Title: Redstone Vignette: Good F*cking Riddance
***
“We’ve reached the required safe distance from the blast
zone, Ma’am.”
Grace Grave, Head Warden of Caravan and Acting-Warden of
Redstone, calmly folded her hands in her lap. “Thank you, Lieutenant Hendricks.
Put Redstone on screen, please.” The floating penitentiary sprang into sight, a
misshapen reddish ingot slowly twisting its way through space. Grace’s fingers
tightened so much she felt her knuckles crack. How she had come to loathe that place during her brief
tenure there.
Grace was no stranger to distasteful things. She had served
with the Federation army for almost fifty years, working her way up from
Private to Colonel. She had participated in and fought against invasions,
occupations, and guerilla warfare on nine different planets. She had seen
atrocities committed on a mass scale, felt the helplessness of inaction, and
the futility of her own burning desire to make a difference. The army was too
regimented to enact meaningful change even if she became a commanding general,
and so Grace had taken an early retirement and moved on to a far more focused
and controllable environment: prisons.
There were just as many laws on the Federation books
concerning treatment of actual prisoners as there were for enemy combatants and
prisoners of war, but while no plan survived the battlefield, in a closed
system, Grace felt she could enact real change. Not that it was easy: she’d had
to justify mass firings of irredeemable guards, retrainings for the ones that
could be taught, and new methodologies for rehabilitation and prisoner
interaction. It had cost most of her political capital and a great deal of
personal grief to make Caravan into a place where she could look upon her work
with quiet pride. That Grace had no one left to share that satisfaction with
was…disappointing, but the work was more important than her private life.
She had known Redstone was bad. The whole time she’d spent
shaping up Caravan, she’d been aware of the worsening reputation of the only
other maximum-security penitentiary in the Federation. It was where the hardest
cases were sent, where men and women went to never be seen again. She had
heard, and to her shame, she had remained silent, content to better her own
small, grimy corner of the universe. And her reticence to get involved had
possibly cost the lives of two of the best men she’d ever known.
Don’t dwell on it.
Grace had already lost too much sleep over Robbie and Wyl Sinclair. As hard as
it was to put them aside, she had a whole new population to work into Caravan
now: a prison population that was used to much more vicious circumstances. Over
half of the inmates from Redstone had been transferred to her facility, and it
would take a lot of oversight to keep them from sliding back into bad habits,
or encouraging those habits in the current residents. Grace would have to be
vigilant, and she couldn’t do that if she spent all her time worrying. God
willing, she would meet that couple again someday. But as for today…
Today was entirely about her personal satisfaction. “Arm the
mines.”
“Arming.” Hendricks nodded a moment later. “Mines are live,
Ma’am. Control routed to your station.” He paused, then said, “Any last words?”
Grace smiled coldly. “Good fucking riddance.” She jammed her
thumb into the activation panel. A moment later, the empty carcass of one of
the worst blights in the Federations’ bloated regime exploded, disintegrating into
atoms with the force of the blast. Light filled the screen, reflected in Grace’s rapt gaze. She captured the force of the explosion in her memory,
the intensity of her own pleasure at seeing it destroyed, and then—the light
was gone. It was over.
Redstone Penitentiary was no more.
I like Ms Grave *a lot*. Will we learn more about her?
ReplyDeleteI agree with the title, Good riddance to Redstone. Thank you for this vignette; it helps feed the addiction to this universe.
ReplyDelete