Dead Reckoning, An Orion Federation Short Story

Find the thread. Don’t pull it. Not yet.

On the trade planet of Meridian, money is the only language everyone speaks fluently. Theo Huggins speaks twelve, and he’s learned to listen better than anyone else in the room.

To the brokers and vintners crowding into the planet’s annual Exposition, he’s a quiet, unremarkable wine trade representative from New Amsterdam, the kind of man no one looks at twice. That’s exactly the point. His real employer is the Trade Ministry’s intelligence office, and his real assignment is eleven account transfers that shouldn’t exist. Ministry-level authorization. Three shell companies. A money trail that ends, for now, on a planet built on commerce and discretion in equal measure.

He isn’t the only one looking. Hendrick Vander Oost, a quiet bank examiner from New Amsterdam, has spent eighteen months building the same case alone, with no authority and no backup, and far less patience from the people he’s investigating than Huggins has. By the time Huggins finds him, it’s one day too late, and the official record already calls it a tragedy instead of what it actually was.

What follows isn’t loud. No gunfights in the Exposition halls, no chases through the spaceport. Just a careful man with nothing left to lose, a broker who asks too few questions, a captain who closed her case too fast and knows it, and a financial trail that someone is being paid very well to keep buried.

Huggins has one rule that’s never failed him. Find the thread first. Don’t pull it until you know exactly what’s attached to the other end.

This time, what’s attached to the other end may be closer to home than anyone on Meridian, or New Amsterdam, is ready to admit.

Dead Reckoning is a quiet, character-driven spy thriller for readers who like their intelligence operatives smart, controlled, and just human enough to bleed when it counts.