you are listening to a Clarkshold magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarksville Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you as well as possibly can be.

Thank you for spending the time with us here at another Clark's World story, which are brought to you by your support.

So if you have subscribed, if you've gone to patreon.com,

forward slash Clarksworld or Clarksworld citizens.com,

or chucked a few bucks our way via a donation.

I cannot thank you enough.

You allow me to keep doing something that I love doing.

You're paying artists.

You are paying for the nonfiction, a podcast, and us putting it all together each and every month for you.

So thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.

Our sixth story for the month of November, 2025, issue 230, is Rat Lines, and is by Brent Baldwin.

Brent Baldwin lives on the edge of the prairie with his wife, two daughters, and pet menagerie.

If you find him without his hands on a keyboard or his nose in a book, it will probably

be in the kitchen.

His work has appeared in Nature magazine,

analog science fiction and fact,

and best of British science fiction, among others.

So, my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax,

and let me tell you a story.

The passengers don't like to think about who is piloting their escape ship.

They want to input a destination, open a celebratory bottle of whatever, and emerge on the other side of the galaxy with a certain knowledge that

...