripped our external shielding for extra speed, something busts every time. Not usually a problem; our nanotech lives in a cozy little shield box, and it can overhaul the electronics in a few hours. But right now, everything depends on seconds.

I'm thrusting full on for the nearest freighter, putting a lot more gees on Madame's pastries than the contract strictly allows. Their travel case whines ominously as its acceleration dampers reach maximum power, but I don't slow down. I'm thinking if we can get behind that freighter before the flare hits full intensity, we might not take any damage.

We almost make it. Just as we slip into the freighter's shadow I see a little flicker, and the nav board goes dead. I backthrust until we're drifting at a soft null-v relative to the freighter and tap the nav board's power switch. Nothing.

It's my turn to use one of Chazz's special-occasion words. The nav board is our primary interface with the ship's sensors and computation package. Without it, we're flying blind and brainless.

"Bots are working on nav," Chazz tells me, tapping away at the nanotech controls. "We lose anything else?"

Belatedly, I scan the readouts above our lifeless navigation system. It would be just our luck to lose the oxy pumps, too . . . but the lights all show green.

"No, just the board," I answer. "You got a time estimate on it?"

"I don't even have a diagnostic yet," he says. Chazz hates being rushed. "Half hour, maybe."

I swear again. If we aren't through the ring in less than ten minutes, we'll miss our deadline for sure. I can already hear the sound of Madame's electronic credits slipping through my fingers and back into her bank account. My mouth tastes sour.

"Looks like an abort," Chazz says.

Chazz always did have a streak of quitter in him. I hate to admit it, but I'm thinking this time he might be right. Without the nav board, I have no entry vector for the ring. Without an entry vector, I can't line us up with the moonside device. We'd shoot straight past Luna and out of the solar system. One-way trip. Finis.

Still, it knots me up inside to think of dropping a job.

It's not about the money, really, although I