Arcturus Mengsk

Arcturus Mengsk was a terran from Korhal who led the Sons of Korhal and orchestrated the downfall of the Terran Confederacy during the Great War. He ruled the Confederacy's successor state, the Terran Dominion, as Emperor Arcturus Mengsk I until his death during the Second Great War. The son of Korhal senator Angus Mengsk, he turned a personal crusade for vengeance into the conquest of an entire sector, and his ruthlessness toward both Sarah Kerrigan and Jim Raynor created the enemies who would eventually destroy him.

A son of Korhal#

Arcturus was born to Angus Mengsk, a Confederate senator for Korhal and Old Family member, and to Katherine Mengsk. Even as a youth he lacked empathy, a trait noticed by perceptive observers such as the family's head of security, Achton Feld. He got along well with his mother and sister Dorothy but clashed with his father, who wanted Arcturus to take up the cause of a Korhal free from the Confederacy. Arcturus instead wished to be his own man and make his own fortune as a prospector among the stars.

He attended the prestigious Styrling Academy, where his strong leadership and distaste for authority figures repeatedly saw him thrown out, though he remained. When he learned of Angus's secret plans for an armed struggle against the Confederacy, Arcturus could not agree with aims that would involve killing people, and the rift between them widened. He enlisted in the Confederate Marine Corps on the very morning his father gave an anti-Confederate speech in the Korhal Senate, leaving over his mother's protests.

Confederate officer and revolutionary#

Mengsk's early career in the Corps was successful, his grasp of tactics and his gift for "making the impossible sound plausible" carrying him up the ranks. He came to dislike the heavy-handed nature of the Confederacy and to miss his family, realizing there was much sense in his father's stand. He earned combat experience against Kel-Morian mining operations, formed a lasting camaraderie with Horace Warfield, and rose to colonel during the Guild Wars, but he no longer believed in the Confederate cause and resigned shortly before the war ended.

Mengsk turned to prospecting and struck a huge lode of high-quality minerals just as he learned, on a visit to Umoja, that he had a seven-year-old son, Valerian. During the same visit came word from Korhal that the Confederates had killed his father, mother, and sister despite their security. Consumed by vengeance, Mengsk accepted leadership of the Rebellion of Korhal, sent Valerian and his mother into hiding, and began rallying the militant groups that had followed Angus. When the Confederacy launched a thousand nuclear missiles at Korhal, killing millions, Mengsk was not on the planet. The survivors formed the Sons of Korhal under his leadership, pledging to overthrow the Confederacy. The first of his raids, against the Fujita Facility on Vyctor 5, was where he discovered the ghost Sarah Kerrigan.

The fall of the Confederacy#

Mengsk built the Sons of Korhal into the sector's most wanted rebellion, winning victories while broadcasting pirate transmissions condemning the Old Families. When the zerg appeared on the fringe worlds, he positioned himself as the only force willing to face them, endearing himself to the colonists of Mar Sara and rescuing the marshal Jim Raynor from a Confederate prison ship. From the Jacobs Installation data his forces decoded the designs for the Transplanar Psionic Waveform Emitter, the psi-emitter that would prove central to his strategy.

On Antiga Prime, Mengsk tested the emitter, luring the zerg to break a Confederate blockade despite Kerrigan's protests. He then turned on Tarsonis, the Confederate capital. Drawing on General Edmund Duke's knowledge of the planet's defenses, Mengsk's forces broke through and planted psi-emitters that summoned billions of zerg, destroying the Confederacy at the cost of countless lives. When the protoss arrived sooner than expected, he sent Kerrigan to hold the zerg hive against them, then ordered the fleet to disengage and abandon her, both because of her political unreliability and because she had been the ghost who killed his father. Raynor and his men left in disgust to become Raynor's Raiders.

Emperor of the Dominion#

With the Confederacy fallen, most of its survivors and squadrons were conscripted into Mengsk's forces, giving him military supremacy. The Sons of Korhal became the Terran Dominion, Mengsk crowned himself Emperor, and Korhal became his throne world, uniting the terran colonies under one rule for the first time. He fortified Augustgrad into the most heavily defended city in Dominion space and worked to bring the Kel-Morian Combine and Umojan Protectorate back into the fold.

During the Brood War, the United Earth Directorate invaded and destroyed Augustgrad, nearly capturing Mengsk before Raynor rescued him at Kerrigan's urging. He entered a bitter, temporary alliance with Kerrigan to retake Korhal from the UED, only for her to turn on him and kill Duke. Through cunning, intrigue, and brute force, Mengsk held the Dominion together in the years that followed, using oratory and media control to bury his past atrocities. He reconciled with Valerian after the death of Juliana Pasteur, named his son his heir, and oversaw dark projects including the training of the ghost Nova Terra, the creation of spectres, and a hybrid breeding program.

Downfall#

As the Second Great War approached, Mengsk grew obsessed with alien artifacts and authorized hybrid creation using technology beyond terran construction. He approached the convict Tychus Findlay with an offer of freedom in exchange for killing Kerrigan, sealing him in armor that would kill him if he disobeyed. When Valerian and Raynor attacked Char to deinfest the Queen of Blades, Mengsk hid half his fleet nearby to claim the victory, but Raynor saved Kerrigan by killing Findlay.

The exposure of Mengsk's hand in the fall of Tarsonis, broadcast across the Dominion by Raynor's Raiders, incited riots and shattered his public image. After faking Raynor's death and declaring victory over the leaderless Swarm, Mengsk enacted a brutal regime of civil oppression, but Kerrigan, spurred by the lie, moved to retake the Swarm and avenge Raynor. The Swarm converged on Korhal, breaking through the orbital defenses and the Psi destroyer Mengsk deployed. Kerrigan cut through his palace guard and confronted him in his office. He used the Keystone to disable her and prepared to kill her, but Raynor appeared, threw him across the room, and destroyed the remote. Pinned to the wall and grievously wounded, Mengsk told Kerrigan he had made her a monster, and she answered that he had made monsters of everyone before killing him with a surge of psionic energy. He was succeeded by Valerian, whose reforms sought to undo the worst of his father's rule, though Mengsk's shadow lingered over the Dominion for years.