Cerberus Program

The Cerberus Program was a Terran Confederacy black ops unit formed from the late Cerberus Recon Squad. Led by the Confederate bureaucrat Tamsen Cauley, it relied on neurally resocialized soldiers who were less innovative but far more obedient than the outlaw units the Confederacy had previously used. When the Confederacy fell, Cauley defected to Arcturus Mengsk and carried the program into the Terran Dominion, where its scientists pioneered the enslavement of zerg broods. After Mengsk's death the program abandoned the Dominion and went underground, surviving as a renegade outfit that sold engineered, mind-controlled zerg to wealthy clients. It took its name from the three-headed hound of Hades. (StarCraft; StarCraft (WildStorm comic); StarCraft II War Chest)

Fall of the Confederacy#

The Cerberus Program was reborn under the command of Tamsen Cauley. It made use of neurally resocialized soldiers, a process that left them less innovative but markedly more obedient than the "throw-away" outlaw bands the Confederacy had relied upon, such as the War Pigs. When the War Pigs became a liability to Cauley, he resolved to replace them with the new program. He lured them to Tyrador VIII, where Cerberus marines and goliaths attempted to kill them, but the War Pigs destroyed all their attackers and escaped, vowing afterward to separate and hide. (StarCraft (WildStorm comic))

Cauley's ascent and the hunt for the War Pigs#

As the Confederacy's defeat became clear, Senator Tamsen Cauley began assembling a new, upgraded Cerberus Program in anticipation of the change in regime. He soon became a Terran Dominion official, meeting with Arcturus Mengsk himself, and built a power base at the Dominion Internal Security Division stocked with resocialized Cerberus troops he regarded as his own rather than the Dominion's. His intent was to use them to eliminate the War Pigs once they had carried out the task he had hired them for, the assassination of Jim Raynor. (StarCraft (WildStorm comic))

Cerberus troops under Lars Trakken, who had not himself been resocialized, tracked the War Pigs to Moria, aggressively interrogating the Kel-Morian Combine and learning the outlaws had been asking after Raynor. Trakken's remarks about Cole Hickson aroused Cauley's suspicion and prompted an investigation. Trakken's forces followed the War Pigs to Urona Sigma, where, unable to master his personal hatred of Hickson and disregarding Cauley's instructions, he used a cloaked Wraith to attack the vessel General Lee and later led a squad to the surface to demand Hickson's surrender. The demand was a ruse exploited by the War Pigs and Raynor, who seized Trakken's dropship. In the ensuing fight the zerg emerged onto the battlefield, and the Cerberus troops were killed. (StarCraft (WildStorm comic))

The Dogs of War#

According to the lore of StarCraft II's co-op skins, during the reign of Arcturus Mengsk the most talented scientists of the Cerberus Program turned to the enslavement of the zerg. Harvesting specimens from the isolated Maguro Brood, beginning with its zerglings, they surgically modified the creatures' nervous systems to create the Dogs of War, enslaved zerg that could be controlled by the Terran Dominion. To study mutalisk behaviour the program built large aviaries, facilities that saw a marked rise in staff disappearances, while Dr. Rudolfo Subsourian worked to secure the control apparatuses of enthralled hydralisks and ultralisks at the cost of many interns. (StarCraft II Co-op Missions)

Renegades and the Battle of Tyrador IX#

In the lore of StarCraft II's War Chest skins, the Cerberus Program abandoned the Terran Dominion after the death of Arcturus Mengsk and went underground, forced to sell its services to the highest bidder to survive. Its research into neural resocialization was redirected toward the zerg, redesigning the nervous systems of various breeds so that they could be driven by a single terran operator. The work drew very wealthy investors who funded ever more extravagant projects, including the reengineering of individual banelings, and the outfit reinforced its enslaved creatures with titanium compounds and blades and outfitted them with void sensors, luminescent eyes, and energy beacons. (StarCraft II War Chest)

Sometime after the Defenders of Man Insurgency, Cerberus was hired by rival interests to invade the resort world of Tyrador IX as an act of corporate sabotage. Its controlled zerg blindsided the ill-equipped Knights of Tyrador and took out much of the planet's air defenses in the first wave, bringing the defenders of the city of New Canaan to the brink of ruin. A third faction then intervened as the Ihan-rii protoss ambushed the Cerberus assault, and under the combined Knights and Ihan-rii counterattack the Cerberus zerg were pushed back. Unable to abandon the invasion because it needed real-world metrics to secure its funding agreements, Cerberus infiltrated the lava tubes beneath the planet, seeded them with hatcheries, tapped the Knights' vespene reservoirs, and spawned a new brood whose mutalisks took on the echolocative traits of the local gigabats. Baneling nests, lurker dens, spine and spore crawlers, and a nydus network were laid throughout the tunnels in preparation for an inevitable second invasion. (StarCraft II War Chest)