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The Bounty Hunters from Mars are three characters from different planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Each one is a warrior. Each one is a hero. Each one would die for the other two. And each one has survived a tragedy.Alexandre Dumas meets Edgar Rice Burroughs for
swords, sorcery and adventure in outer space.
There is Clive King from Earth. Clive was 12 when a vile gelatinous mass consciousness called The Infinite Mind set a vanguard of synthetic slaves from Mars to Brady, Nebraska in 1958. These slaves released a psychic virus that subjugated everyone in Brady except Clive, whose latent psychic abilities immune him to the virus. Clive escaped Brady to warn the nearest military outpost in Hastings. Brady was liberated, but not without casualties, including Clive’s parents. Lt. Col. Kent Swanson, who led the liberation, adopted the orphaned Clive.
Next up is the trio’s sole Martian, Princess LeLan
of the Ky’Raid. Her father, Lord Kuldun, died in a joint assault on The Infinite Mind
by her warrior people and soldiers from Earth. The Earthlings, led by Swanson, came to
Mars in the synthetic slaves’ spaceship to retaliate The Infinite Mind’s attack
on Brady. And attack the Ky’Raid were ignorant of. For 10,000 years LeLan’s
people have lived in mammoth environmental domes on the Martian surface, while The
Infinite Mind kept to itself like a hermit spider in its subterranean empire, attended
only by its synthetic slaves.
LeLan and Clive (who accompanied Swanson to Mars) fall in love at first sight. Both are psychic, but, more, both are attuned to the other’s feelings. But, while Clive was trained to fight by Swanson during the flight from Earth to Mars, LeLan was born with a sword and a ray gun in her hand. Nevertheless, it is Clive who destroys The Infinite Mind, avenging his parents.
The Bounty Hunters are born when Clive tells LeLan he is not returning to Earth. Not so much because he has no blood family left but he does not want to leave her. LeLan, meanwhile, has nothing to hold her to Mars after her brother, Hansun, is selected to succeed Kuldun by the Ky’Raid’s Council of Elders. Natural-born daredevils and voyagers, the young couple decide to borrow one of The Infinite Mind’s other spaceships and use their wits to find their fortune in the stars (i.e., support themselves by collecting bounties while searching distant worlds for treasure).
Clive and LeLan pick up Baskerville, the third member of their team, from the frontier world of Lomar. Baskerville is a tab’bern, an empathic wolfhound. Baskerville, the runt of his litter, was abandoned as a pup by to survive or die according to vagaries of Fate. And, as Fate would have it, the young tab’bern was adopted by Clive and LeLan during their first quest, to retrieve a necklace, The Black Rose, that was stolen from the august family of Eniw-Noi-Lednad by renegades.
Together this trio of expatriates wanders the galaxy. Mercenaries. Musketeers. Adventurers. They are The Bounty Hunters from Mars!