| abstract
| - A world in the Kornacht Cluster, Anno is a bare hundred light years from Coruscant, located roughly along the Corellian Run if viewing the galaxy as a top-down projection, but so greatly diverged from the Run ‘vertically’ that it has never been a major stopover. Nevertheless, it was a lush garden world, and for millennia it was a happily habitable world, far enough off the beaten path that one could venture out of the cities and find verdant green growing lands, but close enough to find cities, with industries, businesses, and people. It all came to a crashing halt about a hundred and fifty years before the Battle of Yavin. Hundreds of years of polluting industry and poor regulation took their toll on Anno, as they have to so many other worlds. Unlike many other worlds, however, Anno seemed to fight back with a vengeance; a rise in global temperatures and the unfortunate decision to locate planetary infrastructure with massive power plants and inadequate shielding in the polar regions led to rapid polar ice melting, and the ocean quickly covered the world, raising sea levels so dramatically and in such a short time that the planet seemed to drown. Where once had been a planet of continents and seas was now an ocean world of archipelagos with only a few huge islands remaining worthy of the name. As ecological disasters went, it was hardly one of the greatest ever to befall an inhabited planet, but it was pretty bad. Billions of sapients had less than a month to evacuate their homes before the rising floodwaters claimed them, and most left for good. Hundreds of thousands still stayed, however, and a slow migration of immigrants looking for an oceanic world, a challenge, or an environmental cause continued to bolster their ranks. The Ithorians promised their help, but because Anno was still a livable, fertile planet, albeit one undergoing massive ecological upheavals, they didn’t send in a herdship, limiting their support. Years came and went, the planet continued to revolve, largely forgotten about by the galaxy at large as the locals and the sorts who were attracted to the place continued on. Eventually, three distinct camps emerged; Harmonizers, who were of the opinion that the best way for sapients to live was in complete harmony with nature, using technology and verdant skill to create living places and industries with a minimum of ecological impact, Researchers who grew largely to be agnostic towards the matter of the environmental state as long as they could continue to plumb the mysteries of science and technology, and Magnates, largely capitalist folk who did not give a damn about the environment as long as it wasn’t so bad that it was interfering with their businesses and industries. For almost a hundred years things went on well, with the oceans - which were by now so dilute that they were fresh water - populated by streaming hordes of fish gleefully swimming in and above drowned, sunken ruins, and the locals taking to the waves just as readily. When the Clone Wars hit, the Republic installed an orbiting supply and repair yard above the little-known planet. This upset most of the locals; Harmonizers because the Republic wasn’t shy about just dropping their waste into the ocean, Researchers because they feared governmental oversight and pilfering of their research and crackdowns on what they could research, and Magnates because the Republic didn’t want to do business with them on their terms, and brought in outside laborers and set up their own supply lines. The Republic did little to address these concerns, and when the Confederacy broke up and the Clone Wars officially came to an end, the locals invited the Galactic Empire to kindly remove their superfluous operations from their planet. The Galactic Empire instead expanded the repair yard to a small shipyard and installed garrisons. The locals of Anno did not like this. They had, after all, spend the last century and a quarter building themselves up as tough, do-it-ourselves types who had little use for the Galactic Empire’s oversight and control, but they had a problem; so deep in the Empire, yet so far out of the way, they were a very minor blip on the Alliance’s radar. Certainly, some locals escaped to join the Rebellion, and the Alliance did manage to funnel some intelligence and a few specialists to the locals, but for the most part, the people of Anno seemed willing to live with the yoke, and the Empire willing to let them live with the yoke. This is primarily because the Empire concerned itself almost exclusively with the matters happening above the waves. The locals bided their time, building up their strength, literally under the noses of the Empire; the Empire had done a poor job of securing the planet’s surface, let alone its subsurface, and given the strong naval presence in orbit, what would it have mattered? After all, they had denied even repulsorcraft vessels to the locals, what good would a ship, let alone a submarine, be against the Empire? As it turned out, far more good than they would have ever imagined. Following the fall of Coruscant, when Imperial vessels fleeing the fall looked for a safe harbor, Anno was the first one many of them who looked to the star charts in search of an Imperial facility that wasn’t under Alliance control found. Dozens of Imperial capital ships, Star Destroyers included, fled to Anno’s shipyards in various states of repair for safe-haven. The orbits were crowded, and every sensor array was aimed up and away from the planet, fearful of a Rebel follow-through, when it should have been aimed down. The locals of Anno, disparate in worldview but united in cause, had spent the entirety of the Empire’s control of their world building up for this opportunity. With the Rebel Alliance still seemingly so far away, but the Empire so broken, they had the opportunity they needed. In a coordinated assault the Empire never saw coming, sub-surface launched strategic missiles ripped from beneath the waves, igniting massive, powerful ion engines and activating shield generators, accelerating into orbit en masse. Before the Empire knew what was happening, the locals had violated hundreds of millennia worth of the customs of warfare on them, deploying atomic weapons of mass destruction not as single coups, but in abundance. Atomic fire lit the skies, and even undamaged, fully-shielded Imperial-II class Star Destroyers were rendered into burning wrecks by the assault. The shipyard, a dozen Star Destroyers and dozens of lesser capital ships were completely obliterated, leaving the island-based garrisons cut off. That was when the second prong of the attack came, when armed, well-designed military submarines with deck-mounted laser cannon turrets surfaced, raised shields, and began bombarding the Empire’s garrisons and surface repulsorcraft. Though the garrison’s fighter compliments tried, a handful of TIEs weren’t enough, and even if they did achieve air superiority, the submarines could simply escape beneath the waves to repair and return. By the time the nascent New Republic got around to checking Anno for the fleets they suspected had escaped and were possibly repairing, rearming, and massing for a counterattack there, they found that the locals had erased the Empire from their own world, without any help from you. In turn, even the veteran Rebels were unnerved by the extreme measures the local resistance had gone to; even though the atomic detonations had been sufficiently removed from the atmosphere as not to wreck the planet, strategic scale atomic weapons were still beyond the pale, things that even the Empire was reluctant (though not completely unwilling) to employ; on the scale the locals had used them, they were nigh-unthinkable. Many years later, the inhabitants of Anno are wary members of the New Republic. The locals still hold it to be both a point of pride and of contention that they rid themselves of the Empire without a single drop of blood being shed by a member of the Rebel Alliance to liberate their world, while the New Republic has thusfar failed to convince the locals to disarm themselves - normally not a problem for the New Republic, but the locals are still holding onto the atomic weapons they manufactured and had waiting in store for an Imperial counter-attack, giving rise to the very real worry that if something were to go monumentally wrong, the entire planet could end up a radioactive wasteland. On the other hand, it’s very, very hard to convince someone to willingly relinquish weapons that demolished the Empire, and for now everyone simply wishes to keep it as quiet as can be, for fear that other worlds might decide to begin manufacturing the ridiculously-easy-to-make weapons.
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