Battle of Antiga Prime: the uprising that broke the Confederacy

The Battle of Antiga Prime was the campaign fought on the Confederate colony world of Antiga Prime during the Great War, in which the Sons of Korhal under Arcturus Mengsk backed a colonial uprising against the Terran Confederacy. The fighting drew in the Confederate Alpha Squadron under General Edmund Duke, and then the zerg and the protoss, and ended with Alpha Squadron defecting to the rebels and the world purified from orbit. The campaign followed the fall of Mar Sara and gave the Sons of Korhal the momentum that carried them on to the Confederate capital.

Background#

By the closing years of the Great War the Sons of Korhal, the insurgent movement led by Arcturus Mengsk against the Terran Confederacy, had been driven from the Sara System as the zerg overran one Confederate colony after another. On Mar Sara, Mengsk's movement had rescued Jim Raynor from a Confederate prison ship and gained the support of the local colonists where the Confederacy had abandoned them. When the protoss prepared to scour Mar Sara of all life, the Sons of Korhal fled to the colony world of Antiga Prime, and thirteen hours later the protoss purified the world they had left behind.

Antiga Prime carried its own history of resistance to Confederate rule. The colonists had a grievance against the corruption and economic repression that drove dissent across the Confederate worlds, and the planet was already restless when the rebels arrived. The Sons of Korhal moved to turn that unrest into open revolt.

The revolution#

After the loss of Mar Sara, the Sons of Korhal fleet first engaged General Edmund Duke's forces at the Battle of Brontes, a large fleet skirmish that left a wide field of debris. The rebels then moved to Antiga Prime's second moon to support the colonial revolt directly. The Confederacy had anticipated a move and had taken control of the primary Antigan command center and a nearby road, while the Sons of Korhal detected a stealthy zerg presence on the world.

Mengsk dispatched Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan, a ghost, together with Captain Jim Raynor and the renegade reporter Michael Liberty, with additional troops. Raynor's forces destroyed the defenses around the captured command center, and Kerrigan slipped inside, killing the Alpha Squadron garrison and the Confederate officer in command. Liberty followed her in and broadcast the event, then aired pro-Mengsk propaganda across the colony. Alpha Squadron answered with a strike force against the combined Sons of Korhal and Antigan position, but the coalition not only beat back the attack but destroyed the nearby Confederate base, throwing the Confederates on the planet into panic.

The downing of the Norad II and Duke's defection#

During the fighting the zerg shot down Alpha Squadron's flagship, the Norad II, stranding General Edmund Duke and his command. Duke was forced to call for help, and Arcturus Mengsk, seeing his opportunity, ordered Captain Jim Raynor to rescue him. The Sons of Korhal linked up with nearby Alpha Squadron forces and the joint operation freed Duke from the zerg. Mengsk then persuaded the general to switch sides and bring his squadron with him.

Duke's defection was a heavy blow to the Confederacy. He was a member of the Old Families, the economic leaders of the Confederacy, and his desertion deepened their fear of domestic collapse. Some of the families began quietly evacuating their children from the capital of Tarsonis to Tyrador IX, disguising the relocations as vacations. The Confederacy responded to the revolt by imposing a massive blockade on Antiga Prime using elements of the Colonial Fleet and Confederate Army, and by flooding the colony with propaganda that cast the rebels as users of mind-control drugs and Duke as a "mentally reprogrammed zombie." The Sons of Korhal used the lull to fully integrate Alpha Squadron into their forces.

The fall of Antiga Prime#

With the Confederate blockade in place and a Delta Squadron attack pressing the rebels, the Sons of Korhal built a psi emitter from the weapons technology stolen earlier at the Jacobs Installation, a device that could draw the zerg from a considerable distance. Sarah Kerrigan was ordered to carry the emitter into the Confederate base threatening the rebel position, and she did so despite interference from the zerg.

Masses of zerg traveled to Antiga Prime from light years away, falling on the Confederate positions and shattering the blockade. The Confederates held their ground rather than retreat, and in doing so allowed the Sons of Korhal to slip away. The protoss then arrived, briefly fighting the zerg on the ground alongside Jim Raynor during a mission to rescue colonists before surrounding the world and purifying it, sterilizing all life on the surface.

Aftermath#

The revolution on Antiga Prime gave the Sons of Korhal momentum that became impossible to reverse. The campaign secured the defection of Alpha Squadron and validated the effectiveness of the psi emitter as a weapon, two results that Arcturus Mengsk carried directly into his next move. Thus strengthened, he planned a strike on Tarsonis itself to destroy the heart of Confederate power, keeping the full nature of the plan secret from subordinates such as Sarah Kerrigan and Jim Raynor. The Confederacy, for its part, shifted its forces to Halcyon, a point between Antiga Prime and Tarsonis, in an effort to halt the rebel and zerg advance, and revised its propaganda to claim that Mengsk had struck and then broken a deal with the aliens.