Post by Insano-Man on Sept 24, 2018 9:48:59 GMT -5
What Starts in Misery
Argannei is a heavily-populated planet not far from the border between the Praetorian Federation and the Verinen Permanos Regentic and is one of the oldest known colonies in human space. Just as it is placed in a region that saw some of the fiercest fighting in the Timosi War, Argannei, despite its official status as a holding of the Federation, has been in a state of quasi-anarchy since it was first supposedly settled by the Ollenhall in 1492 A.F.
The virtually lawless state of Argannei stands in stark contrast to the sheer density of its population and its state of development; at least 3.3 billion people live on Argannei with an estimated population of transients and uncounted residents in the range of 400-540 million. At least 40% of the planet's entire surface is covered in sprawling megalopolises and industrial or agricultural zones dedicated to supporting those cities.
Despite being a self-sufficient planet with one of the highest population densities in known space, Argannei is often seen less as a monument to civilized expansion and more as a lawless, endless slum. Ineffective and often corrupt police agencies struggle to keep order alongside the Federal Guard in the middle of one of the Federation's longest martial law orders - from 2188 to the present date - as Argannei's cities continue to expand in the face of an ever-growing population.
Gangs, crime syndicates, private military companies, and corporations lay claim to entire districts of the planet that lay outside the Federation's reach. Criminal activity runs rampant in the fragile, oft-shattered peace kept in the streets and violent gang wars erupt on a monthly basis. Poverty, homelessness, and moral destitution breed in cycles alongside Argannei's ongoing disorder and often leave those on the planet without option to escape.
Environment
Argannei was once a picturesque twilight world; a planet with a thick upper atmosphere that shielded it from the intense radiation of its parent star, Veilug, as well as most of its light. That same atmosphere helped the dark, distant world maintain a chilly, though pleasant temperature capable of supporting human habitation with little variation between different locations, days, nights, or any period in its orbital cycle.
Argannei's upper atmosphere was a thick mix of inhospitable gases that often chilled into toxic rain that would evaporate before it reached the planet's surface. On the surface, however, oxygen was abundant and concentrations of nitrogen around its poles gave it an earthly quality that was safe to breathe. A comfortable level of gravity just below that of Earth's likewise made it possible to completely forgo protective equipment. In many ways, Argannei seemed to have been waiting for mankind.
Ice and water were in abundance on Argannei when the planet was first discovered and copious quantities of industrial resources lay hidden underneath its surface. Calm weather, mostly featureless terrain, and its placement as the outermost planet in its system made for one of the most appealing colonial prospects ever discovered at face value - and, as it was quickly discovered, nature had already realized it and staked its claim.
When Argannei was first discovered, a rich diversity of plant and animal life was found already teeming on its surface. Thriving ecosystems of bioluminescent plants and animals trailed in the valleys carved by passing glaciers at the north and south poles of the planet, some large enough to be seen from orbit. Small herds of docile creatures made yearly migrations from wind-eroded plateaus dotting the equator of the planet to rivers literally aglow with life when rainfall was at its lowest.
Today, little of the life documented in the incomplete records of Argannei's settlement can be seen today. Those that resided away from the north and south poles were driven to near-total extinction, while the flora and fauna of the poles were either wiped out or driven into Argannei's sprawling sewer systems by aggressive exploitation of the planet's frozen fresh water reserves. Life on Argannei now rarely features outside of urban legends of monsters stalking the underground.
Fresh water and untainted ice are now similarly mythical outside of Argannei's cities. Its once-idyllic and gentle plains have decayed into lightless, toxic badlands of harsh weather, high temperatures, and, where there was once water, dry river and lakebeds, ironically desecrated by acidic rainfall pushed out from industrial centers. The territory outside of Argannei's cities mirrors the disorder inside; a wasteland left dead and desolate by the chaos that followed mankind.
Air quality across the planet has simultaneously improved and plummeted in the same stroke. Early efforts to make the planet more hospitable to human life were largely successes and helped diffuse the planet's pockets of nitrogen-laced air across its surface - which briefly came with explosions of plantlife in the process. Today, however, industrial pollutants and byproducts of human society have left the air in the badlands - and some cities - dangerous without protection.
Temperatures remain constant on Argannei, but fluctuate wildly within its cities. Weather patterns shifting exhaust from industrial zones and other parts of Argannei's megalopolises can radically alter the temperatures in nearby districts, sometimes skyrocketing temperatures to nigh-uninhabitable heatwaves, other times dropping them to sub-zero chills that bring toxic snowfall to isolated regions.
Argannei is one of six planets in its system and the smallest overall. Three gas giants, two other terrestrial worlds - both superheated planets that faintly glow in space - and a dense asteroid belt orbit in a loose cluster together at similar intervals between Argannei and Veilug. Eclipses on Argannei are common on the few occasions that Veilug can be seen through the planet's cloud cover - and the dense smog that permeates over cities.
Cities
Argannei's cities are often as chaotic as the society they host. Population centers blend seamlessly between slums, upper class residential districts, corporate offices, and administrative centers with little sense of structure or intent. Stalled and abandoned construction projects litter the planet's inhabited areas, breaking up otherwise tightly-packed areas with trenches, torn roads, and half-finished buildings ranging from small, single-family homes to perilously-incomplete spires.
Industrial centers sprawl across many of the outlying - or once-outlying - parts of the cities. Automated manufacturing centers, power plants, and various other facilities pour exhaust and smoke in pillars of smog over deep, low-lying mineshafts that continue to spring up to take advantage of Argannei's mineral wealth, often times forcing local engineers to construct - and sometimes abandon - additional structures in the area to avoid parts of the city collapsing into sinkholes.
Underground sewer systems, public transit tunnels, and large power conduits criss-cross through every inch of inhabited territory on Argannei and frequently extend outside of city limits. Squatters often take refuge in this labyrinthine expanse of hazardous tunnels and, regardless of the disruption they might cause, are rarely uprooted - or even discovered - by local police. A number of long-lived shantytowns have been found literally sprouting out from drainage pipes or abandoned tram tunnels into canals or other areas.
Airspace in Argannei is at a considerable premium and many cities are overgrown with thick tangles of wires, walkways, tram rails, and piping that run between virtually every possible connection point between buildings above ground level. Skyscrapers, industrial facilities, communications towers, and even the planet's two gargantuan space elevators block out much of its skyline in the inner city, while dense air traffic desperately clings to the few safe routes over Argannei's cities.
Despite the disarray of society at large and the difficulties in keeping order, business thrives amidst the chaos of Argannei. Streets are often flooded with the glow of neon, digital, and even holographic advertisements for all manner of services, ranging from mom-and-pop convenience stores to gang-owned brothels. Nightclubs, private spaceports, gambling centers, and recruitment offices for mercenary corps often rest side-by-side in every part of the cities, from the slums to industrial centers.
Agricultural greenhouses and reprocessing centers that feed much of Argannei's population are regular sights near population centers and ventilation hubs. As with its industry, Argannei food is locally supplied from a mix of private, corporate, and government-owned facilities. Ultimately, however, each is a for-profit operation that typically sells to local stores or other nearby buyers, leading to poor global availability and infrequent famines for its lower classes during crop shortages or population booms.
Argannei is kept safe from its own growth by an ever-expanding list of air purification and ventilation centers that help modify wind currents and clean smog from the lower levels of the cities. Without these structures, ranging from towering spires to underground processing centers, much of Argannei's districts would be totally uninhabitable without protective equipment. Many of these facilities were put into place decades or even centuries in advance with careful oversight, a rare sign of tact from a typically bloated and ineffectual planetary government.
Verinen and Ollenhall architecture continue to litter Argannei from its times as holdings of the two rival empires. The softly-rounded spires of Ollenhall core worlds stand beside the reinforced, pyramid-like structures of Verinen fringe worlds, some of the buildings older than the dawn of faster-than-light travel on Anchorage. Only recently has Federal building design begun to climb in prominence, with mixed brutalist structures spanning the gap between the two extremes of the spectrum.
History
It is unclear when Argannei was settled by human colonists and the conditions surrounding the first human landing are in considerable doubt. Officially, the planet was an Ollenhall colony that had been settled in 1492 A.F. and was seized by the Verinen in 1510 and, later, the Praetorian Federation in 2188. What few records that remain of the supposed Ollenhall founding of Argannei's first colony are sparse, incomplete, and often run in contradiction with records pre-dating the colony.
The Verinen seizure of the planet, however, had been confirmed through a number of sources. The Verinen officially recognize it as a formally-conquered territory and have hard evidence of its surrender by the Ollenhall, while Argannei records of the time have survived better than their counterparts - which has often been credited more to Verinen military pride than the planet's historians. To this date, the Verinen continue to hold territorial claims on Argannei, despite willfully surrendering it to the Praetorian Federation.
The Verinen hold on the planet was, much like the Federation after them, loose and tenuous. It is widely believed that Argannei was in much a condition during its forfeiture by the Ollenhall as it was today; a world in utter disarray that only seemed to expand to vent excess energy from an overtaxed system. Attempts to enforce control of the planet are marked in history by a series of bloody riots and clashes with Verinen police and military forces in 1518, 1530, and 1532.
The Regentic eventually gave up on its attempts to bring order to Argannei's cities and scaled down much of their presence, following the Lower Klassau Riot in 1532 that left at least 400 people dead. Beginning in 1534 and concluding in 1538, a garrison of roughly 120,000 military personnel and 210,000 off-world law enforcers were scaled down to a token presence of 1,000 troops and 4,500 police officers, most acting in the role as senior advisors rather than directly monitoring the planet.
Verinen record-keeping from the times following their de facto withdrawal and leading up to the Federal acquisition of the planet are limited. Most focus on incidents with Verinen facilities or staff and cover little of the planet itself. As a result of Argannei's unreliable historical documents, much of what occurred in the six intervening centuries is in doubt. Riots, invasions, famines, and various other catastrophes are all contradicted by themselves, others, and Verinen records with few concrete events remaining.
When the Praetorian Federation arrived at the planet in 2188, during the Timosi War, their own military pride met with that of the Verinen in shoring up the frightfully incomplete records of Argannei's history. The "invasion" of the planet - could the veritable mock battle in orbit be called as much - was the beginning of Federal rule and the Verinen's speedy departure from Argannei, which both documented in detail as part of their tradition.
Hostilities began in orbit when the 31st Combined Flotilla, led by Commodore Steven Cardack, comprising thirty-two ships, and flying the flag of the Federal Navy, arrived just short of Argannei. The Verinen defense fleet, an unnamed unit under the 4th Naval Detail, was little more than a handful of outdated destroyers and frigates numbering at precisely a dozen. The 31st, detected almost immediately by the defenders, broadcast a demand for surrender, which the Verinen refused in silence.
The battle that ensued was little more than a show of participation on either side. The Federal 31st knew well enough that the Verinen were sure to retreat once they had withdrawn their personnel on the planet and the Verinen themselves had no intention of disappointing them. After several exchanges of long-range fire that crippled one Federal frigate and briefly disabled two Verinen destroyers, the battle ended as all had anticipated. The Federation had claimed what it believed to be a major colony in a single day's time.
Initially, the 31st believed a Verinen counterattack to be imminent and gauged that the significance of Argannei warranted a major fleet action. Two fleets arrived to support the flotilla from nearby colonies; the Klaberdawn Defense Fleet at twenty-two strong and the 35th Battle Group at fifty strong, notably led by the unique battleship-carrier hybrid Charlotte Glenn. All in all, more than a hundred ships - predominantly smaller vessels - waited for nearly a week for a counterattack that never came.
The Verinen were not interested in defending a planet that was impossible to control and offered the Federation little in the way of contest. Reconnaissance probes prodded at Argannei a handful of times and two of the six identified by the Federal ships were destroyed in the process, but no Verinen warships returned to the system. Two days after the Federal attack on the planet, the Klaberdawn Defense Fleet withdrew from the system to its namesake home planet. By the end of the week, the 35th Battle Group had followed them.
The 31st Combined Flotilla exchanged places with an ad-hoc defense fleet made up of sixteen ships, two of them troop transports that had been meant to arrive alongside the 31st. The troop transports were given orders to hold back until orbit had been secured and were only called upon by the time that it was clear that the Verinen were not mounting a counteroffensive. Federal troops deployed to Argannei in expectation of strike troops waiting for them planetside.
Instead, the guardsmen and marines that landed on the planet were left perplexed at the utter lack of Verinen personnel on the ground. Two weeks of cautious deployment were met with a skirmish that only added to the confusion surrounding Argannei's seizure; an office for Safezone Security, a mercenary outfit native to Argannei, mistook Federal troops for rivals readying to mount an assault. After fighting began, the office was quickly levelled by a Federal airstrike and its surviving guards surrendered.
The "assault" on Argannei set the tone for Federal rule of the planet. Martial law was enacted as soon as the planet was officially incorporated into the Federation and its initial garrison of some 40,000 guardsmen were empowered to apprehend or kill criminals on sight. For two years following their landing, the guardsmen followed the order to the letter, and continued to apply it on an irregular basis for another three years until the Timosi War's end.
The result was a rapid heightening in tensions and a number of small wars with gangs and private military contractors that left scores dead or in custody by its informal conclusion. The status quo on Argannei was disorder and guardsmen often mistook their role as peacekeepers in wartime as a deployment to a contested planet with active combatants around every corner. Their heavy-handed approach only served to skyrocket crime rates across the planet and continually escalated violence between the Guard and civilians.
In 2190, garrison officers on Argannei were given an order to suspend patrols deemed "excessive", often those passing through crime-ridden areas that typically spurred shootouts between jumpy guardsmen and vengeful thugs - or innocent passers-by that had the misfortune of startling the unit. Off of the records, it was an order from colonial overseers to apply martial law only where necessary to secure Federal facilities against imminent threats.
Two years later, new troubles emerged as the handful of organized and concerned citizens on Argannei that opposed Federal rule came together in the Argannei Resistance Front as a response to the displacement of several local government officials by Federal replacements. For a time, the ARF was little more than a political movement seeking a removal of the Federation through peaceful means. As the Timosi War came to its conclusion in 2193 and the ARF's methods failed to bear fruit, it reorganized in silence as a true resistance movement.
The ARF did not launch major offensives against the Federation until much later, but conducted several limited strikes against guardsmen on patrol shortly after its restructuring. These strikes saw little success on either side; the disjointed ambushes that resulted caused limited casualties and no deaths for the Federal troops, while the Resistance Front slinked away without a single casualty. These small attacks were enough to alert the Federation to the ARF's reorganization, but did not provoke any significant operations against them.
In 2193, Federal High Command unofficially suspended martial law on Argannei in response to reports of violence on the planet. A quiet inquiry was launched into the affair that brought up what High Command had already been informed of; Argannei, large and dense as it was, was virtually impossible to control for an off-world military without the deployment of millions of personnel to lock down the cities and effect a wholesale replacement of local police.
The order remains suspended and garrison officers have since been granted limited emergency powers in its place. Officially, Argannei remains under martial law, but guardsmen are no longer permitted to fire without provocation and are typically assigned patrols only in the immediate areas surrounding their garrisons or Federation-owned structures. They, like many other mercenaries and corporate security details on the planet, control little more than their own interests.
Problems continued to pile on as time passed and the Timosi War's aftermath permeated across Coalition space. In 2195, the Argannei Liberation Army formed together in Ghasreik, one of the planet's northernmost cities. Wholly opposed to the Federation, at odds with the Argannei Resistance Front, and built on a strong initial base of discontented cyborgs and sympathizers, chaos unfurled in the wake of their birth.
Months after their official founding, the ALA went to blows with the Federal Guard and ARF simultaneously, scoring notable successes against the Federal Guard in three encounters with guardsmen on patrol. The ARF fared better in their early clashes; the ALA attempted and failed to eliminate several Resistance Front leaders in five individual attacks, inflicting only minor losses on their guards and sustaining considerable casualties themselves.
Fortunes reversed as 2195 became 2196 and the Liberation Army found itself assailed by the Federal Guard and ARF in Ghasreik. The Guard launched multiple simultaneous attacks on ALA safehouses while ARF members worked to sabotage attempts by the ALA to secure backing from several prominent corporations on the planet. The Federation achieved several major victories in the process, including a publicized raid by Federal shocktroopers that razed an ALA hideout with no Federal casualties.
The Resistance Front, meanwhile, suffered setbacks as attempts to infiltrate or disrupt meetings between Liberation Army and corporate representatives floundered in the face of renewed ALA intelligence efforts. The few successes the ARF achieved quickly turned around into unexpected backlash as corporations withdrew their support to the ARF or reaffirmed their commitment to the Liberation Army.
Hostilities between the two resistance groups and attacks launched against the Federal garrisons have since quieted to a simmering cold war of smaller raids and limited encounters. Disorder spurred by Federal attempts to fully claim Argannei has since returned to the "normal" level of disarray in Argannei's streets. In turn, projects kept under tight watch by the Federation have grown in popularity and prevalence, and expansion of Argannei's limited orbital infrastructure has steadily accelerated.
Whether the Federation will be able to succeed where the Verinen failed remains to be seen. The sheer scope of the road ahead - nothing short of establishing full dominance over a planet of billions - is daunting like no other. With some six hundred years of distanced, unenthused governance behind Argannei, it is anyone's guess as to whether the Federation will be able to adapt a successful model towards securing the planet's incredible potential or whether it hands Argannei off to the next naive invader.
Argannei is a heavily-populated planet not far from the border between the Praetorian Federation and the Verinen Permanos Regentic and is one of the oldest known colonies in human space. Just as it is placed in a region that saw some of the fiercest fighting in the Timosi War, Argannei, despite its official status as a holding of the Federation, has been in a state of quasi-anarchy since it was first supposedly settled by the Ollenhall in 1492 A.F.
The virtually lawless state of Argannei stands in stark contrast to the sheer density of its population and its state of development; at least 3.3 billion people live on Argannei with an estimated population of transients and uncounted residents in the range of 400-540 million. At least 40% of the planet's entire surface is covered in sprawling megalopolises and industrial or agricultural zones dedicated to supporting those cities.
Despite being a self-sufficient planet with one of the highest population densities in known space, Argannei is often seen less as a monument to civilized expansion and more as a lawless, endless slum. Ineffective and often corrupt police agencies struggle to keep order alongside the Federal Guard in the middle of one of the Federation's longest martial law orders - from 2188 to the present date - as Argannei's cities continue to expand in the face of an ever-growing population.
Gangs, crime syndicates, private military companies, and corporations lay claim to entire districts of the planet that lay outside the Federation's reach. Criminal activity runs rampant in the fragile, oft-shattered peace kept in the streets and violent gang wars erupt on a monthly basis. Poverty, homelessness, and moral destitution breed in cycles alongside Argannei's ongoing disorder and often leave those on the planet without option to escape.
Environment
Argannei was once a picturesque twilight world; a planet with a thick upper atmosphere that shielded it from the intense radiation of its parent star, Veilug, as well as most of its light. That same atmosphere helped the dark, distant world maintain a chilly, though pleasant temperature capable of supporting human habitation with little variation between different locations, days, nights, or any period in its orbital cycle.
Argannei's upper atmosphere was a thick mix of inhospitable gases that often chilled into toxic rain that would evaporate before it reached the planet's surface. On the surface, however, oxygen was abundant and concentrations of nitrogen around its poles gave it an earthly quality that was safe to breathe. A comfortable level of gravity just below that of Earth's likewise made it possible to completely forgo protective equipment. In many ways, Argannei seemed to have been waiting for mankind.
Ice and water were in abundance on Argannei when the planet was first discovered and copious quantities of industrial resources lay hidden underneath its surface. Calm weather, mostly featureless terrain, and its placement as the outermost planet in its system made for one of the most appealing colonial prospects ever discovered at face value - and, as it was quickly discovered, nature had already realized it and staked its claim.
When Argannei was first discovered, a rich diversity of plant and animal life was found already teeming on its surface. Thriving ecosystems of bioluminescent plants and animals trailed in the valleys carved by passing glaciers at the north and south poles of the planet, some large enough to be seen from orbit. Small herds of docile creatures made yearly migrations from wind-eroded plateaus dotting the equator of the planet to rivers literally aglow with life when rainfall was at its lowest.
Today, little of the life documented in the incomplete records of Argannei's settlement can be seen today. Those that resided away from the north and south poles were driven to near-total extinction, while the flora and fauna of the poles were either wiped out or driven into Argannei's sprawling sewer systems by aggressive exploitation of the planet's frozen fresh water reserves. Life on Argannei now rarely features outside of urban legends of monsters stalking the underground.
Fresh water and untainted ice are now similarly mythical outside of Argannei's cities. Its once-idyllic and gentle plains have decayed into lightless, toxic badlands of harsh weather, high temperatures, and, where there was once water, dry river and lakebeds, ironically desecrated by acidic rainfall pushed out from industrial centers. The territory outside of Argannei's cities mirrors the disorder inside; a wasteland left dead and desolate by the chaos that followed mankind.
Air quality across the planet has simultaneously improved and plummeted in the same stroke. Early efforts to make the planet more hospitable to human life were largely successes and helped diffuse the planet's pockets of nitrogen-laced air across its surface - which briefly came with explosions of plantlife in the process. Today, however, industrial pollutants and byproducts of human society have left the air in the badlands - and some cities - dangerous without protection.
Temperatures remain constant on Argannei, but fluctuate wildly within its cities. Weather patterns shifting exhaust from industrial zones and other parts of Argannei's megalopolises can radically alter the temperatures in nearby districts, sometimes skyrocketing temperatures to nigh-uninhabitable heatwaves, other times dropping them to sub-zero chills that bring toxic snowfall to isolated regions.
Argannei is one of six planets in its system and the smallest overall. Three gas giants, two other terrestrial worlds - both superheated planets that faintly glow in space - and a dense asteroid belt orbit in a loose cluster together at similar intervals between Argannei and Veilug. Eclipses on Argannei are common on the few occasions that Veilug can be seen through the planet's cloud cover - and the dense smog that permeates over cities.
Cities
Argannei's cities are often as chaotic as the society they host. Population centers blend seamlessly between slums, upper class residential districts, corporate offices, and administrative centers with little sense of structure or intent. Stalled and abandoned construction projects litter the planet's inhabited areas, breaking up otherwise tightly-packed areas with trenches, torn roads, and half-finished buildings ranging from small, single-family homes to perilously-incomplete spires.
Industrial centers sprawl across many of the outlying - or once-outlying - parts of the cities. Automated manufacturing centers, power plants, and various other facilities pour exhaust and smoke in pillars of smog over deep, low-lying mineshafts that continue to spring up to take advantage of Argannei's mineral wealth, often times forcing local engineers to construct - and sometimes abandon - additional structures in the area to avoid parts of the city collapsing into sinkholes.
Underground sewer systems, public transit tunnels, and large power conduits criss-cross through every inch of inhabited territory on Argannei and frequently extend outside of city limits. Squatters often take refuge in this labyrinthine expanse of hazardous tunnels and, regardless of the disruption they might cause, are rarely uprooted - or even discovered - by local police. A number of long-lived shantytowns have been found literally sprouting out from drainage pipes or abandoned tram tunnels into canals or other areas.
Airspace in Argannei is at a considerable premium and many cities are overgrown with thick tangles of wires, walkways, tram rails, and piping that run between virtually every possible connection point between buildings above ground level. Skyscrapers, industrial facilities, communications towers, and even the planet's two gargantuan space elevators block out much of its skyline in the inner city, while dense air traffic desperately clings to the few safe routes over Argannei's cities.
Despite the disarray of society at large and the difficulties in keeping order, business thrives amidst the chaos of Argannei. Streets are often flooded with the glow of neon, digital, and even holographic advertisements for all manner of services, ranging from mom-and-pop convenience stores to gang-owned brothels. Nightclubs, private spaceports, gambling centers, and recruitment offices for mercenary corps often rest side-by-side in every part of the cities, from the slums to industrial centers.
Agricultural greenhouses and reprocessing centers that feed much of Argannei's population are regular sights near population centers and ventilation hubs. As with its industry, Argannei food is locally supplied from a mix of private, corporate, and government-owned facilities. Ultimately, however, each is a for-profit operation that typically sells to local stores or other nearby buyers, leading to poor global availability and infrequent famines for its lower classes during crop shortages or population booms.
Argannei is kept safe from its own growth by an ever-expanding list of air purification and ventilation centers that help modify wind currents and clean smog from the lower levels of the cities. Without these structures, ranging from towering spires to underground processing centers, much of Argannei's districts would be totally uninhabitable without protective equipment. Many of these facilities were put into place decades or even centuries in advance with careful oversight, a rare sign of tact from a typically bloated and ineffectual planetary government.
Verinen and Ollenhall architecture continue to litter Argannei from its times as holdings of the two rival empires. The softly-rounded spires of Ollenhall core worlds stand beside the reinforced, pyramid-like structures of Verinen fringe worlds, some of the buildings older than the dawn of faster-than-light travel on Anchorage. Only recently has Federal building design begun to climb in prominence, with mixed brutalist structures spanning the gap between the two extremes of the spectrum.
History
It is unclear when Argannei was settled by human colonists and the conditions surrounding the first human landing are in considerable doubt. Officially, the planet was an Ollenhall colony that had been settled in 1492 A.F. and was seized by the Verinen in 1510 and, later, the Praetorian Federation in 2188. What few records that remain of the supposed Ollenhall founding of Argannei's first colony are sparse, incomplete, and often run in contradiction with records pre-dating the colony.
The Verinen seizure of the planet, however, had been confirmed through a number of sources. The Verinen officially recognize it as a formally-conquered territory and have hard evidence of its surrender by the Ollenhall, while Argannei records of the time have survived better than their counterparts - which has often been credited more to Verinen military pride than the planet's historians. To this date, the Verinen continue to hold territorial claims on Argannei, despite willfully surrendering it to the Praetorian Federation.
The Verinen hold on the planet was, much like the Federation after them, loose and tenuous. It is widely believed that Argannei was in much a condition during its forfeiture by the Ollenhall as it was today; a world in utter disarray that only seemed to expand to vent excess energy from an overtaxed system. Attempts to enforce control of the planet are marked in history by a series of bloody riots and clashes with Verinen police and military forces in 1518, 1530, and 1532.
The Regentic eventually gave up on its attempts to bring order to Argannei's cities and scaled down much of their presence, following the Lower Klassau Riot in 1532 that left at least 400 people dead. Beginning in 1534 and concluding in 1538, a garrison of roughly 120,000 military personnel and 210,000 off-world law enforcers were scaled down to a token presence of 1,000 troops and 4,500 police officers, most acting in the role as senior advisors rather than directly monitoring the planet.
Verinen record-keeping from the times following their de facto withdrawal and leading up to the Federal acquisition of the planet are limited. Most focus on incidents with Verinen facilities or staff and cover little of the planet itself. As a result of Argannei's unreliable historical documents, much of what occurred in the six intervening centuries is in doubt. Riots, invasions, famines, and various other catastrophes are all contradicted by themselves, others, and Verinen records with few concrete events remaining.
When the Praetorian Federation arrived at the planet in 2188, during the Timosi War, their own military pride met with that of the Verinen in shoring up the frightfully incomplete records of Argannei's history. The "invasion" of the planet - could the veritable mock battle in orbit be called as much - was the beginning of Federal rule and the Verinen's speedy departure from Argannei, which both documented in detail as part of their tradition.
Hostilities began in orbit when the 31st Combined Flotilla, led by Commodore Steven Cardack, comprising thirty-two ships, and flying the flag of the Federal Navy, arrived just short of Argannei. The Verinen defense fleet, an unnamed unit under the 4th Naval Detail, was little more than a handful of outdated destroyers and frigates numbering at precisely a dozen. The 31st, detected almost immediately by the defenders, broadcast a demand for surrender, which the Verinen refused in silence.
The battle that ensued was little more than a show of participation on either side. The Federal 31st knew well enough that the Verinen were sure to retreat once they had withdrawn their personnel on the planet and the Verinen themselves had no intention of disappointing them. After several exchanges of long-range fire that crippled one Federal frigate and briefly disabled two Verinen destroyers, the battle ended as all had anticipated. The Federation had claimed what it believed to be a major colony in a single day's time.
Initially, the 31st believed a Verinen counterattack to be imminent and gauged that the significance of Argannei warranted a major fleet action. Two fleets arrived to support the flotilla from nearby colonies; the Klaberdawn Defense Fleet at twenty-two strong and the 35th Battle Group at fifty strong, notably led by the unique battleship-carrier hybrid Charlotte Glenn. All in all, more than a hundred ships - predominantly smaller vessels - waited for nearly a week for a counterattack that never came.
The Verinen were not interested in defending a planet that was impossible to control and offered the Federation little in the way of contest. Reconnaissance probes prodded at Argannei a handful of times and two of the six identified by the Federal ships were destroyed in the process, but no Verinen warships returned to the system. Two days after the Federal attack on the planet, the Klaberdawn Defense Fleet withdrew from the system to its namesake home planet. By the end of the week, the 35th Battle Group had followed them.
The 31st Combined Flotilla exchanged places with an ad-hoc defense fleet made up of sixteen ships, two of them troop transports that had been meant to arrive alongside the 31st. The troop transports were given orders to hold back until orbit had been secured and were only called upon by the time that it was clear that the Verinen were not mounting a counteroffensive. Federal troops deployed to Argannei in expectation of strike troops waiting for them planetside.
Instead, the guardsmen and marines that landed on the planet were left perplexed at the utter lack of Verinen personnel on the ground. Two weeks of cautious deployment were met with a skirmish that only added to the confusion surrounding Argannei's seizure; an office for Safezone Security, a mercenary outfit native to Argannei, mistook Federal troops for rivals readying to mount an assault. After fighting began, the office was quickly levelled by a Federal airstrike and its surviving guards surrendered.
The "assault" on Argannei set the tone for Federal rule of the planet. Martial law was enacted as soon as the planet was officially incorporated into the Federation and its initial garrison of some 40,000 guardsmen were empowered to apprehend or kill criminals on sight. For two years following their landing, the guardsmen followed the order to the letter, and continued to apply it on an irregular basis for another three years until the Timosi War's end.
The result was a rapid heightening in tensions and a number of small wars with gangs and private military contractors that left scores dead or in custody by its informal conclusion. The status quo on Argannei was disorder and guardsmen often mistook their role as peacekeepers in wartime as a deployment to a contested planet with active combatants around every corner. Their heavy-handed approach only served to skyrocket crime rates across the planet and continually escalated violence between the Guard and civilians.
In 2190, garrison officers on Argannei were given an order to suspend patrols deemed "excessive", often those passing through crime-ridden areas that typically spurred shootouts between jumpy guardsmen and vengeful thugs - or innocent passers-by that had the misfortune of startling the unit. Off of the records, it was an order from colonial overseers to apply martial law only where necessary to secure Federal facilities against imminent threats.
Two years later, new troubles emerged as the handful of organized and concerned citizens on Argannei that opposed Federal rule came together in the Argannei Resistance Front as a response to the displacement of several local government officials by Federal replacements. For a time, the ARF was little more than a political movement seeking a removal of the Federation through peaceful means. As the Timosi War came to its conclusion in 2193 and the ARF's methods failed to bear fruit, it reorganized in silence as a true resistance movement.
The ARF did not launch major offensives against the Federation until much later, but conducted several limited strikes against guardsmen on patrol shortly after its restructuring. These strikes saw little success on either side; the disjointed ambushes that resulted caused limited casualties and no deaths for the Federal troops, while the Resistance Front slinked away without a single casualty. These small attacks were enough to alert the Federation to the ARF's reorganization, but did not provoke any significant operations against them.
In 2193, Federal High Command unofficially suspended martial law on Argannei in response to reports of violence on the planet. A quiet inquiry was launched into the affair that brought up what High Command had already been informed of; Argannei, large and dense as it was, was virtually impossible to control for an off-world military without the deployment of millions of personnel to lock down the cities and effect a wholesale replacement of local police.
The order remains suspended and garrison officers have since been granted limited emergency powers in its place. Officially, Argannei remains under martial law, but guardsmen are no longer permitted to fire without provocation and are typically assigned patrols only in the immediate areas surrounding their garrisons or Federation-owned structures. They, like many other mercenaries and corporate security details on the planet, control little more than their own interests.
Problems continued to pile on as time passed and the Timosi War's aftermath permeated across Coalition space. In 2195, the Argannei Liberation Army formed together in Ghasreik, one of the planet's northernmost cities. Wholly opposed to the Federation, at odds with the Argannei Resistance Front, and built on a strong initial base of discontented cyborgs and sympathizers, chaos unfurled in the wake of their birth.
Months after their official founding, the ALA went to blows with the Federal Guard and ARF simultaneously, scoring notable successes against the Federal Guard in three encounters with guardsmen on patrol. The ARF fared better in their early clashes; the ALA attempted and failed to eliminate several Resistance Front leaders in five individual attacks, inflicting only minor losses on their guards and sustaining considerable casualties themselves.
Fortunes reversed as 2195 became 2196 and the Liberation Army found itself assailed by the Federal Guard and ARF in Ghasreik. The Guard launched multiple simultaneous attacks on ALA safehouses while ARF members worked to sabotage attempts by the ALA to secure backing from several prominent corporations on the planet. The Federation achieved several major victories in the process, including a publicized raid by Federal shocktroopers that razed an ALA hideout with no Federal casualties.
The Resistance Front, meanwhile, suffered setbacks as attempts to infiltrate or disrupt meetings between Liberation Army and corporate representatives floundered in the face of renewed ALA intelligence efforts. The few successes the ARF achieved quickly turned around into unexpected backlash as corporations withdrew their support to the ARF or reaffirmed their commitment to the Liberation Army.
Hostilities between the two resistance groups and attacks launched against the Federal garrisons have since quieted to a simmering cold war of smaller raids and limited encounters. Disorder spurred by Federal attempts to fully claim Argannei has since returned to the "normal" level of disarray in Argannei's streets. In turn, projects kept under tight watch by the Federation have grown in popularity and prevalence, and expansion of Argannei's limited orbital infrastructure has steadily accelerated.
Whether the Federation will be able to succeed where the Verinen failed remains to be seen. The sheer scope of the road ahead - nothing short of establishing full dominance over a planet of billions - is daunting like no other. With some six hundred years of distanced, unenthused governance behind Argannei, it is anyone's guess as to whether the Federation will be able to adapt a successful model towards securing the planet's incredible potential or whether it hands Argannei off to the next naive invader.
