Teddy Bomber

Grey has crept into both the hair and the beard of this middle-aged Martian, whose frame carries a faintly disreputable heft beneath an otherwise average height. Costumes are central to his method: he slips into a guard's uniform to roam a target building unchallenged, buttons himself into a full plush-bear suit to blend into a masquerade gala, and falls back on a plain shirt, light jacket, shorts, and boots for the standoff at City Hall. A wristwatch is his one constant accessory, and it hides a second purpose as the trigger for his charges.

Bower frames himself as a public conscience, convinced that the soaring high-rises of Mars stand for a runaway greed that ordinary people ought to fear, and he means to level them one by one from the top down. Underneath the rhetoric lies a rawer hunger: he cannot stand being overlooked. His mission unravels emotionally as Spike and Andy treat him as an afterthought, cutting him off every time he tries to state his case, and even a letter to the hosts of Big Shot gets clipped when the program runs long. That accumulated humiliation pushes him to rig City Hall to kill both hunters, betraying his own earlier vow never to aim at human lives and laying bare how completely their neglect has warped him.

His explosives are compact yet devastating, small bears capable of gutting the structure of a skyscraper, and he backs that craft with an electronics habit that lets him build custom detonators and even seize control of an elevator. The campaign began in 2071 and quickly earned him a three million woolong price on his head. Spike caught up with him on an escalator after neutralizing one charge, but Andy came crashing in and mistook the bounty hunter for the culprit; while the two squabbled, Bower slipped away and blew a large section of the tower apart. His second attempt, hidden inside a bear costume at an upscale party, collapsed the same way when Spike and Jet traced him through a leftover ignition pin and Andy again spoiled the arrest. Enraged, he set off his bombs, fled by car through the Martian streets, and crashed, only to find Andy had forgotten him entirely to chase Spike. After broadcasting a threat through Big Shot, he lured both men into a sabotaged City Hall elevator meant to be their tomb, yet they climbed out through the roof. Faye knocked him cold and collected the bounty, and even his last chance to explain himself to a lone officer in the prison transport was drowned out when Andy reappeared in a new samurai guise.