Antiga Prime

Antiga Prime was a planet in the Antiga system, a terran fringe world settled during the expansion of the Terran Confederacy into the outer reaches of the Koprulu sector. It is best remembered as the staging ground of the Antigan Revolt, the uprising that Arcturus Mengsk and the Sons of Korhal hijacked and ended in a deliberate zerg massacre, an act that demonstrated the lengths Mengsk would go to in his war against the Confederacy.

A fringe world and its terrain#

In its distant past, Antiga Prime had oceans that were home to large aquatic creatures. By the time terrans colonized the world those oceans had vanished, leaving hard mudflats and low mesas covered in native scrub mixed with seeded purple blossoms, and the sea creatures survived only as fossils in the dried seabeds. The colony built an economy around viticulture and buffalo rearing, supplemented by resource-rich sites such as the Stickler Woods, where harvested materials slowly regenerated over time.

The world's standing within the Terran Confederacy was marked early by resistance. In 2478, the residents of Andasar City rebelled, expelling their militia and taking the local magistrate hostage while demanding an end to Confederate corruption. The response was annihilation: a Confederate troop under Lieutenant Nadaner killed the entire city of thousands. The memory of that reprisal shaped Antigan attitudes toward the Confederacy for the decades that followed.

The Antigan Revolt#

By December 2499, the Sons of Korhal had so weakened the Confederacy's grip on the fringe worlds that Antiga Prime was ready for open revolt. Aware of this, the Confederates stationed a large detachment of Alpha Squadron troops on the planet to hold it. After the evacuation and sterilization of Mar Sara, Arcturus Mengsk, Jim Raynor and their forces fled and relocated to the second moon of Antiga Prime, carrying data discs that held the stolen blueprints of a Confederate Psi-emitter.

Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan and Captain Raynor were sent down to free the colony and prove the Sons of Korhal's good intent to the Antigan people. Kerrigan infiltrated the Antigan command center and killed the Confederate officer in charge, and when a Confederate strike force advanced on their position it was destroyed by Kerrigan's and Raynor's forces. As this unfolded, elements of the zerg began to assault the planet, and the revolt swelled into a full-scale uprising across the Antigan colonies that threw the Confederates into panic.

As the zerg assault escalated, the battlecruiser Norad II was attacked by zerg fliers and crash-landed between colonies of the Surtur and Garm Broods. General Edmund Duke transmitted a priority-one distress call to Confederate headquarters; Mengsk intercepted it and sent Raynor to save Duke, whom Mengsk then convinced to defect to the Sons of Korhal. The Confederacy committed the Colonial Fleet and the Confederate Army to the rebellion, and three-way fighting raged for months between the rebels, the Confederates, and the zerg.

The Psi-emitter and the purification#

The turning point came when the Confederacy located the Sons of Korhal position and sent a large strike force to establish a base camp inside their defensive perimeter. Two hours later, Mengsk called a meeting and ordered Sarah Kerrigan to plant a Psi-emitter in the Confederate base camp. The device drew the zerg down on the unsuspecting Confederates, who were annihilated, and in the chaos the Sons of Korhal made their escape. A Koprulu Expeditionary Force then incinerated the planet from orbit, and the surviving Confederate forces were forced to retreat to Halcyon.

The decision to weaponize the zerg against a populated world was a defining moment for Arcturus Mengsk and for the Sons of Korhal cause, and it foreshadowed the far greater betrayal he would commit at Tarsonis not long after.

Antiga's return under the Dominion#

Sometime after its purification, Antiga Prime was repopulated and became a world of the Terran Dominion, though it remained a lower-population fringe world. The city of New Andasar was built and recolonized on the site of the old, and the planet's oceans returned.

Antiga Prime was one of the first targets of the separatist Defenders of Man. Using their contacts within the Dominion, the Defenders requisitioned the ghost agents Nova Terra and Stone to place devices around New Andasar described as "anti-zerg" measures. The devices were in fact psi-emitters, and they lured a large number of feral zerg to the planet. Nova and Stone attempted to retrieve a backup mission file they had failed to scrub at their operation's center, but were caught by Defenders personnel, and the planet was overrun by feral zerg. Admiral Matt Horner publicly reported the attack as an isolated incident the Dominion was working to address, while in a news segment with Donny Vermillion, Magistrate Grayson and General Carolina Davis debated the relief effort, with Davis defending the Dominion's response.

After gaining terrazine to undo her mind wipe, Nova Terra and her Covert Ops Crew returned to Antiga Prime to recover what memories they could. They fought through the feral zerg infesting New Andasar, where Reigel observed that destroying the zerg structures would stop them spawning specialist broods, and noted a plasma weapon locked near the city's docks. Nova recovered her memories of the original operation, her mission files, and the identity of the Defenders of Man's leader, General Carolina Davis.