2499: the year the Great War began

2499 was the year the old order of the Koprulu Sector ended. For most of its months the Terran Confederacy carried on as it always had, hunting the Sons of Korhal, training its telepath hunters, and burying its mistakes, all while an economic downturn tightened its grip on the fringe worlds. Then, in its final weeks, the zerg surfaced on Chau Sara, the protoss answered with fire from orbit, and Mar Sara followed its sister world into ash. The Great War had begun, and by the last days of December it had already cost the Confederacy two colonies, the loyalty of Marshal Jim Raynor, and its hold on Antiga Prime.

The Quiet Months#

The year opened without any hint of what was coming. In January, Malcolm Kelerchian began his training as a Wrangler, one of the Confederacy's specialist hunters of rogue telepaths, starting with his equipment. His instruction moved on to his own psionic talents in February and concluded in June, leaving him with a lasting side effect: a headache whenever a telepath came near. In September, Universe News Network reporter Michael Liberty was assigned as a war correspondent to Alpha Squadron, stationed aboard the Behemoth class battlecruiser Norad II under Colonel Edmund Duke. He would spend the next three months aboard the vessel, a posting that placed him at the center of everything that followed.

Beneath the routine, the Confederacy was straining. An economic downturn gripped the government throughout the year, and the war that began in its final weeks only intensified it.

The Hephaestus Cover Up#

The Confederacy's first brush with the zerg in 2499 never reached the public. On March 22, a zerg organism was discovered on the world LV-555, and the crew of the battlecruiser Hephaestus was ordered to retrieve it. Late in the month the creature escaped containment, killing most of the crew and forcing the survivors to fortify themselves within the ship. Tamsen Cauley, a bureaucrat of the Center for State Security, was told to resolve the situation in a deniable manner. He dispatched the War Pigs, a squad of criminal commandos, to destroy the battlecruiser along with its specimen and its surviving crew. By early April the War Pigs had succeeded, at the cost of one of their own. Around the same period, the outlaw Nuura Joss began work on the vessel General Lee.

First Blood on Chau Sara#

Open contact came in November. On November 7, Alpha Squadron forces arrived on Chau Sara at the request of Magistrate Collins to deal with the Sons of Korhal. When they engaged the rebels the next day, they found themselves under attack by creatures no terran force had officially faced before: the zerg. The Cerberus Recon Squad came to their aid, and together they defeated both the organisms and the rebels. Confronted by aliens and by the shadowy Cerberus unit, the Sons of Korhal abandoned Chau Sara.

The fighting on the colony only worsened. With Alpha Squadron's help, the Cerberus unit reached the Flannum Installation, which had been overrun by the zerg, and evacuated the Confederate scientists inside. On November 11 the city of Los Andares fell to the Swarm before Duke led its reclamation; when Los Andares Prison came under attack, the Confederacy rescued the guards but abandoned the prisoners, taking three days to retake the site. Against Collins' wishes, Alpha Squadron pressed on and destroyed the zerg's primary hive clusters on November 12. The entire affair was classified. By mid November, Confederate media were portraying the action as a victory over the Sons of Korhal, and Chau Sara was placed under lockdown, with all traffic and communication in or out heavily restricted. On November 24, the Ishanti Uprising broke out elsewhere in Confederate space.

The Protoss Answer#

The zerg had not gone unnoticed by older eyes. In late November, the protoss Conclave dispatched an expeditionary force to the Koprulu Sector to discern the severity of the zerg threat and of humanity's plight. Executor Tassadar led the fleet of fifty warships from his flagship Gantrithor, answering to Judicator Aldaris, who by this time served as the Judicator advisor to the expedition.

On December 8, the protoss fleet arrived at Chau Sara. Scans revealed the topsoil consumed by creep and most of the colonists dead or infested. On hearing the report, the Conclave ordered Tassadar to torch the planet. He sorrowfully obeyed, extinguishing all life on the surface, and was ordered to do the same to any colony with even the slightest possibility of infestation. Tassadar complied, but the genocidal orders had planted a doubt in him that would shape the rest of the war.

The Confederacy was thrown into disarray by the sudden attack. Predicting Mar Sara would be next, it dispatched a clumsy counterstrike to the Sara system, and on December 12 Confederate forces confronted Tassadar's fleet over the dead world. Unwilling to loose more death, Tassadar withdrew, and the Confederacy heralded the standoff as a victory. Word of the alien attacks reached Earth as well. Widespread panic swept the United Powers League, which absorbed the dissident countries of South America and renamed itself the United Earth Directorate, adopting a proactive, militaristic stance toward alien affairs and quietly gathering data on the strengths and weaknesses of the protoss and the zerg.

The Fall of Mar Sara#

Mar Sara's own catastrophe had already begun. On December 2 the colony started losing contact with its outland stations, and the recon squads sent to investigate vanished in turn. A reconnaissance in force on December 7 confirmed the world was infested. In the aftermath of the Chau Sara standoff, Duke ordered the colonists relocated to concentration points in the wastelands for evacuation, and Marshal Jim Raynor personally escorted evacuees to safety.

On December 13, Backwater Station came under zerg attack. Duke assured the colonial magistrate that Alpha Squadron would handle it, but Raynor, certain the Confederates would move too slowly, set out on his own while the magistrate sent militia to support him. By December 16, Raynor and the Mar Sara Colonial Militia had liberated the station, and with Liberty, who had come down to the surface the day before, Raynor went on to destroy an infested command center nearby. The reporter's escort, Lieutenant Emily Swallow, was killed by the zerg at Anthem Base before Raynor's arrival.

The Confederacy's reward for saving Backwater Station came on December 17, when Alpha Squadron marines arrested Raynor and the militia for "treasonous activities" and hauled them to a prison ship in orbit. That same day, Liberty found the evacuation point abandoned except for Sarah Kerrigan, who brought him to a safehouse where a hologram of Arcturus Mengsk revealed the Confederacy's plan to abandon Mar Sara and its people while it observed the two alien races. Mengsk offered a deal: Liberty would speak on his behalf, and Mengsk would free Raynor and his men. Meanwhile the 417th Confederate Marine Platoon recovered a psi emitter from Oasis Station and used it to lure the zerg to their own position, buying time for the Sons of Korhal to evacuate Mar Sara City.

After the breakout on December 18, Raynor and Liberty led a raid on the Jacobs Installation, where they found zerg held in Confederate holding pens and retrieved the weapons data Mengsk sought. The Sons of Korhal then abandoned the planet. Thirteen hours after the evacuation, protoss ships arrived and incinerated Mar Sara.

Rebellion at Year's End#

In the last days of December, Liberty was granted a series of interviews with Mengsk and came to believe in his cause. Kerrigan was dispatched ahead to Antiga Prime, where Alpha Squadron forces had been stationed to quell a brewing rebellion. With the aid of the Sons of Korhal, Alpha Squadron's control collapsed and the Antigans rose against the Confederacy, whose grip on the fringe worlds had been fatally weakened. The revolution that would destroy the Confederate government within the year was under way.

Elsewhere in the Sector#

Away from the front lines, 2499 left quieter marks on the sector's history. The Reaper Corps was founded that year. On Bhekar Ro, the siblings Octavia and Lars Bren set up automated mineral mines in the foothills of the Back Forty. The Kel-Morian Combine discovered the world Chanuk. By this year Gabriel Tosh was already enrolled in the Ghost Program, one of many young telepaths whose lives the coming war would upend. And in the weeks after the purification of Chau Sara, the Sons of Korhal carried out a poison gas attack on a public plaza on Haji, while a multi train accident struck Moria, signs of a sector already coming apart at the seams.