The Red Hand Accord

HQ : Zemjelos Major

Found on : System Wide

 

 

The Red Hand Accord is an underground (sometimes literally) resistance movement operating within and around the extraction zones of 51 Pegasus that are manned by prisoners. Their mission: expose the corporate-judicial conspiracy that funnels unjustly convicted people into “Living Death” sentences, and liberate as many as they can.

They operate on two fronts:

1. Legally, by filing appeals and pushing cases through overburdened or corrupt planetary and interplanetary courts — a slow, dangerous game.

2. Illegally, by organizing extractions: smuggling prisoners out of the depths, relocating them into safehouses hidden in uncharted sub-colony shafts, and then getting them off-world, whilst falsifying shuttle logs and setting up new identities.

Theirs is a delicate task.  Those that they seek to save are, at least in most cases, criminals whose guilt no longer needs to be proven, but whose sentence to "Living Death" is disproportionate to the crimes committed.

Membership of the Red Hand is very diverse, and secretly includes some very public figures.  They might be active or retired attorneys and judges, as well as white-hat hackers who have built a career fighting against the corporations.  There is some support amongst the miners of 51-Pegasus itself, although it is not widespread.  Better sometimes to believe in the just punishment of another, than have to work the most dangerous areas oneself.

 

The Red Hand also employs the undeniably criminal talents of the very prisoners it has helped to escape, to manipulate, mislead and falsify, and also provide a revenue stream.  Their ethical lines are thus particularly blurred, particularly given that the mental health of some escaped prisoners has been severely compromised by the time spent on 51-Pegasus.  Critics also point out that the Red Hand shows no concerns for those non-prisoners who, poorest of the poor, share their harsh working conditions in the malasite-b mines.  There have also been incidents where freed prisoners had clearly committed crimes worthy of their sentence, but had high value for the organisation itself.

Whenever the organisation frees someone, they come back to leave a "red hand", be it in holochit form or, more daringly, graffitied directly onto a wall or corridor, always with an eye in the centre of the palm.   Prisoners often whisper: “The Red Hand sees,” a hopeful mantra suggesting help is coming.