Akio I Gironi
Sir Akio I Gironi, The Last of the Investigators
Let Justice be Done, Though the Heavens Fall
Sir Akio has spent the last 67 years of his life investigating the origins of the Final Jizani War. In a nutshell, an EMP detonation stuck the Sultanate of Jizan on Indara (Empty Quarter 0837), destroying most electrical equipment, the financial and information networks, and most agricultural and sanitation equipment. The possession and use of nuclear weapons is aggressively banned by the Imperium, but the hostile neighbors of the former Sultanate insist that they had nothing to do with it: instead, they produced data that suggested that the Sultanate failed to pay Danegeld to the Kzokhfuell, a feared pirate group from the Vargr/Vilani world of Ikon (Empty Quarter 1602), and so was punished for it.
With the sector in an uproar over the perceived failure of the Imperial Navy to protect her charges, and relations with the Julian Protectorate in rough waters – only exacerbated by loud denials that any such Ikonaz pirate bands even existed – only a few investigators were tasked to actually verify the documents. The analysis came back positive, which gave the Imperium a chance to rhetorically unite the sector against the high-tech barbarian outsiders (instead of setting off another round of tribal reprisals), and build up sufficient regional Naval strength and authority to drive out the Kzokhfuell from Imperial Space.
Over the decades, Sir Akio has continued to pursue leads that suggest that the Kzokhfuell was encouraged to pressure the Sultanate of Jizan by Jizan’s enemies: but definite proof has eluded him, even after the Kzokhfuell disintegrated and the possible actors of the drama aged and died. With the exile of the Jizani people and the Sultanate herself dead for 87 years, Sir Akio is the only Imperial Ministry of Justice Investigator working on the case: after he dies, it will cease to be a criminal matter, and instead just an issue for historians to debate.
A Golden Lead
As part of current operations against pirates – the Shadow Cartel, in this case – a derelict pirate base was uncovered in <system name>. The Colonial Naval forces couldn’t spend the time to properly scout the entire base, but were able to determine that it was abandoned in haste at least 70 years ago. Sir Akio financed an expedition to the site in 991, two years ago: it was definitely a Kzokhfuell command center, but all the major equipment – including the mainframes and databanks – were yanked out.
But the Imperial Knight has a hunch that something valuable was left behind. Certainly there were enough abandoned datalinks, smartphones, laptops, and even pseudo-paper documents scattered about here and there. Even the routers and network nodes may still hold data, after all these decades. A properly financed group of investigators, techno-archaeologists, and software forensic analysts should be able to piece together the story – either onsite, or at an Imperial sector or subsector capital – and finally let Sir Akio point the finger at the culprit before the Sector Court, with evidence that is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
References and Contributors[edit]
- Alvin Plummer. "Personality Profiles V." Stellar Reaches 26 (2017): 69.
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