Ghost

Ghosts were the feared psionic covert operatives of the terran nations, trained and deployed through the Ghost Program created by the Terran Confederacy and later inherited by the Terran Dominion. Drawn from psychically gifted individuals, equipped with cloaking technology and a hostile environment suit, ghosts served as commandos and assassins and were the operators who guided the terran sector's nuclear strikes. Their ranks produced two of the most consequential figures of the era, Sarah Kerrigan and Nova Terra.

Selection and training#

Ghosts were chosen from psychically gifted individuals who had been quarantined by the Terran Confederacy and trained from infancy to channel their psionic energies to augment their natural physical strength and endurance. Conscripts who completed the program's rigorous training and augmentations served as commandos and assassins, appearing and striking suddenly and silently. They were lightly armored and could hide their presence with a cloaking device, and their stealth made them especially valuable for directing nuclear missile strikes against enemy targets.

Conscription was, in theory, universal: it was mandatory for children born within the Confederacy to have a Psi Aptitude Profile taken within nine months of birth, and a score of 2.50 or higher resulted in recruitment. The ideal of universal testing was impossible in practice, and Fringe World children or those with socially powerful parents could sometimes escape detection. Cover stories were invented to obfuscate the fate of conscripted children, some parents being told their child had been taken to a special school or had died in an accident. Telepaths who slipped through the profiling were tracked down by "wranglers," mildly psionic agents whose powers were useful mainly for finding other telepaths at close range. Ghosts spent an average of four years at the Ghost Academy, training in target shooting, close-quarters combat and vehicular operation, and drilling against artificial simulations of hostage rescues, darkened mazes and zerg attacks.

Control and conditioning#

Standard Confederate practice was to implant psychic dampeners into all ghosts as a precautionary measure, working on the same principle as neural resocialization. While active, the implants reshaped a ghost's memories, weakened their powers and enforced loyalty, with the result that few ghosts under the program retained any memory of their former lives. The Confederacy maintained a layered set of limiters: aggression inhibitors to prevent ghosts from attacking their superiors, ghost conditioning to weaken psionic ability, and psi-screens to shield a mind from being read.

For the most part ghosts were known only by numbers or alpha-numeric agent codes, and their training emphasized that they should address one another by these designations rather than by name. They lived their entire lives within the program, which provided all of their housing, food and arrangements, leaving many unable to adjust to civilian life. After the defection of Sarah Kerrigan, the Confederacy concluded that the disableable psychic dampener was insufficient and made the theoretically unbreakable memory wipe standard operating procedure, applied after training and after major missions.

The Confederate program#

About twenty years before the war sparked by the destruction of Chau Sara, the Confederacy had already created a fledgling Ghost Program. One of its early subjects was eight-year-old Sarah Kerrigan, whose powers erupted with such force that the measurement scale had to be completely readjusted. Ghosts were used to assassinate Angus Mengsk to suppress the rebellion of Korhal, and they guided the tactical nuclear weapons to which the Confederacy limited itself after the devastation it inflicted on that world.

The Confederacy also experimented with strange xenomorphs at the secret Fujita Facility on Vyctor 5, discovering that the creatures were sensitive to psionic abilities and could be controlled, with Kerrigan exercising the best control of any subject. When Arcturus Mengsk and his Sons of Korhal raided the facility and rescued Kerrigan, they removed her neuro-adjuster and restored her memories. Kerrigan then led an attack on the primary ghost training center on Tarsonis, destroying it, an event that drove the Confederacy to make memory wiping universal.

Under the Dominion#

The Sons of Korhal, renamed the Terran Dominion after the fall of the Confederacy at Tarsonis, took control of the Ghost Program. Under Arcturus Mengsk, Dominion ghosts remained ghosts until they died, with no one permitted to leave voluntarily; Mengsk ordered roughly half of his government's ghosts killed in a controlled environment to eliminate untrustworthy former Confederate operatives, and commissioned dedicated academies equipped with nuclear silos. The young Nova Terra, a scion of the Old Families of Tarsonis retrieved just as the Confederacy fell, became one of the Dominion's most powerful agents and the first to undergo a graduation exercise immediately before her memory wipe.

The Dominion's use of children drew it into conflict with the Umojan Protectorate, which sheltered the family of conscripted trainees and publicized the program's practices. In response the Dominion turned to public relations, recasting ghosts as superheroes, opening the Ghost Academy and training students in groups. Later Dominion projects sought to push the program further: Project Shadow Blade studied the effects of the psionic reagent terrazine on terrans, and Project Gestalt spliced ghosts with protoss organs. The terrazine research ultimately spawned the renegade spectres of Gabriel Tosh's rebellion, which abducted ghosts from the program until Nova Terra helped bring it down. After the death of Arcturus Mengsk, Emperor Valerian Mengsk reformed the program, making memory wipes optional and allowing ghosts to leave of their own free will, though years later only one had taken the offer.

Powers and equipment#

Ghosts could read minds but generally could not block thoughts, and found one another very easy to read. Through their hostile environment suit they could channel psionic energy through artificial muscle fiber to enhance their physical capabilities, and a cloaking device, powered in part by psionic energy, was frequently issued as well. The next generation of operatives gained further techniques, including greatly heightened speed and reflexes and the ability to see through objects with heat vision, and the program adopted protoss-derived technology such as the psyblade. Exceptional ghosts could tear through walls, run at remarkable speeds and leap large obstacles, and the most powerful, including Sarah Kerrigan and Nova Terra, could damage an opponent's brain to the point of death. Their standard armament included the C-10 rifle, alongside other weapons such as the BOSUN FN92 sniper rifle and the Torrent SR-8 shotgun.

Other terran powers ran their own programs on different principles. The Umojan Protectorate's operatives, called shadowguards, used neither memory wipes nor other forms of control, while the Kel-Morian Combine's program had largely been shelved since the Guild Wars. The United Earth Directorate maintained its own Ghost Program despite its predecessor state's earlier campaign to exterminate mutants, and its psychics played a key role in the assault on the Dylarian Shipyards.