The Black Hole Gang

 

Though the greatest threat to the Acamas Republic remains the X-Terminator space pirates, the smaller Black Hole gang maintains a persistent grip on worlds in the outer rim pioneer planets owing to two factors–the caution of their leader and their cornering of the kybernetic black market.

 

The X-Terminators are an ambitious crew of pirates. They aim for nothing less than to become the dominant power of the Sungold galaxy. But the Black Hole gang only seek one think–profit. If the powers-that-be, whoever they might be, want to stand in their way, they’ll find a workaround. The Black Hole gang hopes that if the X-Termiantors succeed in their goal of seizing control of the space lanes that they’ll be easier to work with than the Acamas Republic, but if not, what does it matter? The Acamas Republic has sent elite squads of Star Deputies to wipe them out, and they’re still here. If the X-Terminators want to exterminate them, they’re welcomed to try. The Black Hole gang is confident that they’ll learn just as the Acamas Republic has learned that skilled outlaws can’t be defeated by throwing armies at them, especially when local markets bend to their will. As long as they have the kybernetic market, it doesn’t matter who rules the galaxy, the Black Hole gang will flourish.

 

Kybernetics are a fairly recent technological development in the Sungold galaxy, but following the disastrous Artificials War which burned the first Acamas Republic over the rights of artificial life, technological developments of all kinds were looked on with fear and cynicism. Kybernetic implants were heavily regulated, a they uncomfortably blurred the line between natural life and artificial life, but the rise of Iron Jaw Blackstarr led to their complete banning, something Iron Jaw uses to further his position as king of the underworld.

 

Iron Jaw

“Don’t listen to all the talk about ol’ Two Gun Blackstarr being a liar. I’m many things, but I’m not a liar. Would a liar go around dressing as honestly as I do?”

 

Alias “Two Gun,” “James Blackstarr,” and “Cain Desperado,” Iron Jaw is the leader of the Black Hole gang and a legendary outlaw in his own right, but he first rose to prominence as a hunter of outlaws.

 

James Blackstarr was once a member of the Searchers, an independent group of vigilantes and bounty hunters that operated around the Pioneer Planets. Far away from the centralized authority of the Acamas Republic, the Searchers flaunted kybernetic restrictions. They became experts in kybernetics, both in their creation and implementation, and with their kybernetics they brought peace tot he Pioneer Planets–for a time.

 

But they were betrayed by one of their own–“Two Gun” Blackstarr, who got his name from his kybernetically boosted dexterity which allowed him to skillfully wield two atomic motion “AM” guns at once, one in each hand. One AM gun increased the temperature of a target, the other lowered the temperature, and when used in tandem they could destroy a target at the molecular level by rapidly fluctuating atomic motion.

Two Gun was an excellent Searcher. He always got his man, but unlike his fellow Searchers, he wasn’t in it for the sake of law and order, he was in it to thin out the competition. The Searchers were sitting on a lot of illegal kybernetic which could make them a lot of money if they sold them indiscriminately. His plan from the very beginning was to help bring down the underworld of the Pioneer Planets and then bushwack the people that called him their friend.

 

One day, Two Gun called an emergency meeting at dessert planet. When all his friends arrived, he revealed that they were talking to a robot. The robot exploded, gouging the planet’s surface and stunning the Searchers, and Two Gun opened fire from an orbiting starship. Only John Meteor survived the ambush, having been thrown clean off the planet’s surface by a shock blast from Two Gun’s ship. He activated thruster units in his arms and hid himself in the planet’s debris field from the scans of Two Gun’s ship. But Two Gun got the rest of the searchers–and their corpses.

Two Gun carved the kybernetics right out of their corpses. Placing them inside himself, he became the ultimate kybernetic gunfighter, the greatest gunfighter in the entire Sungold galaxy. All the enhancements of the Searchers were now his, and he used them to start a one-man crime spree across the Pioneer Plants.

No longer needing to hide what he truly was, he tore the artificial flesh from his face to reveal to all a leering metal skull and took the skull as his personal symbol. The frightened people of the Pioneer Planets called him Iron Jaw, the man who slew the Searchers.

 

So great was his rampage across the stars that the Acamas Republic fully banned kyberetics, which couldn’t have made Two Gun happier. He had the Searcher’s supply of kybernetics, and he knew how to make more. He cornered the kybernetic market. Sungold crystal harvesters that wanted something to keep their backs from breaking had to go through him. The Acamas Republic didn’t end the trade of kybernetics, they ensured it continued through Iron Jaw.

 

Iron Jaw would made Planet Tamer, known for its unusually large amount of sungold crystals, his base of operations, and space pirates and space governors were forced to visit his base, a combination fortress, saloon, and casino called the Grinning Skull to pay homage to he who ruled the Pioneer Planets.

 

But John Meteor was still alive.

 

John raised a posse from the Acamas Republic and was pardoned for his kybernetic crimes in exchange for leading that posse to Planet Tamer so that the Acamas Republic could finally close the books on Iron Jaw.

The posse descended on Planet Tamer and invaded the Grinning Skull. After a long and bloody battle, the posse was victorious, and Iron Jaw was imprisoned aboard their ship and made ready to be tried and executed for his many, many crimes on Gavel 5, the artificial justice planet of the Acamas Republic, placed in a dead system as a show of impartiality.

 

And Iron Jaw would have made it to Gavel 5, if not for the intervention of a con man known as Jake Sidewinder.

 

Jake Sidewinder

 

 

“No, you’re mistaken. You want to give us your sungold crystals. Why? Because we won’t take them all. See, other pirates would do that, and leave you with nothing. We don’t. In fact, you can consider this little exchange a form of payment. You are paying us to keep the real pirates from destroying your livelihood. You can’t say we’d do a worse job of protecting you than the Star Deputies. I mean, if they were worth a damn, you think they would have let us get you in the first place?”

 

The second-in-command of the Black Hole Gang is every bit as slippery and treacherous as his name implies. Once in charge of a major Republic sungold crystal harvesting operation on the southernmost continent of Tamer, Sidewinder’s career came crashing down when it was discovered that he was corrupt to the core. Not only did he sell forbidden kybernetics to his workers (“Don’t worry about it. You’ll feel stronger, you’ll work longer, everyone wins in the end.”), but he spiked the programming so that they required maintenance–maintenance only he was equipped to give. The workers couldn’t seek help elsewhere without fear of getting in trouble with the law, so Jake Sidewinder developed an army of superpowered slaves. On top of all that, he funneled a sizeable portion of the sungold crystal harvesting portions into a secret account. Jake left no path to profit untrodden. But all it took was one whistleblower, kybernetic worker Alpha Cody, and one investigation to expose his entire operation to the Acamas Republic.

 

When Acamas sent a unit of Star Deputies under Starmarshall Colt Laezor and Searcher John Meteor to Planet Tamer to apprehend Iron Jaw Blackstarr, they managed to arrest to kybernetic gunfighter only after a long and brutal battle that decimated their numbers and left the survivors tired, but Starmarshall Laezor still decided to pick up Jake Sidewinder before leaving Planet Tamer. But when they came to serve Sidewinder his warrant, he revealed that he, like Iron Jaw, had become a kybernetic gunfighter with formidable combat systems.

 

Sidewinder convinced several of his worker slaves to take up arms against the Star Deputies under the argument that with him, they were free, and with them, they were kybernetic criminals–or worse, accessories to Sidewinder’s crimes. At first, only a few workers attacked the Star Deputies, but when the rest saw their friends in pitched battle, they joined the fight to protect them. With this army and his kybernetic enhancements, Sidewinder was able to slay the Star Deputies and the legendary John Meteor, who he killed personally, or so he likes to say. The truth is that he killed John Meteor by shooting him in the back, something he did often, but the truth doesn’t stop Jake Sidewinder from claiming he out drew John Meteor and wearing John Meteor’s Searcher star. John Meteor’s kybernetic enhancements, however, would be claimed by Iron Jaw, who wanted the full set of Searcher enhancements inside his body. When one sees a red light in Iron Jaw’s sockets, as they tend to right before they die, those are the optical targeting enhancements of John Meteor. John’s son Buck has vowed to pluck them from Iron Jaw’s corpse.

 

Starmarshall Laezor was the only survivor of the slaughter, and escaped off Planet Tamer only with the help of the mysterious unidentified lifeform Chief Iron Lance, who rescued Laezor from pursuers in Tamer’s Great River Country. Chief Iron Lance, the last “survivor” of a race of beings that combined their souls into his body so that race may collectively experience the life of a single individual. Chief Iron Lance summoned a starship long buried by his people to transport Laezor back to the Acamas Republic where he quickly went about forming a new team of Star Deputies to return to Planet Tamer.

 

Sidewinder and his men used gravity anchors to bring the Black Hole, the ship that transported the doomed Star Deputies to Planet Tamer, and released Iron Jaw from the ship’s brig. Jake swore allegiance to the outlaw in recognition of Iron Jaw’s accomplishments (but really, he did so because he knew lawmen would go for Iron Jaw before him).

 

Taking their name from their captured starship, the Black Hole gang was formed. They spread across the Pioneer Planets with Planet Tamer being their base of operations. The kybernetic trade became their major source of income, as people felt they could (mostly) trust kybernetics from the people that used them to defeat the Star Deputies, but they also made a sizeable portion of their income by demanding protection money. With the Star Deputies defeated, they were the law in the Pioneer Planets, and the law demanded “taxes” for their “services.”

 

Like his boss, Sidewinder uses dual AM guns. One gun speeds up atomic motion, heating objects, and the other slows down atomic motion, freezing objects. By firing both, Sidewinder produces rapid and extreme temperature changes in a target, causing damage at the molecular level. Sidewidner’s kybernetics not only boost his physical abilities well beyond what nature allows, they give him the ability to project photite clones of himself. These clones can imitate firing his AM guns by photite energy discharges, though the effect will always be a hot bolt of energy. Though the clones can fight, their primary function isn’t to kill Sidewinder’s opponents but to mislead them while he makes his getaway. Sidewinder has never been a fight he wouldn’t rather not be in and firmly believes that dissertation is the better part of valor.

 

It is also rumored that Sidewinder uses kybernetics to make himself superhumanly charismatic. How exactly he does this is a matter of dispute. Some say he uses low-level telepathy. Others say he secrets mood altering pheromones’. But Jake denies all these rumors. He claims that his silver tongue is all natural.

What do you think? Do you think he’s honest about how he lies?

 

Tricky, isn’t it?