2502: the year of quiet atrocities

2502 was a year without an open war, and the Terran Dominion filled it with hidden ones. Two years after the Brood War, Emperor Arcturus Mengsk ruled the Koprulu Sector's dominant terran power from a position of apparent strength, celebrating the anniversary of his coronation even as rebel broadcasters aired footage of his marines butchering a colony. Behind the parades, the year belonged to the sector's shadows: a Dominion bureaucrat set the War Pigs loose to assassinate Jim Raynor, a ghost erased a town on Agria, covert programs experimented on captive protoss and stolen telepaths, and on the far frontier the Daelaam fought the zerg and the Dominion alike for the relics of the xel'naga.

The Candore Massacre#

The year began with a warning dressed as journalism. In January, UNN reporter Kate Lockwell ran a story on treason and the Dominion's punishment for it, which was death. The next month she learned how literally the state meant it. In February, Lockwell and fellow reporter Zach Oliver were embedded with a Dominion Marine Corps battalion to report on its activities, and those activities included the massacre of Candore Colony. The reporters had seen too much. Oliver was killed, and Lockwell would have shared his fate had the Knights of Freedom, a terran revolutionary group, not attacked the battlecruiser carrying her. She gave the rebels her footage of the massacre.

The Knights of Freedom held the recording until it could do the most damage. In March, as the Dominion celebrated the anniversary of Arcturus Mengsk's coronation, they aired the Candore footage across the sector, setting images of slaughtered colonists against the imperial festivities.

A Funeral on Umoja#

March also brought a private grief to the imperial family. After many months of struggle, Juliana Pasteur, the mother of Valerian Mengsk, lost her long battle with cancer and was buried on Umoja. Father and son were reunited at the funeral, and afterward Arcturus told Valerian the story of the Mengsk Dynasty, the history of the family whose name the young heir carried. For a man who had burned worlds to take his throne, it was a rare moment of candor, and it brought the emperor and his estranged son to an understanding.

The Hunt for Jim Raynor#

At mid year the Dominion moved against its most famous enemy by proxy. Tamsen Cauley, the bureaucrat who had once run covert operations for the Confederacy, offered the imprisoned War Pigs their freedom if they assassinated Jim Raynor. Secretly he intended to use his Cerberus Program to terminate the outlaws once the job was done, burying the last witnesses to his old crimes.

The War Pigs began by investigating Raynor's past on Moria, where they were attacked by Kel-Morian Combine forces and forced to withdraw to Grissom IV to repair their vessel, the General Lee. Cerberus troops under Lars Trakken followed them at a distance. In August, while the squad crossed the Kelanis Rift, a xel'naga artifact inflicted psychological torment on the crew before a group of Dark Templar retrieved it. The strain told on the outlaws in other ways. By October 22, the neural resocialization of War Pig Cole Hickson had begun to surface, manifesting as an obsession with mission preparation.

On October 25 the War Pigs finally tracked Raynor to Urona Sigma, only to find the planet crawling with zerg. They confronted their target amid the infestation, but the reckoning was interrupted twice over: Cerberus forces arrived to wipe out the outlaws, and then the protoss arrived to purify the world entirely. The survivors of Urona Sigma abandoned the contract and launched a do or die assault on Cauley's headquarters, seeking to end the threat at its source. Unknown to them, the Dominion ghost Nova Terra shadowed their every move.

The Ghost of Hudderstown#

The Dominion's methods on Agria that August showed how cheaply it held its own citizens. On August 13, the government dispatched a ghost to terminate the rebel leader Castor Mezzo, who had taken shelter among the farmers of Hudderstown Colony. The operative did not stop at the target. The town was exterminated almost to the last inhabitant before the War Pigs, passing through on their own hunt, rescued the remnants and shot Mezzo dead themselves for recklessly endangering innocent people. When Leonid Celsus arrived at the ruins with a troop of marines on August 17, he found the ghost dead and was left wondering how a band of outlaws had managed to kill it.

Ghosts and Secret Projects#

The Dominion's psionic machinery ground on through the year. In September, after two and a half years of training, Nova Terra passed the Ghost Academy's program, with only a graduation mission standing between her and full agent status. Some records placed Mengsk's brutal overhaul of the Ghost Program, in which half its agents were terminated and the ghost Devon Starke was presented to Valerian as a gift, in this year as well, though other accounts fixed it earlier.

Not every program answered to the emperor. By 2502, Project Shadowblade had begun abducting Dominion ghosts, and the Ghost Program covered up the disappearances rather than admit it could not protect its own operatives. Elsewhere, Project Gestalt was formed, and Dr. Stanley Burgess began experimenting on captured Khalai Caste protoss, creating the entity designated Gestalt Zero. The Dominion also began work on the Odin, a colossal war machine whose existence would remain secret for years.

The year brought quieter changes to the terran arsenal. The AH/G-24 Banshee, a new attack aircraft designed for counter insurgency work, was in Dominion service by 2502, and the Kel-Morian Combine fielded it within the same year. The Minotaur class battlecruiser likewise came into service with the Dominion fleet.

The Protoss Under Artanis#

Beyond terran space, the protoss struggled to govern themselves in exile. Dominion Intelligence confirmed in this period that Artanis was leading both the Khalai and the Nerazim. Within the protoss Hierarchy, the reality was less settled. The body reached one impasse after another in its debates until Zekrath declared that it needed a single leader, and both he and Mohandar agreed that Artanis was the best choice. Artanis refused, reaffirming his intention to leave the council and return to a warrior's life.

Whatever his title, Artanis oversaw the year's fighting. On the frontier world of Artika, Dominion, zerg, and protoss forces battled for control of a xel'naga temple. The Dominion Marine Corps and the zerg engaged first, and the late arriving protoss took the field and the temple, though at great loss. Mengsk, whose forces had been sent to acquire the artifact, insisted the failed attack had been worth the cost.

Protoss science fared no better than protoss politics. A group of protoss researchers conducted an experiment on the creep, the living carpet of the zerg. The sample became a psychic predator and spawned an infested protoss, and the scientists sacrificed themselves to freeze both the creep and the creature it had made.

Elsewhere in the Sector#

The scars of the Great War drew scavengers through the year. Independent and indentured contractors began strip mining the dead worlds of Chau Sara and Mar Sara, and the Dominion intimidated the Kel-Morian Combine into taking control of certain secret sites on the latter world. On Mar Sara, the Thor pilot Sandin Forst and his companions Rieff and Garth attempted a heist of the ruined Jacobs Installation. Forst recovered the valuable ardeon crystals he sought, but zerg spores bonded to the crystals infected him.

Violence found the colonies in stranger forms. During a weapons demonstration on Ursa, the psychotic viking pilot Captain Jon Dyre turned his machine on the innocent colonists; his former pupil Wes Carter confronted him and ended the killing spree. The crew of the Generous Profit landed on a fringe world in hopes of salvage and were instead converted or killed by the Church of Besainted Pelagius. And amid the year's cruelties there was at least one ordinary beginning, as the marauder Shila and Isaac White started their relationship.