Red Hand

The Red Hand are an Unbound group lead by Adrianna Leblanc with their headquarters located in The Grasp. While it is a primarily a pirate group, Leblanc is secretly allied with Red One and had taken over the Red Hand for the purpose of helping the AI with her goals.

## Description

The Red Hand is one of the largest Unbound clans in the region they operate, and are described as "effectively a rogue star nation." It flies both captured and self-built ships, and is unusually disciplined in combat. Captured warships are called "vassa anka," or "flayed one," and are crewed by the Red Hand's elite. The "kiran shren" or "blood born" are ships built in their own manufacturing facilities. While these ships are expensive to create and crew, the Red Hand is large and organised enough to handle the costs.

The Red Hand is lead by Adrianna Leblanc, who uses a system of trusted officers and a cell structure to control the whole organization. Within the Red Hand, her word is absolute, and she is brutal when punishing wrongdoing. Punishments for going against her range from relatively benign to being strapped to the outside of a ship undergoing shock travel. While they engage in almost every criminal venture possible, and many that are untenable for smaller clans, Leblanc forbids engaging in the slave trade.[citation]

The majority of the Red Hand outside of her trusted officers is unaware that the true purpose of the clan is war against the Compact itself. Adrianna's end goal is to create a force capable of overthrowing the Compact's government with the aid of the UECNS *Nemesis*.

## History

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Adrianna Leblanc killed Vuld, the leader of the Unbound clan Cursed Red Gauntlets and taken his place. The Red Hand was formed and Leblanc becomes the Red Queen.By 'present day', the Red Hand is effectively a rogue star nation operating inside the Compact (mostly).

There are larger Unbound factions with fleets that outnumber and outgun Adrianna's, but they're not nearly as aggressive, nor are as widely-distributed as the Red Hand. It's both boon and bane; the upside is that they can muster more forces far quicker than the Rd Hand can, whose operations are spread across thousands of systems at any given time. The downside is that if the Compact ever decides 'okay, we've had enough of your shit', these cartels can be wiped out or crippled fairly quickly. It's much harder do that to the Red Hand, since they have so many fingers in so many pies. You can take out their operations in one region, but the rest of the organization remains. It rebuilds, it stays out of sight until you're comfortable and safe again and then it creeps back in. One spark becomes an inferno.

The vassa anka are the Red Hand's captured warships and are one of the fleet's elite units. You have to prove your skill and loyalty to serve aboard a "Flayed One", since flying a captured Compact warship or rival cartel's vessel is a status symbol as well as a dramatic increase in performance and capability. The kiran shren ("Blood Born") are the Red Hand's own warships, built from the ground up. Large ships are horrendously expensive to operate, but as mentioned the Red Hand tends to do very well in space - with more and more powerful ships, they can take on far more jobs, even ones that no other cartel is willing or able to touch, which makes them even more money... and they're only getting better at design, construction and maintaining their own infrastructure.