The Earth Run
A farmhand, a thousand-year-old colony, and a man who never wanted a bigger life than the one he had.
Jake Reilly was never meant to leave Kansas. He fixes pumps, patches fences, and keeps what’s left of his family’s farm going because somebody has to. He’s thirty-two, can diagnose a machine by ear, and is certain no one should count on him for more than the next repair.
The night a strange light comes down in the east section, Jake walks toward it because the pump out there sounds wrong. By the time the hatch seals behind him, he’s aboard a survey ship from a human colony that left Earth a thousand years ago, bound for a world Earth lost track of before the Norman Conquest. Out there, Jake discovers that he has always been more than the life he settled for.