The Cardinal Directive: Season One

By Madeline M. Dunsmore

The Cardinal Directive is a sci-fantasy apocalyptic horror/zombie horror series that has been running as serialized fiction (1 chapter every other week) on my Substack, Author's Notes, for some time now. This contains the whole of what we refer to as "Season One", or the first major arc of the series. Though technically not meant to be experienced as a "book" per se, I wanted to provide a paperback option for those interested.
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The Cardinal Directive takes place on a partially-colonized Mars, where most people live their entire lives in the safety of the biodomes, and never think twice about the swathes of the vast, uninhabitable deserts that surround them. These empty, hostile expanses are known as "The Red", and they are the domain of people known as harriers. Armed with bioengineered dragons and spacesuits, the harriers have taken up the monumental task of being the red desert's temporary denizens, creating and maintaining supply lines between the different towns and cities. They alone have familiarity with the desert, some even considering it to be more like their home than the habitable zones of the planet.

The Red is host to dangers and oddities in equal measure. There is much about this world that its people don't understand -- even the harriers. It's a fact that will become glaringly obvious as a new danger emerges from the sands: one that refuses to stay dead.

Cardinal's Mars is a world of raiders, cults, cowboy-style rangers, spies, dragons, undeath, and the Unknown and Unexplainable, with capital U's. And between the rise of the undead and troubled pasts catching up to them, our cast of harriers will need to navigate them all if they're going to survive.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0C6W2VCL6
• ISBN13: 9798379050399
• Release Date: June 2023
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"