Short Fiction

Joseph Mauser

In a mercenary trade where Uppers command and Lowers bleed, Joe Mauser is the anomaly: a born-Lower officer whose instincts have kept him alive and useful to men who patronize him. He knows Baron Haer's outfit is a losing side before he signs, and signs anyway, because old pros sometimes gamble on more than survival. His secret plan to locate Marshal Cogswell's forces sets him at odds with his dilettante superiors, and his quiet defiance — walking out of headquarters with a promise to return by afternoon — is the hinge on which the early campaign turns.

Lawrence Woolford

Woolford returns from vacation early and immediately starts pulling threads — a call to Hans Distelmayer, the world's most tolerated clearinghouse for espionage, and a wary exchange with Secret Service's Steve Hackett about whose turf this job belongs to. He trades in debts and half-truths, aware that Hans may be lying and that his own department tolerates the German for reasons it won't admit. His instinct that something big is stirring on the other side makes him the reader's early guide into the machinery of Cold War intrigue.

Ronny Bronston

Facing a personnel officer's card of questions, Ronny Bronston answers with a family tree so thoroughly blended that a transfusion from anyone would feel at home — and with a theology of waiting for the Higher Power to call Him. He is average in every visible measure, which is precisely the point: inconspicuous is a qualification in his line of work. His deadpan Texan punchline and his refusal to perform earnestness mark him as a man who will be underestimated, and the early arc turns on whether that's an asset or a trap.

Henry Kuran

Kuran works the field for Morton Twombly's department, and he's bitter about a culture that sends its best minds into advertising while the Soviets send theirs into science. His chief, aged visibly by ten years of undeclared war, leads him through sterile corridors to Sheridan Hennessey's sanctum — a summons that smells less like a trade conference than a sentence. Kuran's bluntness and his Americanized name (once Kuranchov) make him the story's grounded witness to power deciding something large.

Don Mathers

Mathers carries the weight of a decoration earned in circumstances the public only half understands, and the label follows him into rooms where it's worth more than he is. His story turns on the gap between the man and the medal — between what he did and what people need him to have done. In the early arc, that gap is the pressure point: a hero being handled by institutions that want his name without his judgment.

Ilya Simonov

Simonov moves through the old Czarist ministry building in mufti, past guards who salute a colonel they can't see, into the office of Kliment Blagonravov, where vodka is poured and reports are mocked. He has just come from Magnitogorsk, where a club of engineers and intelligentsia discussed affairs too freely, and his account of it is routine — which is exactly what makes it ominous. His ease with Blagonravov, and Blagonravov's with him, marks him as the instrument through which Soviet security acts on what it learns.