Show Notes
When a ship at the end of the line dies, the sound comes up the tow cable like a church bell struck underwater, and nine hundred refugees sit up in the dark to face it.
A navy tug admiral has strung sixteen overloaded refugee haulers behind his ship, fleeing the dying farm moons for a heavy world. Something follows them that no instrument can detect, betrayed only by the stars behind it, bent into rings around perfect black.
It takes the last ship first. Her weight drains away until hair lifts off every head and dust spirals toward the vents. Then she folds toward her spine in forty-one seconds and comes out heavier than she ever was. After about an hour, the thing climbs the line to the next.
The wrecks drag at the convoy, and people are still breathing inside them. On the bridge, the designer of the cheap gravity plates under every deck times each collapse with a stopwatch and wants them cut loose. In thirty-one years, the admiral has never cut a tow. Every hour he holds on, the weight behind him grows, and the thing climbs toward the ship at the front: his own.
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