The Neptune Customs Ledger
A Dieselpunk Space Opera

About this book:

In the soot-choked customs stations orbiting Neptune, Chief Inspector Arthur Pembrooke wages a one-man war against smudged ink, trimmed ledger margins, and the unauthorized use of red pens. He doesn't carry a blaster—he carries calibrated nickel calipers, a brass-bound magnifier, and an unshakable faith in the Imperial Tariff Code. When a routine inspection of the freighter *Caledonian Rust* reveals false-bottomed crates hiding precision logic plates instead of stove bolts, Pembrooke doesn't see a conspiracy. He sees a filing error of staggering incompetence: someone shipped a machine piece by piece across three vessels when a single Form 11-A would have saved them forty-two percent in duties.

But beneath the pneumatic tubes and steam-drenched corridors of Customs Station 7-B, someone is watching Pembrooke's ledger entries with great interest. Every component he seizes—copper tubing from the *Northern Light*, relief valves from the *Aethelgard*, logic plates from the *Rust*—bears the same nine-and-three-sixteenths-inch mounting standard. Someone is building a machine large enough to regulate the steam hearts of Neptune's floating cities. And they've just realized the Empire's most pedantic bureaucrat has accidentally assembled the parts list.

*The Neptune Customs Ledger* is dieselpunk space opera as bureaucratic noir: a mystery where the detective's greatest weapon is a dip pen, the stakes are measured in cubic inches and tariff schedules, and the revolution will not be televised—it will be audited, cross-referenced, and stamped in triplicate.