Corbin Phash: the senator who defied the Dominion

Corbin Phash was a senator of the Terran Dominion, representing the mining world of Maltair IV. A former prospector, laborer, and SCV operator who rose to elected office, he spent years concealing the enormous psionic potential of his son, Colin Phash, from a government that conscripted every psychic child it could find. When a zerg invasion exposed the secret, Phash lost his seat, his reputation, and very nearly his life. He found asylum with the Umojan Protectorate and turned exile into a weapon, flooding Dominion worlds with propaganda that accused the Ghost Program of institutional child abuse and forced Arcturus Mengsk himself to reform it.

From the mines to the senate#

Before he ever held office, Corbin Phash worked with his hands. He had been a prospector, a laborer, and an SCV operator, and he never lost those skills even after Maltair IV sent him to the Dominion senate. That working past kept him close to his constituents. As senator he spent much of his time in and around Maltair IV's vespene gas mine rather than in distant halls of government.

His life bent around a single secret. At some point Phash learned that his son Colin was psychic, and he became determined to hide the boy's condition from a Dominion that fed such children into the Ghost Program. He went to extraordinary lengths to do it. Through long practice with his son, Phash taught himself to hide his thoughts from psychics and even to broadcast false thoughts in their place, though the trick worked poorly against a telepath of Colin's caliber.

The mine itself was not a peaceful posting. Phash had a strained relationship with Scott Dagget, a miner who resented the workers' low wages and the presence of the Dominion marines, under Captain Veers, that the senator had brought in for protection. Phash answered that he was working with a limited budget, that the nearest alternative supply of vespene gas was a long way off, and that the marines would cause no trouble. Shortly before the planetary elections, the marines proved their worth in the worst possible way. The zerg invaded the facility, and Phash took shelter underground with his son and the other survivors.

Buried secrets on Maltair IV#

Seventy hours into the siege, Colin sensed the zerg approaching and warned the survivors of an ambush. His father covered for him, claiming that young children simply had better hearing. The zerg attacked and killed a marine before being driven off, but the excuse had already begun to wear thin.

Dagget and a marine named Piett had had enough. Dagget taunted the senator openly, saying that Colin should have been made a ghost and that Phash had hidden him from the program. Phash lost his temper and swung at the miner, and the fight only confirmed the accusation. Dagget beat the senator into unconsciousness, tricking him into stepping onto a vespene leak. A medic told Captain Veers that Phash would live but would be out for a long time, and Veers made Dagget carry the man he had beaten. The group planned to reach a secure bunker about half a day's march away.

While Phash lay unconscious, Piett kidnapped Colin and tried to use the boy as bait against the zerg. Veers rescued the child before dying of his wounds, telling Colin to activate an emergency transmitter and hide. Colin dragged his unconscious father the rest of the way to the bunker, and when Phash finally woke, his son apologized for the bruises the dragging had caused. Of everyone trapped in the mine, only the two Phashes survived. Colin explained it simply: he could play hide and seek better than the others.

Fall from grace#

Dominion marines pulled the pair out of the ruins, and the story broke almost immediately. Phash moved fast. He sent Colin away with his aide, Andrew Ballenger, deliberately keeping himself ignorant of their destination so that no telepath could pull it from his mind. The Dominion's retribution followed the pattern he must have expected. His friends in the senate were pressured into turning against him, he lost his seat, and he was accused of child abuse and treason. Heavy media attention and genuine public support made a public arrest politically impossible, and in the space that hesitation created, Phash escaped Dominion territory. The courts convicted him of treason in absentia.

He made his way to the Umojan Protectorate and met personally with Minister Jorgensen to request asylum. The Umojans welcomed him, not least because his presence irritated the Dominion, and installed him in a wing of Orbital Platform UE3255, keeping visitors well away. When UNN reported that the Dominion had captured Colin and taken him for the Ghost Program, Phash was outraged. He vowed to expose the Ghost Academy and to push the truth out beyond Dominion control. Jorgensen knew people in the media who could help, and they came to include Michael Liberty, whose pirate broadcasts carried Phash's story deep into Dominion space.

The assassin on UE3255#

The Dominion answered his defiance with a killer. A Dominion ghost broke into Phash's wing of the platform and sealed it off behind them, cutting the exile off from Protectorate security. What followed was a duel between a trained assassin and a former mine worker with nothing but his wits and a lifetime of practice at deceiving telepaths.

Phash headed for the cargo bay intending to seal himself inside, knowing full well the ghost had probably read the thought already. He triggered the fire protocols to flood the deck with water and rigged an electrical trap in it, hiding his intentions behind a masked mind. The trap wounded the ghost, but the assassin kept coming. When Phash reached the cargo bay and found he could not seal the doors, he improvised again. He moved an SCV onto the platform's hull, set it drilling into the plating, and hid himself inside a sealed livestock crate, masking his mind so that it broadcast nothing but the looped thought "Drill. SCV." The ghost, reading exactly that, attacked the SCV and found it empty. As the assassin turned toward the crate, the drill broke through the hull, and the explosive decompression hurled both the ghost and Phash's crate into space. Protectorate security recovered the crate and the man inside it alive.

The Protectorate refused any military reprisal, pointing out that it had an orbital city and a planet to protect, but it doubled Phash's security.

The propaganda war#

Phash's real counterattack was fought on the airwaves. He produced what came to be called pirate holos, recordings in which he accused the Ghost Academy of child abuse and likened its practices to something the old Terran Confederacy would have condoned. He was careful with his aim; the holos kept a respectful tone toward Emperor Mengsk and the Dominion itself, isolating the Ghost Program as the target. The Umojans spread the recordings to dozens of Dominion worlds.

The campaign worked. Mengsk and Ghost Program director Kevin Bick instituted a series of reforms at the Ghost Academy to make the institution more humane, among them the training of ghosts in teams. Bick went on the media program The Dominion and You to rebut Phash's accusations, but the exile's videos remained popular, and the Dominion found itself locked in a public relations struggle with the Protectorate over the fate of its ghost recruits.

The spectres and a son regained#

Phash never stopped working to recover Colin. Allying with Project Shadowblade, he eventually secured his son's release from the Academy, and Colin returned to the Umojan Protectorate, where he was trained as a shadowguard, the youngest known member of that order.

In 2503 the renegade ghost Gabriel Tosh contacted Phash. Tosh had known about the situation with Colin and the Dominion, and he was raising a new spectre uprising against Mengsk. Phash opened a channel for him, and through it the Umojans supplied the spectres in return for assurances that Mengsk would be deposed. The uprising was ultimately put down, but Phash's part in it completed his transformation. The senator who had once defended the presence of Dominion marines in his own mine had become one of the Dominion's most persistent enemies, a man who fought an empire with a masked mind, a borrowed broadcast tower, and an SCV operator's practical cunning.