Off Manifest

Hassan was dead three days before anyone bothered to tell me.I fix air recyclers on Pallas Station, the Belt's working ring, where bad news runs three relays before it reaches a mechanic, because a mechanic isn't worth the hurry. I keep my head down. I let next month's problems belong to next month. The only company I keep is Vee, the workshop AI I broke years ago and liked better broken. She is usually right about me. I do not tell her that.Hassan was the closest thing I had to standing, and he turned up dead at the Highgate perimeter with his ship logged twelve hundred kilos light. Twelve hundred kilos is what a ship weighs when someone's been moving people off the books. I calibrated that ship. My signature was on the log.Five days. That was what I had to find out who really put Hassan on that manifest before the file closed and took my bench, my license, and my name with it.The only other person reading the body was Kvor, a Mars-Oversight inspector and the last man I should trust. Neither of us could close it alone. So a Belt mechanic and a Mars cop started trading secrets across a dead man's cargo cart, and what we pulled up was bigger than one body. The hand behind it came up on the same floor I did.Off Manifest is the standalone prequel to the Amsa Logs: a fast, funny, two-sittings space thriller for readers who like a dry narrator, a sharp AI, and a working-class hero in well over her head.