Angus Mengsk

Angus Mengsk was a senator of Korhal and a member of the Old Families of the Terran Confederacy who became the leader of an armed rebellion against Confederate rule. The father of Arcturus Mengsk, he declared the independence of Korhal before he and his family were assassinated by Confederate ghosts, a murder that set his son on the path of vengeance that would one day produce the Terran Dominion.

Old Family senator#

Angus Mengsk was a member of the Old Families and a senator for the Korhal Senate, speaking in a rich baritone at the Palatine Forum. He had been raised by his father, Augustus, who took him on at least one hunting trip into Korhal's Keresh Province and passed on enormous financial wealth. Angus courted Katherine, who eventually asked him to marry her, though only after he had maneuvered her into being the one to ask, and the couple had two children, Arcturus Mengsk and Dorothy Mengsk.

Angus came to believe that the Terran Confederacy and the Old Families were corrupt, and his views grew popular among the people of Korhal IV as his oratory swayed many senators to his cause. His son Arcturus did not share these views, and the two did not get along: Arcturus felt his father was trying to control his life, and wanted to become a prospector, an ambition Angus strongly disapproved of.

The road to rebellion#

Angus's popularity alarmed the Confederate Council, which feared losing control of its most prized colony, and the Korhal Senate leader Lennox Craven was unable to rein him in. In 2478, with Angus in his mid-forties, Craven tried a different tactic, disguising neurally resocialized marines as a corporate death squad and sending them against the Mengsk summer home while the Umojan ambassador Ailin Pasteur and his daughter Juliana were visiting. The attack was inadvertently foiled by Arcturus and the family's chief of security, Achton Feld, who had been alerted only because he caught Arcturus trying to sneak back into the house.

Angus had been planning an underground armed struggle against the Confederacy, and Pasteur agreed to aid him by secretly funneling Umojan weapons and equipment to Mengsk-controlled factories. Arcturus overheard the arrangement and objected, knowing the tactics would cost lives, but Angus held that in war people die. At the Close of Session speech, which his popularity entitled him to give, Angus walked Senators' Parade alongside Katherine to cheering crowds against Feld's security advice, whispered to Craven that he knew the truth behind the "corporate death squad," and tore down a Confederate flag to rapturous applause. The day brought him private disappointment as well, for that morning the newly graduated Arcturus had enlisted in the Confederate Marine Corps and left without saying goodbye. The two failed to reconcile when Arcturus returned to visit two years later.

Independence and assassination#

The rebellion continued, killing hundreds of Confederate troops in ambushes and explosions while Angus went on publicly condemning the violence he was secretly directing, and Ailin Pasteur visited him regularly. By 2489 the Guild Wars had ended and Angus had amassed enough strength to declare the independence of Korhal, whipping the Korhalians into a patriotic frenzy and capturing all the Confederate outposts on the world. His declaration that the Confederacy no longer held any claim over Korhal won the respect of many other struggling colonies. When the Confederates pulled their forces and fleet from Korhal, Angus and the other leaders of the revolt believed they had won and celebrated their victory.

The Confederacy answered not with armies but with assassins, dispatching three ghosts, numbered 24601, 24506, and 24718, who easily bypassed Angus's security and killed him, his wife Katherine, and his young daughter Dorothy. Ghost No. 24601 personally cut off Angus's head, which was never recovered, the killers having taken it with them.

Legacy#

The murders of Angus, Katherine, and Dorothy drove Arcturus Mengsk onto a path of vengeance against the Terran Confederacy, and of the three deaths it was his father's that struck him hardest. Ailin Pasteur, whose life Angus had once saved, helped Arcturus become the next leader of the Rebellion of Korhal. The most consequential of the three ghosts was Sarah Kerrigan, Ghost No. 24601, who had cut off Angus's head; Arcturus tracked her down intending to kill her in revenge but, finding her amnesiac after an experiment, decided she would be more useful as a follower. Kerrigan later learned from Arcturus that she had murdered his father, and that he had forgiven her, and she became a trusted member of the Sons of Korhal before his betrayal of her on Tarsonis led to her infestation and her eventual rise as ruler of the Zerg Swarm. During his anti-Confederate movement, Arcturus was given a portrait of his father by his constituents to honor the crusade, and it was later mounted aboard the battlecruiser Bucephalus.

Character#

Angus Mengsk was a broad, powerfully built man with dark hair worn in a long ponytail streaked with silver, a face gnarled with age, and cold grey eyes. He was a ruthless but inspiring man, determined to push the Confederacy off Korhal by any means necessary. Though he cared for his family, he was not afraid to speak his mind to them, a bluntness that bred tension with his son Arcturus, and he had little patience for the security precautions of his chief of security, Achton Feld, often discarding them without warning.