The Metric
Novelette 16,434 words Recommended by 7 award/anthology sources
"The ship was a billion years old, and it was dying. The incalculable energies that had forced open the metric to permit its passage were all but spent, and now the relentless quintessence was taking over again: pulling the metric tighter, so that from instant to instant the needle-eye the ship tried to thread was that much narrower, the forces pulling the ship apart that much stronger."
Quasar links out; the story lives on Asimov's, where the author gets the click.