Egon Stetmann

Egon Stetmann was the chief science advisor of Raynor's Raiders during the Second Great War, a young and eager researcher whose work aboard the Hyperion covered protoss and zerg materials and, eventually, the xel'naga artifacts gathered by the rebels. Recruited by Jim Raynor and Matt Horner after they rescued him from a public execution at Deadman's Port, Stetmann served the Raiders faithfully before being stranded for years on the world of Bel'Shir, where long exposure to terrazine gas wrecked his sanity and left him building a mechanical army he called the Mecha Swarm.

From Dominion idealist to fugitive#

Stetmann began his scientific career at a Terran Dominion research facility on Tyrador III, one of many young and idealistic recruits who believed they were working to build a better future. Alongside a colleague named Isabella Yorin, he was tasked with creating a portable force field of ionized gas, a terran analogue to the protoss plasma shield but without a psi-field generator. Stetmann believed the technology could have civilian applications, and the prototype was completed within a few months. The success earned him a higher security clearance, and with it the discovery that the force field was intended for a military cyborg program whose test subjects were conscripted unwillingly from New Folsom Prison and subjected to horrific surgery.

Appalled, Stetmann could not win the support of his colleagues, who were unwilling to risk their careers and preferred to ignore the implications of the wider program by concentrating only on their own narrow parts. He designed a computer virus to sabotage the facility, stole the force field prototype, and triggered the virus, purging all data from the central computer while freed test subjects, guards, and security turrets fought one another. Yorin seized control of the final blast door to stop him from escaping, but rather than harm his former colleague, Stetmann overloaded the prototype to generate an electromagnetic pulse that distracted her and unlocked the door.

The fugitive smuggled himself off Tyrador III aboard a merchant ship and hid for several months at the criminal hive of Deadman's Port, selling tech upgrades to make a living. His talents were quickly noticed by the local criminal groups, but he refused to implant tracking devices into people's brains for them, and his defiance made him a hunted man. Forced to hide and scavenge among the refuse of the city's starport, he was a broken man by the time he was finally caught.

Recruitment by Raynor's Raiders#

The criminals of Deadman's Port intended to make an example of Stetmann with a public execution. Raynor's Raiders happened to be resupplying at the port at the time, and Commander Jim Raynor and Captain Matt Horner passed by the imminent execution. Rather than watch an innocent man murdered, they intervened and rescued him. Sympathetic when he heard of the scientist's escape from Tyrador, Raynor recruited Stetmann as the Raiders' chief science advisor.

When the Second Great War began, the Hyperion's research lab was inoperable, a fact Stetmann frequently reminded Raynor of until it was repaired. Once working, he turned to protoss and zerg materials and their potential applications, keeping a log of his progress. Through an arrangement with the Moebius Foundation brokered by Tychus Findlay, xel'naga artifacts were added to his work. When it emerged that these artifacts formed a greater whole capable of making Sarah Kerrigan human again, Stetmann remarked that it was unlikely the Raiders' retrieval of the devices was mere coincidence.

For the operation to cripple the nydus network on Char, Raynor took Stetmann along with his elite strike force as a medic, where the scientist offered advice on dealing with the various zerg strains. After Kerrigan was deinfested and rescued from Char, Raynor brought her to Stetmann, who admitted he lacked the knowledge even to begin treating her failing condition.

Flashpoint and the flight from Char#

As Raynor's Raiders and Dominion renegades loyal to Valerian Mengsk fled the Dominion fleet sent by Arcturus Mengsk to retrieve Kerrigan, Stetmann went with the rebels. They eventually reached a Moebius Foundation base named Space Station Prometheus, where Doctor Chantal de Vries offered Stetmann a tour, unrestricted access, lavish compliments, and a job with greater pay than the Raiders provided. The friendship was a feint. De Vries soon held him at gunpoint and forced him to speak into a recorder to falsify adjutant logs, telling him that Doctor Emil Narud wanted him alive before knocking him unconscious.

Stetmann awoke bound in a locked room. He was freed by Kerrigan, who had broken out of her own lab, and the two attempted to escape together, encountering hybrid along the way. Kerrigan fought through, and the pair reached Raynor and Valerian at the exit, where a dropship awaited. Stetmann escaped alongside them and boarded the Hyperion, and the Raiders evaded the Dominion fleet to flee to the Umojan Protectorate Research Station EB-103.

Exile on Bel'Shir and the Mecha Swarm#

At some point after the flight from Char, and before the Dominion's attack on Research Station EB-103, Stetmann was sent on a research expedition to Bel'Shir to prepare the way for future researchers. As the Second Great War ended and the End War broke out, the terran political landscape shifted so drastically that Stetmann was lost in the shuffle and forgotten on his expedition. Total isolation taxed his mental well-being, and long exposure to terrazine gas had a drastic effect on his sanity. He became obsessed with harvesting terrazine, collecting samples from harvesting bots he called his "friends" and "babies." They became his only companions apart from Bel'Shir itself, which he conversed with regularly.

The terrazine granted him psionic powers and the ability to commune with wildlife, and the visions it gave him advanced his research. Yet his mind continued to unravel. He came to worship Bel'Shir as a god and the planet as sacred land he was bound to protect, judging outsiders and trespassers and often killing them. To defend the world he built a mechanical army of zerg he named the Mecha Swarm, empowered by inventions he called egonergy and stetellites. His closest companion among them was a harvesting bot named Gary, with whom he regularly argued; he also built a smaller bot named Timothy for company, though he considered it a failure.

When Tal'darim under Fourth Ascendant Malain arrived to forcefully extract terrazine, harming the planet, Stetmann believed they would destroy it. With Gary he constructed the Mecha Swarm to drive them off. A Terran Dominion rescue team, sent on account of his connections to Raynor and Valerian, was shot down by the Tal'darim. Stetmann judged the survivors as trespassers, but a ghost among them convinced him they would serve him, and Stetmann recruited the ghost as his "minion" after force-feeding terrazine so that Bel'Shir could commune with the agent. The Mecha Swarm drove the Tal'darim from the planet, with Stetmann riding a mecha ultralisk into the battle. In the aftermath the ghost, having succumbed to the terrazine, incapacitated Stetmann and carried him aboard the medivac that had brought the team, with Gary following, the ghost apparently coming to worship Bel'Shir in much the same manner.

Character#

Stetmann was in his early twenties during the Second Great War. As a scientist he was eager and almost hyperactive, with a deep interest in his fields of research and a streak of naivety. He had a habit of exaggerating his abilities, which made Raynor take seriously the rare occasions on which he admitted a project was beyond him. He strapped cans of drink to his body and showed little creativity in naming his inventions, with "egonergy" a representative example, and he was a firm believer in recycling.

The terrazine exposure on Bel'Shir transformed him. It granted him psionic abilities that let him direct his swarm through technopathy and read minds through telepathy, but it left him convinced that Bel'Shir was a god and sacred land. He treated the Mecha Swarm with a mixture of loving care and abject cruelty, calling them his closest friends while threatening to dismantle them, and his deepest bond was with the harvesting bot Gary.