Forthcoming · October 2026

The Earth Run

A farmhand, a thousand-year-old starship, and the long way home.

Jake Reilly was never meant to leave Kansas. He fixes pumps, patches fence, and keeps the Henderson place running because somebody has to. He's thirty-two, quiet with his hands, and convinced no one should count on him for anything larger than that.

The night a survey ship from a thousand-year-old human colony touches down in the east section, Jake walks toward the light because the pump sounds wrong. By the time the hatch seals, he's a stowaway on a starship already bound for home. Home, for the crew, is a world Earth lost track of before the Norman Conquest.

Out on the long passage, Jake becomes useful to people he never expected to know, and necessary in ways he has spent his life refusing. Some of what is asked of him is small. Some of it costs him more than he expected to have.

Whether he finds his way back, and who he is by the time he does, is a question the book takes its time arriving at.

You came back. Did you come home?

What it's about

The book, in four questions.

On competence.

Jake can hear a bearing fail six minutes before it does. He has never thought of this as a skill. The Earth Run disagrees, quietly, and doesn't make a fuss about it.

On belonging.

Jake has spent his life half-outside the towns that raised him. He has never been sure what it would mean to be properly inside one. He may, slowly, be about to find out.

On grief.

The losses in this book arrive without ceremony. There is no lesson waiting at the end of them. The Earth Run doesn't tidy them up.

On rural America, quietly.

Repair shops close. Grain elevators stand dark. The Earth Run sits with it.

Excerpt · Chapter Five

The Inventory

Footsteps outside. One set. Measured. No hurry in them, which was its own kind of authority.

The lock disengaged. The door opened inward.

The man who entered was not the older mechanic and not any of the crew who had chased him. Tall. Lean. Fair-skinned in a way that had been worked ruddy at the cheekbones by weather he hadn't stood in for years. Gray at the temples. Clean-shaven. He wore the same shipboard coveralls, but the collar and trim carried stitched markings that separated him from everybody Jake had seen so far. He held a flat device the size of a clipboard.

He touched the device. A green point lit.

"Mr. Reilly."

Jake had not given his name to anyone on this ship.

"My name is Captain Baker. I am the commanding officer of the survey vessel Veldthen. I need to establish a formal record of your presence aboard."

The English was good. Better than good. Too good, in a way that made it stranger. Careful consonants. Old-fashioned vowels. A voice from documentaries and public television pledge drives and nobody Jake had ever met in person.

"How do you know my name?"

Baker's eyes moved once, to the phone on the shelf, then returned.

"Your device identified you during intake scanning."

"Intake scanning."

"Contamination assessment, if you prefer."

"I prefer being on my farm."

Baker accepted that without reacting.

"Mr. Reilly, our records indicate you entered this vessel through an exterior maintenance access on the port ventral hull. I need your account of why."

"I heard something failing."

"And your intention?"

"To keep it from failing worse."

"You entered an unknown vessel at night because of a sound."

"I entered through an open panel because whatever was behind it sounded like it was about to come apart."

Baker stood very still. The green light on the recorder gave one pulse after another.

"I am going to tell you more than protocol recommends," he said. "Circumstances have made protocol less useful than I would like."

Continue reading when the book is available.

The Earth Run is not a chosen-one story. It is not a war. There is no empire, no rebellion, no prophecy. Nobody is saving the galaxy. The protagonist is a farmhand with a wrench, and the book is about what that turned out to be worth.