Battle of Char

The Battle of Char was fought during the Second Great War between a joint Terran Dominion and Raynor's Raiders force and the Zerg Swarm. It was instigated in secret by Prince Valerian Mengsk and executed on the ground by Commander Jim Raynor, and its purpose was to strike the primary hive on Char and use a xel'naga device to de-infest Sarah Kerrigan.

Imperial aspirations#

Long before the war, Prince Valerian Mengsk had developed an interest in xel'naga archaeology, an interest he kept hidden from both the public and his father, Emperor Arcturus Mengsk. To pursue it he privately sponsored the Moebius Foundation, which set about acquiring the components of a xel'naga device the prince believed could de-infest Sarah Kerrigan. He saw such a feat as proof of his worthiness to lead the Terran Dominion.

The scheme ran into trouble as war approached and the Dominion began acquiring alien artifacts for itself. Undeterred, Valerian turned to illegal means. Through the recently freed Tychus Findlay, the Foundation recruited the anti-Dominion rebel Jim Raynor and his Raiders to keep gathering the components. The Raiders, ignorant of the Foundation's true master, accepted for the income, and as the war broke out it became a race to collect the pieces before Kerrigan did. When all the components had been delivered, the prince revealed his hand, telling Raynor of his involvement and his plan and proposing the Raiders help carry it out. Raynor agreed, his personal stake in saving Kerrigan wagered correctly by the prince.

The fleet at Char#

The Queen of Blades had returned to Char while most of the Swarm remained dispersed across the sector from the hunt for the components, and the reduced zerg presence gave the planned invasion some hope. Valerian requisitioned half the Dominion Fleet, including the flagship Bucephalus and the services of General Horace Warfield, all without informing the emperor. Because the assembled device had only short range, Warfield planned a frontal assault to carry it close to the primary hive. Raynor judged the plan over-optimistic, but the general disdained the Raiders and would not reconsider.

Valerian informed his father of the offensive only after the fleet had arrived. Arcturus was impressed by his son's ambition but doubtful of his experience, and unpleasantly surprised by the alliance with Raynor. He allowed the attack to proceed, then kept the rest of the Dominion Fleet near the battle but clear of the fighting, content to let his two enemies weaken one another.

The landing#

Valerian had badly underestimated his opponent. The Queen of Blades did not wait to be struck, and zerg waves attacked the orbiting fleet while the terran commanders were still in conference. Battlecruisers were swarmed by mutalisks and raked by spore cannons from the surface, and the fleet answered with orbital bombardment as ground forces began landing into contested space.

The landing went as Raynor had warned. Most battlegroups were destroyed in mid-drop or overrun soon after touching down, survivors clinging on with little fire support, some forced underground into the more defensible tunnels while the zerg dragged prisoners away for infestation. Raynor and his Raiders came down relatively intact, established a base amid the disaster, and drew scattered Dominion forces to them. When the battlecruiser Helios was crippled and crashed nearby with Warfield aboard, Raynor and Tychus Findlay personally rescued the surrounded general. His animosity faded at once, and the wounded Warfield handed command to Raynor.

Push to the hive#

The foothold became Warfield Forward Base. Zerg strength was too great for a direct push, and the Queen of Blades was recalling her forces to Char from worlds conquered earlier in the war, so the window for victory was closing fast. There was time for only one secondary attack to weaken the defenses before the main assault. Unwilling to advance with the nydus network threatening his rear, Raynor chose to flood the subterranean tunnels with lava. Declining Warfield's offer of elite troops, he took only Tychus Findlay, Egon Stetmann, and Rory Swann to plant seismic charges, and the squad escaped as the last charge detonated and the lava poured in.

Attention then turned to the air. Most of the zerg air support was based on the orbital platforms of Char Aleph, whose nests lay too deep for nuclear weapons, so the terrans instead destroyed coolant towers to force a meltdown that wrecked the platforms. The attack succeeded despite the arrival of a zerg battle group built around a leviathan, and with the mutalisks and brood lords broken the terrans took air superiority.

The de-infestation#

The terrans moved quickly on the main hive. Warfield delivered the fully assembled xel'naga device to Raynor, who rallied his exhausted troops before it. The device was set at the base of the hive and defended while it charged. The Queen of Blades joined the counterattack herself to seize it, impressed but undeterred by its energy nova, yet the terrans held the line and the device's full discharge obliterated the zerg from the area.

Raynor and Findlay led a squad into the hive and found a de-infested Sarah Kerrigan, restored to human form. Findlay drew on her, revealing that Emperor Mengsk had promised him his freedom in exchange for her death, but Raynor stopped and killed him. The fleet remained under attack and now-feral zerg plagued the group as Kerrigan was retrieved and they awaited evacuation.

Aftermath#

Raynor's Raiders and Prince Valerian Mengsk refused to surrender Kerrigan to Emperor Arcturus Mengsk for execution. The Raiders and the prince fled Char with the survivors of the invasion fleet, pursued by the Dominion armada, and reached the Umojan Protectorate. Warfield remained behind to purge the zerg that had survived the device.

The Zerg Swarm was broken by the Queen of Blades' defeat. Most of the forces streaming back to Char from earlier conquests turned on each other, and the few survivors fell under the control of broodmothers such as Zagara. Alexei Stukov later speculated that the psionic energy released by Kerrigan's de-infestation had been collected by nearby hybrid and used to resurrect Amon. Studying the keystone afterward, Phasesmith Karax discovered that the device had been modified by Narud to draw the void energies out of the Queen of Blades, energies that had been stored within it and later spent to revive Amon.