The Ferro Campaign

[impala]

OK, so this is a little background piece I wrote up to put the various games of SST we are going to be playing into some perspective.

The Ferro Campaign

Ferro is an unremarkable world with an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. Simple carbon-based life abounds there, and the planetary crust is saturated with iron-rich ore. These metal deposits have led to a small mining colony being established several years ago. A generation later, the civilian colonists and their children have been raided by Skinnies for the first time in the history of the settlement. The Federation took more intrest in these raids than they normally do, in no small part due to the tremendous amount of cheap iron produced on this world and shipped back to Earth to feed the war effort against the Arachnids.

A company of the Mobile Infantry was transported to Ferro in order to protect the mining concerns from the Skinny raids and to discover the extant of their operations there. As it turned out, the Skinnies had already started their own colonization of the planet, possibly several generations before human began mining the iron ore. In fact, the raiders never even took their captives off-world; rather, they spirited them of to any number of their own small settlements on Ferro.

As intelligence was gathered to begin the rescue operations, a new threat surfaced. The Arachnids attacked Ferro, apparently having followed a supply freighter from Earth to this backwater settlement. Now, a single beleaguered company of the Mobile infantry needs to find a way to rescue key mining personnel, while at the same time defending the entire colony from aggression on two fronts, both from the Skinnies and the Bugs.

However, there are a few advantages for humanity's finest. First, the Arachnids seem to be as interested in attacking the Skinnies as they do the Federation, which has resulted in a bizarre three-way war of extermination between these wholly inimicable species. Second, it seems that the Skinny presence on Ferro is not united, as there seems to be at least three different factions of Skinnies in seperate areas, two of which are openly hostile to one another and the third of which seems to ignore the other two.

 

[impala]

A short piece for the first scenario...

The Rescue

Sergeant Block’s voice crackled over the coms, “Diaz, Whitlow, take point. The houses should be just over the next hill. The Senior Sergeant has fought these Skinnies before, and he says they pretty much blend right into the landscape until they start shooting, so keep a careful eye.” She looked at her squad, her small squad, as they fanned out to detect any possible ambushes. The Skinnies were probably already long gone already, but on this strange world it had not been unheard of to move right into the buildings they had so recently enslaved the residents of. Apparently their base was someplace on this very planet, but without any SICON help in searching for it, they had little hope of finding the enemy at home. Instead, they had contacted the colonists, showed them which radio frequencies could be used to contact the Mobile Infantry, and hoped that the soldiers could get there in time. Thus far, their success rate was well below expectations.

As they crested the hill, they saw the group of homes clustered in a clearing. They were too late, the houses had been burned and looted, and there were no dead bodies. Skinnies had managed to capture the entire population of this little settlement, the mining team and their families abducted to an unknown fate. Block knew that it would be the lucky ones who died; slaves rescued from the Skinnies told horrible stories of pain and terror during their time of captivity. As her boots crunched across the reddish gravel, she saw something on the ground. It was a girl’s doll, scorched on one side and missing a leg. They had also taken children.

Her reverie was interrupted by the creeping feeling at the base of her skull, that sixth sense honed in a hundred battles that something was wrong. Very wrong. Nothing she could put her finger on, but she began to have a very bad feeling about whatever they were walking into. There was still no sign of any ambush by the Skinnies, her heads-up display was showing no movement within the scanner’s range. But she had a gut feeling that they were in trouble. At least there was another squad out there for assistance, if they ran into anything they could not handle. She glanced back at the doll laying on the ground. They would avenge the colonists, if nothing else.

“Stay frosty, team. Eyes peeled, no idea what’s out there but something’s not right.” As she called to the squad, her heads-up began blinking, and the com came alive with reports.

“Sergeant, we have movement on the other side of the clearing!”

“Sergeant, there’s something coming towards us past the houses!”

“Sergeant, they’re bigger than Skinnies! What else is here?”

“Bugs, Sergeant! We have Bugs coming at us! Nobody said anything about Bugs!”

Sergeant Block opened the long-com channel, “Senior Sergeant Porter, we have contact with Bugs! We need Graetzman’s squad over here NOW! Nobody said anything about any damn Bugs!”