Caleb: the last salvager of the Magpie

Caleb was a young, inexperienced terran salvager and engineer from a backwater farm world. Recruited by his childhood friend Kyra onto the Kel-Morian Combine scavenger vessel Magpie sometime after the Second Great War, he took part in an illegal salvage of a derelict protoss ship in Terran Dominion space, unaware that the wreck was a prison ship carrying a Nerazim murderess. As the only crewman she left alive, Caleb became her thrall, forced to infiltrate an Umojan Protectorate munitions factory in search of an experimental anti protoss weapon. When she finally seized the weapon and summoned the Tal'darim Death Fleet, Caleb turned on her, sending their ship into a Tal'darim mothership and destroying the weapon, the Nerazim, and himself.

Early Life#

Caleb was born and raised on a backwater farm world, where he worked his father's farm. He grew up alongside his childhood best friend Kyra, and as children the two always talked about the adventure they would one day share. That adventure never came for Caleb. Years later Kyra left the planet to chase it on her own while he stayed put, turning to engineering and machinery as a hobby. He became proficient with machines, a talent that would later let him puzzle out the basics of even protoss technology, though nothing in his quiet upbringing prepared him for the politics and dangers of the wider Koprulu sector.

The Magpie and the Derelict#

Sometime after the Second Great War, Kyra contacted Caleb with an offer: a position aboard the Kel-Morian Combine scavenger vessel Magpie, replacing its former engineer, Jonas. Caleb accepted and came under the command of Captain Nero Theban, who told him the job was the salvage of a protoss ship drifting in Terran Dominion space, a risky and illegal operation. Caleb volunteered for the boarding party despite his nerves. Aboard the derelict he struggled with his suit and drew the ire of the veteran scavenger Orry, but he followed Theban through the wreck, talking over the war between the protoss and the zerg and the value of protoss technology.

Theban directed Caleb to the ship's gunnery power cell, ordering him to salvage it for the crew rather than sell it. Unfamiliar with protoss engineering, Caleb could only guess at the layout, but he eventually found the power conduit, disconnected it, and secured it in a protoss cube. It was on the way out that the crew learned they were not alone. An unseen attacker began picking off scavengers one by one. Theban ordered a retreat to the Magpie, and when Gene raged against abandoning crewmates, Caleb suggested the survivors arm themselves before pressing on. The remnant of the crew fought their way back only to find their own airlock sealed against them, and after forcing a manual override and taking up weapons, they found the bridge locked as well. Theban set Caleb to releasing the docking clamps, but before he could finish, footsteps closed in and a flash grenade blinded the party.

Prisoners of the Dominion#

Caleb came to surrounded by Terran Dominion marines under Captain Barlow, who declared the scavengers under arrest for violating the treaty between the Dominion and the Daelaam. After a brief firefight Theban surrendered, and Barlow pulled Caleb from his hiding place behind the crates, telling him to cooperate and spare everyone trouble. Over his crewmates' protests he agreed and was taken aboard the Dominion Liberator. Under interrogation Caleb tried to warn Barlow of the hidden attacker that had slaughtered the salvage teams, and the warning was soon confirmed: the marine Davis arrived with data recovered from the derelict showing it had been a prison ship harboring a Nerazim murderer, its logs ending before they explained how the vessel became a drifting wreck. Barlow resolved to destroy both the protoss ship and the Magpie, and sent Caleb back to the cells.

His crewmates jeered at him as a traitor, but when the guard opened the cell door Caleb turned on the man and knocked him down, and the scavengers rushed out and killed him. The freed crew stormed the bridge, though not before Davis fired the Liberator's Concord cannon, annihilating the protoss derelict and the Magpie together. Kyra shot Barlow and beat her to death in a fury that left Caleb staring at a stranger where his oldest friend had been. Theban moved to claim the warship, but a protoss voice spoke through the corpses of the dead marines, promising that all of them would soon be dead. The captain's composure broke. He had the corpses shot, then killed the crewwoman Grace during an exchange over United Earth Directorate loyalties. Caleb urged him to seal the bridge and vent the ship, but Theban wanted to kill the Nerazim with his own hands. He found Gene dead instead, and moments later the Nerazim decapitated him.

Caleb and Kyra ran for the escape pods and found them already jettisoned. The Nerazim then appeared and told the pair she needed one of them alive to pilot the ship. Kyra volunteered herself, and Caleb, absorbing the betrayal, remembered how happy they had been when she recruited him and told her she should be the one to live. The Nerazim ordered Kyra to kill him, then drove her warp blade through Kyra as she raised her weapon. Caleb was left gripping the corpse of his oldest friend before his new master guided him to the cockpit and the stolen warship sped away.

Thrall at Spearpoint Base#

As Caleb piloted the Liberator through warp space, the Nerazim explained what she had taken from the mind of one of his crewmates: the words "Umojan job," connected to some kind of great power that she intended to claim. Caleb truthfully protested that he was too new to the crew to know of any such job, but he mined the warship's files for what information he could. The trail led him onto a transport bound for the planet Aeneas, where a friendly young girl named Dahlia approached him. Her father, Frank, offered the solitary young man help if he ever needed it, and the two men went to work together at Spearpoint Base, an Umojan munitions factory whose foreman said its weapons were being built against a potential xenos invasion.

Caleb buried himself in work and guilt, haunted in his nightmares by the taunts of the Magpie's dead. He slipped out of the base at night to report to the Nerazim, who approved of his progress in hunting the hidden laboratory and stole the device he had used to disable a laser gate so that he could not flee. In daylight he slowly thawed, sharing meals with Frank, dinners with Dahlia, and drinks with coworkers like Russell and Ida Briggs. The peace did not last. Russell was found with his stomach torn open, and when the shift manager Jace accused Caleb of being a spy, the Nerazim later left Jace's corpse on Caleb's bed as a warning that his time was running short. Caleb incinerated the body in the base's waste disposal and carried the secret alone, even as Briggs, who knew his history from his file and had grown fond of him, told him of a secret weapon that many powers in the sector wanted, being built at the base.

Caleb finally traced the hidden laboratory to a site beside the base's school farm. Hoping to end the killings without betraying himself, he left an anonymous note reading "killer is protoss outside of base," and Umojan shadowguard agents moved against the Nerazim.

The Fall of Spearpoint Base#

The plan backfired. The Nerazim survived the shadowguard attack and burst in on Caleb, killing his friend George and then Frank, who died believing Caleb had betrayed him. Choking Caleb, she demanded to know if he had sent the shadowguard, and he survived on a technical truth, that he had never "told" anyone. He set the bodies alight as a distraction and followed her into the laboratory, where she carved through the security teams. Inside, the Umojan scientist Dr. Robertson ambushed them with a large experimental anti protoss weapon. Caleb took up a laser pistol that Robertson warned would never harm the Nerazim, and only too late did she realize he meant it for her. He shot the scientist in the chest, and his master praised him for protecting her.

The Nerazim claimed the experimental weapon and forced Caleb to summon the Tal'darim Death Fleet to Aeneas. Fleeing the laboratory to secure a ship, Caleb ran into Briggs, who realized from how much he knew of the protoss that he had been working with the killer. He told her he had never had a choice, that when he had tried to die for his companions the Nerazim had killed them instead, and a horrified Briggs let him go. The Death Fleet arrived and annihilated Spearpoint Base and its defenses while Caleb and the Nerazim escaped. She promised that with the weapon and its power source she would destroy her enemies, and that he would help her do it.

Caleb decided otherwise. He fired his laser pistol into the ship's console, and when the Nerazim sliced off his arm he only laughed, bleeding on the deck, telling her that the pistol had killed her after all in spite of Robertson's warning. The crippled ship careened into a Tal'darim mothership and exploded, consuming both vessels, the anti protoss weapon, the Nerazim, and Caleb himself.

Personality#

Caleb was kind, curious, and naive about the politics of the sector, a competent machinist who could improvise plans under pressure even in alien surroundings. He cared deeply for his friends, and the deaths of the Magpie's crew and Kyra's betrayal left him closed off and haunted. He obeyed the Nerazim in the belief that his service protected others, but the destruction of Spearpoint Base broke that illusion, and he chose to end her at the cost of his own life.