Backyard Starship Origins 2: Career Moves / Red Agent

Two origin stories set in the Backyard Starship universe, this slim volume takes a sharp detour from the main series to explore the man behind one of its most compelling figures. Petyr Groshenko's path from KGB agent to legendary Peacemaker begins not with ambition or heroism but with grief — his father's murder, a stolen secret, and an involuntary trip off-planet courtesy of an alien con artist with her own agenda. The stakes are enormous, the setting spans continents and star systems, and the emotional core is surprisingly intimate: a young man thrust into the impossible, carrying a mystery older than he knows.

What makes this work is the economy of the storytelling. At 64 pages, Chaney and Maggert have no room for excess, and they don't waste a sentence. The prose moves with the confidence of writers who trust their world-building and their readers equally. The Cold War-to-cosmos premise could easily tip into absurdity, but it lands as genuinely fun genre fiction — tight plotting, a dry wit, and characters who feel specific rather than archetypal. Fans of the main series will find connective tissue worth having; newcomers will find a clean entry point.