The Neutral Stars of Orpheus: 2

A compliance auditor. A sealed capsule. A city built for transactions the Great Powers cannot acknowledge at home. When Martin Penrose boards a passenger liner home from a routine frontier inspection, a nervous man at dinner presses a sealed data capsule into his hands. By morning, the man is dead. The capsule cannot be opened without credentials Martin doesn't have. He doesn't know what it contains. He doesn't know who it's intended for. What he knows - because it is his profession to know such things - is that the manifests don't add up. And Martin Penrose has never been able to leave a manifest that doesn't add up. When the liner diverts to Port Orpheus - the Orpheus Compact's nine-towered commercial capital, a city built for transactions the great powers cannot conduct at home - Martin finds himself holding evidence of the largest covert military construction program in frontier history. Someone built a fleet in the space between two great powers. Someone spent nine years doing it. And someone very much wants the evidence destroyed before it reaches anyone who can act on it. Three parties. One capsule. > The Neutral Stars of Orpheus is the second Martin Penrose investigation - a novel of documents, deception, and the specific courage of a man who keeps accurate records under circumstances not designed to support accurate record-keeping.