PosterTHE LONG WAY TO TESSALY
An aging tow captain takes a fifty-light-year contract on an engine that will not survive it, because the alternative is losing the ship to the guild.
by Awaiting creator · Launched Aug 20, 2026
A story idea on the Poster shelf. Posters take no pledges.
About this title
Synopsis
The engine in Ambrose Kell's tow ship was old when he bought her. He has rebuilt it eleven times, by hand, in ports whose names have since changed, and it still sings on the third try. Forty years of hauling other people's dead ships home has left him in arrears to the guild, and the guild has begun using the word ship the way it uses the word asset. There is one contract that clears the debt. It runs fifty light years to Tessaly, and the engine will not make Tessaly, and the nineteen-year-old he hires in the engine room has not been told that.
Who this is about
Ambrose Kell has hauled dead ships home for forty years on one engine, which he has rebuilt eleven times and which the guild inspectors have stopped pretending to certify.
What goes wrong
The guild will take the ship for arrears unless he runs a fifty-light-year tow that his engine cannot finish. He signs it, and he signs on a nineteen-year-old engineer who believes him.
What's at stake
The ship is the only thing he has made that outlasted him. The girl in the engine room did not agree to die for it and does not know she might.
Why it keeps going
Fifty light years is a great many ports, and every port offers him a way out that costs somebody else something, and a repair he cannot quite afford.
Takeaway
A man and the thing he keeps running wear out at about the same rate, and only one of them knows it.
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