Breaking Out

BREAKING OUT

The Resistance Chronicles

Book 1

By

BENJAMIN CRANE

www.west16publishing.com

DEDICATION

My loyal friend, you have been by my side since you were twelve weeks, throughout our journey together and in creating this book. Merlin, furry paws, this book is for you. I wrote it while you snoozed.

I love you so very much. Such a good boy.

Ben

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

I would like to thank you dear reader. You may still be browsing. Trying to figure out if you want to invest your time in this story of mine. I hope you find the story both interesting and entertaining. Dare I say engaging? It might even be funny in places. I hope you find it thought provoking.

A word of advice. I would take the time to read the introduction. I think it will aid you greatly in your understanding of the universe in which our story is occurring.

As the story progresses, it grows and gets darker. The stakes certainly get higher. Hopefully, you will find there are still areas of levity and hope besides bravery against impossible odds.

This is the first book of The Resistance Chronicles series. I hope you find something here that captures your interest.

This book is likely more appropriate for readers that are at least 16 years old. This is because of some of the more adult topics explored in this work of fiction.

Kindest Wishes

Benjamin Crane

ABOUT THE BOOK

Lauren Silva and Jack Gill were in the quiet rural farming community of Alva on Lothian world in the Rim. A beautiful morning, they had spent it together walking among the cherry blossoms. Then the gunships arrived overhead.

A whirlwind adventure had started, one that would take them to the stars and other worlds in the Rim systems. They would discover the Imperium’s conspiracy.

It had started with the assassination of Lauren’s old professor, Daniels. Professor Daniels and Lauren had worked together on an AI research project a decade ago.

Lauren and Jack would never have dreamed where the coming months would take them. What they would become embroiled in, or how The Peregrine would become part of their lives, or their life altering meeting with Merlin.

Could they break out and get away from the Imperium?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin is a long-term Sci-Fi nerd and geek. This is the first book in his debut series, The Resistance Chronicles. In recent years, he has worked as an IT contractor for various clients.

Prior to that, he trained in Vancouver, Canada in acting for film and television then New York, USA.

Benjamin currently lives in Linlithgow in Scotland. His dog Merlin enjoys his walks around the loch by Mary, Queen of Scots palace.

Benjamin loves his dog very much.

CONTENTS

Dedication

A Note From The Author

About The Book

About The Author

Introduction

Act I

​1. Cherry Blossom

​2. Orphans

​3. Trust Me

​4. Y-Fronts

​5. Non-Subtle

​6. Nowheresville

​7. Cows In Space

​8. Dead Drops

​9. Getting Some

​10. Research

​11. Baffling Shit

​12. Green Stars

​13. Fresh And Fruity

​14. Daisy

​15. Hold On Tight

​16. Clementine

​17. Crystal Clear

​18. Feeding Time

​19. Stopping

​20. In Transit

​21. Toss The Keys

​22. A Gunslinger

​23. Brains

Interlude - Act I to II

Act II - Part I

​24. Option Two

​25. Cover Gone

​26. Covert Intelligence

​27. Four-Inch Heels

​28. Brain Smasher

​29. Sixty Seconds

​30. Red Drizzle

​31. Have Fun

​32. Agent 47536

​33. Nukie

​34. Atoms

​35. Furry Night

​36. Higher Than Any Hippy

​37. Bunny Ears

Interlude - Midway Act II

Act II - Part II

​38. Cruising At 240C

​39. Singing

​40. Off The Map

​41. Oh My!

​42. God

​43. Upgrades

​44. In Play

​45. Rolling Dice

​46. Now Feast

​47. Brave Bastards

​48. Four Minutes

​49. Troops In Contact

​50. Emergency Send

​51. Interrogation

​52. Two Salvos

​53. Special Delivery

​54. What Happens At 0.31C

​55. My Shoulder Hurts

​56. Hopelessness

Interlude - Act II to III

Act III

​57. Brainstorming

​58. Mines

​59. Lots Of Pudding

​60. An Opporlem

​61. Swirling

​62. A Hero's Death

​63. Staunchly Loyal

​64. Depend On It Bitch

​65. Plug's Hole

​66. Oh Fuck

​67. Impossible Choice

​68. The Volunteers

​69. Jump Jump Jump

​70. Sifting The Rubble

​71. They Did What?

​72. Hotlines

​73. Order To Chaos

​74. Chaos To Order

​75. Heavy Handed

​76. Heather

​77. OMG

​78. Swan Lake

​79. A Pee And A Sandwich

​80. Through The Looking Glass

​81. The Vanished

​82. The One Percent

​83. Signing Up

​84. We Are Strong

​85. 384 Missiles

​86. Negative, Frigates Overhead

​87. The Huddle

​88. Paying Tom's Tab

Imperium Core Systems

Rim Systems

Before the Colony Worlds' Founding

After the Colony Worlds’ Founding

A History of K-Bots.

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INTRODUCTION

HOW WE GOT HERE

First, dear reader, before we get started with the story, a brief history of the last eight hundred years. This will help answer many of your questions. Questions that might come up while we travel down the rapids of our tale.

This book from the chronicles looks back on the events that took place back in 2815. When the tale of Breaking Out, occurred and the key historical events leading up to that point.

The seeds of our story were sowed about eight hundred years earlier when all humanity was bound to the surface of our one planet, Earth. A planet that, if it were a patient in a hospital, was very close to being moved into the critical care ward. The environment was collapsing, falling toward the point of no return. Corporate greed seemed myopic and blind to the fact that you needed a planet that could sustain life. There is little point in having lots of money stuffed under your mattress if everyone was dead and your bed was on fire.

Global politics circled the drain, a fair amount of insanity was on display by some actors from multiple countries. Thus, Earth, and by extension all the humans that made Earth their only home, were all in the shit.

The vast distances in space between the stars and our poor technology had everyone marooned. There was no escape. There was nowhere to go that we could get to. No one was getting off this fairground ride.

Roll forward 242 years, and we were still battling with ourselves to stem and push back the effects of climate change. There had been some significant wins on this front but also losses. Nothing important really, just the global death of over one million people in the heatwaves of 2097, and both the North and South Pole being ice-free for the whole of 2183. Some people, however, remained very dumb and refused to listen. They didn't see the hazard in front of us. They just keep stuffing money under their mattress. It mattered, having your priorities in the right place. You had to love humans; some were just so-so smart.

In 242 years, along came the subluminal speed drive, or SLS drive for short. We could now reach other stars with the SLS star drive system. Not in a human lifetime, certainly. But just maybe, there could be a way out. The more sarcastic among you might point out that we could all throw a ball, and it would go at subluminal speed, which referred to the speed of light. A sleeping tortoise would have traveled at subluminal speeds, but that didn’t make it a speedy tortoise. But in our context, the SLS drive referred to an engine that you wanted to strap to a spaceship you wanted to blast across the heavens to a nearby (in the loosest meaning of the word close) star system. While fast for humans, balls thrown at one percent of the speed of light, or three thousand kilometers per second, was molasses slow in star system terms. Despite being 176 times faster than the Voyager 1 space probe.

You better have used the bathroom before you started out on that long one-way road trip. However, there was hope, maybe.

Of course, you needed a spaceship to attach an SLS drive to. The scientists, engineers, and theorists all started thinking about ships—what they needed, and how to build these big ships.

One hundred years later, we completed the shipbuilding and selected our best-guess targets. We targeted thirty-star systems within twenty light-years of Earth.

There was just one tiny problem. It would take two hundred years to get to our target destinations. As fast as an SLS drive was, it was just too slow for the human life span, with the distances involved. We couldn't have hundreds of thousands of people running around a ship for two hundred years. Where would you put them all? What would they all eat? How much toilet paper would we need? What would they do to stop themselves from going crazy? Two hundred years meant having babies and children on the ship. This ship was just getting bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier.

We found the answer. No one would travel on the ship, problem solved. It was called UPD—Upload, Print, Download. Humans couldn’t resist a three-letter acronym, Resistance Is Fanciful (RIF).

Our human, let’s call him Fred, wanted to be an off-world colonist, but we couldn't transport him there. What we could do was take a very detailed scan of Fred and his brain, then we uploaded his scans into the ship’s computer storage system. As we neared our target star system, we fed our big fancy printer with buckets of goo as raw materials to print out Fred’s body and brain and let him mature in human toner.

We now had a Fred-shaped box, but no Fred yet. Next, we had to download Fred’s soul from storage into his brain and had to start the body up with some wonderful drugs and electricity. Sort of like a Frankenfred. The original Fred would sit at home on Earth with his feet up and slippers on while the spaceship blasted away on its long journey. At some point Fred died and we disposed of his body—burial, cremation, mushrooms, whatever it was.

About one hundred and fifty years after Fred’s death, the ship neared the colony target world and we hit the print button. We delivered the shiny new Frankenfred to the new planet the spaceship was now orbiting. Fred was alive and kicking. You made it, Fred; you survived your own death!

Many people disliked this idea. It prompted many questions and concerns among wannabe colonists that itched to get off Earth. Here are a few of them:

Some didn’t mind the idea on religious or selfish grounds, and they only ever had two questions:

We had our destinations and a ship to carry us. A way to get there, and some volunteers eager to be scanned. There was a way. It didn’t matter if it took two hundred years or two thousand years, people would sit on a computer disk for the duration of the trip.

Roll forward another two hundred years, and the colony ships arrived at their destination star systems and found their new planets. The printers were warming up, and we ran off a copy of each colonist. Founding a new colony and bootstrapping an alien biosphere from scratch was difficult. It took a lot of effort. The first generation of colonists had a hard, grim life. Frankenfred might have wished he was dead and had just stayed on Earth. There was no time to be idle. There was much work to be done. Lots of pressure to make babies. In fact, sex had become like homework. They had a colony to build, and it needed babies.

We left new landing, in the Earth year 2565, behind us and rolled further forward still. We were now with fourth or fifth generation colonists another two hundred and fifty years forward. It is now the year 2815. We had twenty-two well-established colonies. However, eight of the target worlds were duds:

In the meantime, Earth had ceased to exist. A combination of nuclear war, resource wars, and a collapsed environment. The environment that we had been trying and failing to save for the last three hundred and fifty years. This failure had given birth to a rising general sense of hopelessness and pointlessness. The mattress stuffers showed a mix of anger and arrogance. They wanted to be born again as a colonist! There was anger at not being on a colony ship, and religious incandescence at all this ungodly UPD technology.

Some believed this happened about one hundred years after the ships had launched. All those born since the launch discovered they were born into a dying world. Half of them were very cross and the other half very upset. No one was happy. The missiles flew on or around 2465. No one was sure as there was no one left to write it down, tell the story, or read it. The first colonists would not get printed for another one hundred years. Technically, for one hundred years no humans existed anywhere. Humans were extinct. A further two hundred and fifty years have passed since. We have lost the details of Earth’s death to the vagaries of history. Earth has long since gone, now a polluted radioactive cinder with no biosphere. What used to be a rich, beautiful, alive planet, teeming with all sorts of life, was now just a barren, lifeless, toxic rock.

The colonies, twenty-two of them, were all founded at different points in time depending on their distance from old Earth.

The colony planets all had differing orbital periods. The orbit was what makes the most sense to define your local year by. No one referred to a faraway dead and poisoned world. Everyone changed to their own definition of what a year was.

The distance between them isolated the colonies from one another. They had used the colony ships for parts to help set up the new colonies themselves, and no one was in a rush to build another ship anytime soon. There was a whole perfect, empty new planet to grow into.

Because of their isolation from one another, they quickly became twenty-two distinct societies and governments. All with their own rules.

Traditional communications travelled at the speed of light, which was very slow. Each colony could be up to twenty light-years from the now dead point of origin, all in different directions. So it could take up to forty years for a message such as hello to travel across the sphere of space in one direction, and another forty years for the reply. It would be an awkward first-date conversation. Not to mention the technical challenge of being able to broadcast a message with enough power to be heard forty light-years away. Each colony was on its own. They knew where all the colonies were, but they could not signal to them, let alone travel there.

Some clever scientists on the first colony invented the Faster Than Luminal (FTL) star drive. Some argued it should be called the FAF drive. These people went strangely, awkwardly silent when asked to explain the abbreviation’s meaning beyond the first letter for Fast!

The early 1.0 versions of the FTL were slow compared with the 3.0 versions. Trips were now possible between systems, albeit with an enormous time commitment. It was now possible to travel from edge-to-edge in three years—a substantial improvement over the four hundred years it would have taken an SLS-driven ship.

Three years was not especially useful. You needed to be determined to want to go there, let alone there and back.

After an exploration period and sharing of science, things then took a darker turn. The FTL-powered Imperium started reaching out with their version of faith, law, and order from their colony star system, New Terra, to the other colonies.

That was the third generation of colonists, one hundred years ago.

The drives became even faster with FTL version 2.0, and the journey time dropped to six months to move between the two furthest systems. They had also figured out how to remove the relativistic effects, so six months on the ship was also six months for the people, both at source and destination. You will need a drive physicist to explain things like the Casimir effect warping space–time bubbles and why relativity did not apply anymore when going faster than light with a ship arguably not moving inside its bubble. This is way above my comprehension level in physics.

The Imperium’s tendrils spread out and before you knew it, fourteen of the Core systems were under authoritarian rule again. Only the eight Rim systems further out were not under their control.

The colonies were not a happy place. Yay, go humans! Knocking it out of the park again and straight back into the crapper.

It did, at least, seem we had learned something. The colonies, independent of one another, were all very protective of their new planet, its biosphere and the environment. Pollution was close to zero. No one wanted to go searching for other worlds. While the Imperium was still doing stupid things with fusion bombs, the day-to-day folk treated their colonies well.

The worlds were all different. Two hundred and fifty years had passed since the first generation of printed humans had been downloaded. With the later births, the population of humans was now knocking around 0.3 billion on each colony. A tiny amount compared with the eight billion human rats on ancient Earth early in the twenty first century when we really started to focus on the importance of climate change or the twenty-four billion in 2465, when the original, enlightened human leaders nuked humanity out of the universe.

Now, Earth was long dead and gone. Humanity lived on twenty-two far-flung star systems. Typical solar-type systems with multiple planets that were, to greater or lesser extents, habitable and settled. The Imperium was a pain in everyone’s butt. Just like that big kid at school who used to bully all the other kids. The Imperium had given rise to resistance in the Rim systems. The resistance had had enough of being stomped on. The Imperium ignored the resistance and focused on the fourteen Core systems they controlled. They had enough to keep them busy for now. The Imperium would get to the resistance in their own good time when ready. There was nowhere to go and no way to get there. There was plenty of time. Then along came FTL version 3.0 and now the edge-to-edge time was down to two months and the political pot got all stirred up again.

That brings you up to date, dear reader. Now for one last thing that will help our story make more sense to you. All our chapter scenes begin with a headline description of where they are taking place. They take the form:

CHAPTER NUMBER

RIM OR CORE –  STAR SYSTEM – PLANET

CITY, TOWN or VILLAGE

LOCATION

TIME

SHORT DESCRIPTOR

Because names were chosen haphazardly when ground was being broken on the new colony town settlements, to uniquely identify a location you need to prefix it with the name of the star system and the name of the planet, then add the name of the town or city, for example:

RIM – ROSS 154 – CLACKMANNANSHIRE

ALVA

Last, you may wonder why these planets all have Scottish names. This is because after the year 2288, the Target System Discovery Project was set up (they showed their imagination again by nicknaming it the TSDP). The two scientists who led the team to find colonization target systems and any orbiting planets were of Scottish ancestry. As they discovered the planets, they got to name them.

While breaking with astronomical convention, they decided to make Scotland live forever through the planet names they chose. Sometimes it’s the little things that count. There was a rumor, but nobody could prove it, that the two scientists had a good laugh and chuckle. It caused lots of frothing, huffing, and puffing south of the border, among their former pre-independence, political overlords. For everything else, there is a credit card, but sometimes you need Scottish scientists to say it simply with love. Alba gu bràth.

Many colonists adopted this habit when naming their towns and cities as well, but not all the first-generation colonists. Typically, when they broke ground on a new town’s construction, the colonists gave the towns Scottish names. The names were only found in computer records and the only people now alive had come out of a computer printer on a spaceship. The stars had long since had astronomical names, which they retained.

There is no association with old Earth. The missiles that flew in 2465 killed all remaining life on Earth. That was a long time ago. It is now 2815 and these alien worlds have little in common with early twenty-first century Earth, up to twenty light-years away from the old Earth, orbiting around alien stars. People, history, culture, terminology, and technology; it is all different now.

In this story about far-flung human colonies light-years away. In Earth’s distant future. The lawyers insisted and made me put this bit in: Any similarities to any persons living or dead, or their views, actual events, technology or places on Earth are coincidental. That’s the end of the boring lawyer’s text. I could push the envelope a bit, with scurrilous rumors about drunken parties that included a small flock of sheep and some leaders and other senior politicians from Earth somewhere in the 2010s and 2020s, bah, you know who you are and so did the video camera at Madam Mou Mouton’s. That will have cost me a tax audit, I guess.

Let’s not get distracted. I think we are best just cracking on with our story.

You might want to look over these five sections from the contents page towards the end of this book before starting the first act, they provide useful world context:

Imperium Core Systems

Rim Systems

Before Colony Worlds Founding Timeline

After the Colony Worlds’ Founding Timeline

A Timeline of K-Bots

Our story started in the small, rural farming village of Alva. On the minor planet Clackmannanshire, orbiting the star system Ross 154 in the Rim systems. It was the old Earth year of 2815.

ACT I

CHAPTER 1

RIM – ROSS 154 – CLACKMANNANSHIRE

ALVA

THE BLOSSOM GROVE

AFTERNOON

CHERRY BLOSSOM

We were in the rural village of Alva. To the west, various farms dotted the countryside, both arable and dairy. East of Alva was the local Spooky Forest, as the villagers called it, and beyond the next closest village was Fishcross. A mud track cut through the forest to the south. The track looped around the hills, meandering east to Fishcross, then continuing onward to the real civilization beyond the horizon to the east.

Our story started in the hog shed. There were twelve fat baby porkers and one smaller runt striving to access one of mum’s twelve teats. Mum just lay there, oblivious. Hog dad looked on with little interest. Either the little one would shape up or he wouldn’t. If not, there would be pork for dad’s dinner. Either way, the other twelve were healthy and growing well. Away from the life and death drama playing out in the hog shed, Lauren and Jack strolled through the grove of blossoming trees.

Jack Gill was a tall and muscled Black man of thirty-five, who was born in Alva with the help of the local midwife. His nickname was Speedy Jack, both at the desert racetrack and to his local customers whose tractors he would fix. Anything with an engine, Jack could fix with his spanners. He was statuesque, but his natural camouflage of engine oil and grease kept him away from photoshoots and modeling. That suited Jack just fine.

Lauren Silva went by the ironic nickname of Lauren the Dim. A petite Latino of thirty-three years and a huge computer nerd perhaps smarter than Einstein. Lauren was not an Alva native; she came into the world in a Buenos Aires hospital. Lauren had contemplated God sometimes, but always came down in the atheist camp. Whereas Jack felt that being a racing driver was dangerous by nature, and he would be foolish to turn down any extra help aiding his side of the scales. He was an agnostic to cover his bets.

They were not lovers, just fast friends for life. Jack worried about Lauren and wanted to protect her as best he could. Ever since the earthquake that had resulted in the death of her parents and siblings, the day that turned Lauren into an orphan.

Many others had died as well in Buenos Aires all those years ago when Lauren was just twenty-five. Jack had spent two years trying to persuade Lauren to move to Alva so she would be away from the many dangers of big city life on planet Clackmannanshire. Her city apartment being burgled had been the proverbial straw, and Jack had won the argument.

He had gone to help his friend pack up her life and move to Alva. They had met in their early twenties at Buenos Aires University. He was two years ahead of Lauren, studying mechanical engineering. While he was older, she was much wiser and nearly fifty IQ points smarter. They had almost instantly become great friends. Lauren would babble on to Jack about her computer science classes and her ideas, which always went a long way over his head. Jack dreamed of desert racing and getting a pro drive some day with one of the bigger teams.

There had been a very drunken foursome the night they spent with their partners in the act—a bottle of tequila and a bottle of dry white wine. It was just the one night; neither of them regretted it but neither of them wanted to repeat it either. It wasn’t because the experience had been bad. Rather, it had been a hazy blur for both, but a fun blur. One that made them realize that their friendship was way more important than any romantic or physical coupling.

Ironically, the act of coupling had brought them way closer together. More than many of their peers’ damaged and dysfunctional relationships. Many would mistake them for being together, but neither Jack nor Lauren could see why they were asked this. Jack and Lauren were firm friends. Yes, he was her knight in shining armor, but not the sweeping-you-off-your-feet kind of knight. More the sort of knight that would smash his lance over the miscreant’s head and beat them with the broken stump. Jack was that kind of knight, fiercely loyal and protective of the maiden Lauren. Lauren’s heart was for her computers, while carburetors and exhaust pipes could get Jack hot and bothered. Which he wanted to mate with his race car engine.

The small village of Alva was beautiful, quiet, remote. Some may have called it a little dull. Unless you were part of the hog shed drama where the stakes could not be any higher for hoglet number thirteen who just wanted to get some milk. There were clouds on the horizon, but it was still a fine day. Yes, the blossoms were past their best and going brown at the edges, but it was still beautiful. More so than the city jungle, full of so many more predators than the nearby forest.

At this point, Lauren cocked her head to one side like Jack’s old childhood dog at the words chew stick? Lauren’s face strained.

This new image mixed with fond memories of his old dog reacting to those words made him chuckle inside.

What is that, Jack?

Jack was about to reply when he caught the sound as well. It was at the edge of his hearing but growing. Yes, there is an engine, an aero engine, a turbine Jack thought. He looked up through the branches, and yes! High above him, he could see the contrails of two aircraft. Getting closer and lower as the sound grew louder. The ancient animal instinct in Jack’s reptile brain was firing full tilt now. Jack was on alert, ready to protect Lauren as he polished his mental lance, but what was the threat?

Was it the planes? Were they going to crash? Two planes—that seemed beyond improbable. No, it couldn’t be a plane crash, but his brain kept dragging his focus back to the planes above. Again, closer still, as if they were heading straight for the tiny village of Alva. They were small planes. Small and quick, like a racing car Jack thought.

Shit! Lauren, get down now, down behind the tree trunk.

Jack hoped he was wrong; he was wrong about many things, and he hoped this would just be added to that long list. They could laugh about it later and joke about silly Jack always being on guard. But Jack’s ancient fight-or-flight brain knew he was right. The threat was genuine and approaching.

Please don’t be right. Why would they be fighter jets? It made no sense. At this point, the whirring whizz of the first fighter jet’s rotary cannon reached them, signaling death’s arrival in Alva. The two Imperium fighters alternated, firing in short bursts. They flared high, banked, turned, and then passed over the village. Coming back for another pass—back, and back, and back. It seemed to last forever as time stood still for Jack and Lauren. They looked on in horror from their safe vantage point among the red and white blossoms falling from the trees. As the noise continued overhead, the assault raged against their homes, family, and friends. The noise shook the blossoms free from the trees. Like falling snow, the blossoms carpeted the ground of the safe grove.

Hoglet thirteen was no more. He had died hungry, but so had his twelve fatter siblings, and his indifferent mother and father who had been contemplating who to eat later that day. If only hoglet thirteen had known his other potential fate that day in his father’s jaws. He would have chosen this violent end as a burst of twenty-millimeter high-density cannon rounds tore through the hog shed. Like a sword blow from a great ancient god, everything turned into smaller flying chunks and mist made of wood and hog blood. The hot rounds also set fire to the shed’s straw. Nothing remained of the hog shed or its hogs but a smashed ruin.

From above, the sword kept lashing out. Each tearing sound from the sky snuffed another village building out, along with the lives of its inhabitants. As Jack and Lauren stared on in cold horror, Jack saw the front door of his house open and his brother and father rush out. His mother was pushed between them, an arm from each man under one of her arms, lifting her by the armpits. They ran with her, her feet in midair, fleeing from the house they didn’t want to become their tomb. The trio set out across the fields, running for the tree line.

They weren’t running toward Jack and Lauren hidden among the grove’s blossoms. Jack’s parents and brother did not know where Jack and Lauren were, other than that they had gone off on a hike somewhere. No one knew where Jack and Lauren were. His parents and brother were just fleeing for the safety and cover of the trees, driven by terror.

As Jack watched, that whizzing, tearing sound cut through the air again as death lashed down from the sky. Then the trio were not there anymore. There were no falling corpses. Just a concentrated cloud of pink mist blending with a brown cloud of dirt.

Ugh. It was as if someone had punched Jack in the gut.

This was not Jack’s first encounter with the face of death. His grandparents, of course, had died when he was somewhere around seven. His friend and teammate had died a few years back in a flaming crash on race day. That had been brutal, but at least there had been a body, albeit one covered in burning fuel, as he stumbled from the wrecked car before collapsing two steps away.

This had been worse, just a pink cloud slowly descending over the crops in the field.

Of course, there was Andrew, Lauren’s ex. Who had cheated on her for months, both before and after getting Lauren pregnant. Andrew dumped her when he found out he was to be a father, and he went back to his ladylove.

Andrew had moved to Alva when Lauren was twenty-nine, but they would not meet for another year. He worked as an agricultural technician on the various bits of farm machinery. Not that he had drifted into Alva exactly. When he arrived, he had a job to go to. It was more that Andrew became sort of washed up in Alva.

He had lived and worked in Fishcross on the Robertson farm. The heart attack that struck down Bill Robertson, the farm’s principal, changed everything. It had left Bill’s wife Edna behind with little interest in the hard life running the farm single-handedly. Over the next six months, Edna agreed to sell some fields and buildings to the neighboring Campbell farm. Andrew could not stand the Campbells. Each Campbell happily reciprocated the feeling. When Edna sat Andrew down a few weeks later and explained, there just wasn’t the volume of work to justify keeping Andrew on full time. Maybe he should work part-time for Edna and do work for the Campbells on their adjoining farm. Well, that idea was a nonstarter, and so Andrew looked for more work and somewhere to live. He found a farm in Alva that was looking for a part-time technician. Andrew figured he could live somewhere on the farm and find odd jobs at other local farms to fill out his working week. He moved to the smaller village of Alva. He did not extensively review his options or the choices before him. He just washed up in the closest town to Fishcross. This was typical of Andrew. Yeah, he had charm and was rugged. This allowed him to coast through life, and as he could always turn a girl’s head with his banter, it was all fine with him.

Andrew had met Jack one day on the farm he was odd-jobbing on the same day Jack was fixing a tractor that had blown a head gasket. Looking back, Jack regretted that day. The loose friendship that was