Cole Hickson

Cole Hickson was a terran outlaw and career soldier who bore scars on the left side of his face from a shrapnel injury. A skilled sniper who frequently took a leadership role in the mercenary squad known as the War Pigs, he acknowledged his own sociopathic tendencies and considered himself a failure at everything except soldiering. His life was bound to that of Jim Raynor, whose sanity he saved during the Guild Wars and whom he was later programmed, against his will, to assassinate.

Early life and the Guild Wars#

Cole Hickson and his sister grew up under a drunk and abusive father. At fourteen he ran away from home and lived a poor existence until he enlisted in the military, where he found the one thing he believed he was not a failure at. He racked up many confirmed kills and earned the nickname "Dapper Death."

In 2488, during the Guild Wars, Hickson was held at Kel-Morian Internment Camp-36 on Turaxis II, where he was tortured. He resisted by focusing on pleasant memories, a technique he called dislocation. Two weeks into his imprisonment, his captors threw a soldier from another unit, Jim Raynor, into his cell, repeatedly questioning Raynor about neural resocialization under torture. When they put the same questions to Hickson, he refused to say a word. He ignored Raynor at first, but came to believe Raynor was a good and decent person, unlike himself, and decided he could redeem himself by teaching Raynor how to resist. The two were suspended on spokes before the other prisoners before being rescued by Raynor's Special Tactics and Missions Platoon. Raynor credited Hickson with saving his sanity and possibly his life, and resolved to thank him properly.

Chau Sara and the War Pigs#

During the zerg invasion of Los Andares on Chau Sara, Hickson was a prisoner at Los Andares Prison. When a rescue team arrived to recover guards including Lars Trakken, the wounded Trakken was attacked by Hickson, who stole his weapon and uniform and escaped in his place while Trakken was left to die at the hands of the zerg. Trakken survived and became Hickson's enemy, and the experience left Hickson mentally scarred with recurring flashbacks.

Still a prisoner and serving time on death row, Hickson was recruited into the War Pigs, a program that used non-resocialized prisoners as throwaway troops. By 2500 he had suffered the shrapnel injury that permanently scarred the left side of his face and was recovering in a hospital in the Redstone system while the rest of the squad fought at the Battle of Atticus Minor. That mission failed, and the team was burned by their handler, Tamsen Cauley. Suspicious of teammate Brock Valevoss, the War Pigs took extra precautions for a follow-up job on Tyrador VIII, with Hickson pretending to be too ill to attend while in fact taking up a sniper position. When Cerberus Program troops attacked, his sniping played a significant role in the squad's escape, after which the group agreed to scatter and break contact.

Cauley's prisoner and the new War Pigs#

In 2502, Tamsen Cauley met Hickson, incarcerated at New Folsom Prison, and offered him his freedom and a clean record if he would reassemble the War Pigs for a job: the assassination of Jim Raynor. To ensure his loyalty, Cauley subjected him to an experimental form of neural resocialization buried in his subconscious, designed to activate on a programmed prompt and turn him against Raynor and the War Pigs. The conditioning caused Hickson to behave strangely, raising suspicion among teammates Turfa Dei and Nuura Joss.

Released, Hickson recruited Turfa Dei first and then rebuilt the rest of the team. He was plagued by a lack of focus brought on by flashbacks to the zerg invasion of Los Andares, sometimes forgetting basic tactics, and his apparent friendliness with Cauley deepened the team's distrust. Acting on intelligence that Raynor might be in the area, Hickson took part in a mission on Moria, rescuing teammate Vin Iggins when his vehicle was damaged during a Kel-Morian Combine attack. The War Pigs were captured by the pirate band known as the Screaming Skulls while trying to repair their ship, the General Lee, but escaped through a distraction, with Hickson again rescuing Iggins despite his flashbacks slowing his reactions.

A xel'naga artifact smuggled aboard the General Lee began to affect the minds of the crew, leaving Hickson with the sense that he was trying to remember something important and a persistent headache, while it struck Turfa Dei and Iggins harder still. The squad's pursuit of Raynor through the fixer Denny Houston led to violence: Iggins finally snapped and shot Houston, and Houston was killed before he could reveal Raynor's location, while three Dark Templar boarded the ship to reclaim the artifact and warned the War Pigs not to harm Raynor.

The betrayal and the broken conditioning#

Hickson tracked Raynor to Urona Sigma using information from Houston's files. There he became obsessed with fine-tuning his armor and watching the long-range sensors, going seventy-two hours without sleep, behavior that prompted Nuura Joss to investigate him. When Raynor's Raiders dropships were spotted, Hickson led the team down to the surface, where they were surrounded by zerg and forced to leap from a cliff into water to escape before locating the Raiders' hidden base.

Raynor was ready for them and forced their surrender, trusting Hickson as an old friend. As Hickson drew a concealed weapon, Joss received a transmission revealing his resocialization, but she could not warn the squad in time. Hickson leveled his pistol at Raynor's face, prompting a standoff, and Raynor recognized the resocialization from Hickson's expression. A zerg invasion interrupted them, and Hickson fled, only to ambush Raynor again on the surface. Raynor reminded him of dislocation, the technique Hickson had once taught him, and Hickson screamed in agony and collapsed as he fought the conditioning.

As a protoss fleet began the purification of the planet, Lars Trakken descended with a number of Cerberus heavies and offered to spare the War Pigs if they handed Hickson over. Trakken's hatred distracted him long enough for Raynor and the War Pigs to surprise his troops, and Hickson, awaking and admitting he no longer recognized Trakken, grappled with his old enemy. Teammate Romy Pyrius shot Trakken and left him to the zerglings, then pulled Hickson to safety before being shot from behind by a Cerberus heavy and killed. The War Pigs stole Trakken's dropship and escaped, and Hickson, holding Cauley responsible for Pyrius' death, pledged revenge, with the rest of the squad agreeing to a plan they knew was suicidal.

Character#

Hickson was very strong-willed and acknowledged his own sociopathic tendencies, believing himself a failure at everything except being a soldier. He sometimes wore red CMC armor and demonstrated clear skill as a sniper and a natural leadership role within the War Pigs. His childhood and the trauma of the Los Andares invasion left him with dark secrets and recurring flashbacks that could endanger his teammates, but his loyalty to Raynor, rooted in their shared imprisonment during the Guild Wars, proved strong enough in the end to help him resist the conditioning meant to make him a killer.