Form TR-9

The Aurigan Directorate of Strategic Review has discovered a pattern.

Eight operational failures. Six worlds. Multiple investigations.

At the center of them all are two names.

Cedric Pritchard and Lionel Welles.

The evidence appears overwhelming.

A transit complaint filed at the wrong place.

A compliance certification noticed by the wrong person.

A baggage-routing form submitted with suspicious precision.

Taken individually, each incident is insignificant.

Taken together, they suggest a sophisticated Anglo intelligence operation operating deep inside Aurigan space.

As analysts, auditors, investigators, and surveillance teams mobilize to uncover the truth, the case grows larger, stranger, and more important with every report.

There is only one problem.
Pritchard is a retired transit administrator.
Welles is a retired procurement specialist with unusually strong opinions about tea.
Neither man has the slightest idea they are under investigation.

Told almost entirely from the perspective of the officials trying to solve a mystery that does not exist, Form TR-9 is a dryly comic science-fiction novel about bureaucracy, intelligence analysis, institutional incentives, and the extraordinary consequences that can emerge when ordinary facts are viewed from the wrong angle.

For readers who enjoy the wit of British administrative satire, the procedural detail of classic espionage fiction, and science fiction that explores systems as much as technology.