Jackson Hauler

Jackson Hauler, who also operated under the identity of Doctor Cole Bennett, was a powerful terran psychic and the commander of Nova Squadron, the clandestine black-ops and secret-police division inherited from the Terran Confederacy by the Terran Dominion. His true name was never recorded. A rogue ghost who concealed his powers for decades, he ultimately turned against Arcturus Mengsk and sought to seize the Dominion for himself with an army of spectres.

A stolen identity#

As a young man, Hauler had been a ghost in the Terran Confederacy Ghost Program, where his psychological profile was graded high risk. The memory-wiping process the Program called brain-panning failed to take hold because of his unusually high psionic rating of 8.5, and the Program resolved to eliminate him. He escaped before it could. He resurfaced inside the Confederate Marine Corps, having murdered a non-commissioned officer named Jackson Hauler and assumed his identity through a combination of mind control, memory alteration, and forgery, so that his superiors believed only that he had vanished one evening. Swiftly commissioned as an officer, he rose to lead Nova Squadron, the Confederacy's black-ops division, all the while keeping his psionic powers secret. Following Mengsk's Uprising, he proved his loyalty and usefulness to the new Terran Dominion.

Doctor Bennett and Project Shadowblade#

In 2501, terrazine was discovered on the planet Demon's Fair, and Arcturus Mengsk established a secret program, Project Shadowblade, under General Horace Warfield to research its military applications. Hauler saw an opportunity. Having himself assigned to a "secret mission," he created or stole the identity of Cole Bennett, a biomedical researcher, and joined the project, where he secretly experimented on himself with terrazine. When the project's chief scientist discovered this and prepared to take the evidence to Warfield, and as the program's dangerous side effects led Mengsk to order it shut down anyway, the Dominion Marine Corps was sent to eliminate or imprison everyone involved. Hauler claimed to have used his mental powers to escape with a few others, planting false memories of Bennett's death in the attacking marines. The Dominion afterward maintained that Bennett had gone mad from self-experimentation and killed most of the team. Only three project survivors were imprisoned. Reassuming his Hauler identity, he returned from his "secret mission" feeling betrayed by the Dominion he had served, and began to plot revenge.

The conspiracy#

As Bennett, Hauler met the deserter and former ghost Gabriel Tosh on Altara, and the two, both bearing grudges against Mengsk, formed an alliance. Drawing on Tosh's knowledge of Sector Nine and the disgraced senator Corbin Phash, they secured backing from the Umojan Protectorate, which supplied technology to Hauler's growing rebel movement. The plan was elaborate: the hacker Lio Travski would disable the Dominion's security network, Mengsk would be captured, and a confession to his crimes, including Project Shadowblade, would be broadcast by Michael Liberty. Hauler would then frame Tosh as the leader of the destabilizing spectre forces and step forward as a benevolent successor, using his telepathy to bend any rivals to accept him as their new leader.

In 2503, Hauler took part in an investigation on Altara into the disappearance of a ghost, Kath Toom, and the wrangler sent to find her, a mission complicated by a zerg force drawn in by released terrazine. The ghost agent Nova Terra was assigned to his unit, and Hauler manipulated the operation to destroy evidence that might incriminate him, deploying forces that stirred up the zerg and then having their bodies destroyed. He blamed the abductions on squatters or leftover UED forces. Behind the scenes, in his Bennett persona, he chastised Tosh for failing to fully destroy the refinery where Toom had been ambushed and ordered the movement to make its final move against Mengsk, impatient after so long lying low.

True colors and Gehenna Station#

When spectres attacked Korhal Palace in an attempt to assassinate Mengsk and capture Nova, both failed, and an aggravated Hauler privately berated Tosh for ensuring Mengsk would now be even better protected. Playing the loyal officer aboard his ship, the Palatine, he drafted resocialized reinforcements loyal to him personally and fended off Major Spaulding of the Annihilators, who suspected Nova of being a spectre. He then knocked out Nova and the wrangler Malcolm Kelerchian with neuroleptics, confronted Nova in the brig, and revealed his true background, offering her a place at his side in toppling the tyrant Mengsk. When she refused, he held the captured Kelerchian hostage to coerce her into retrieving Mengsk for him, intending to remove her neural implant and warning that he had no qualms about killing her.

Nova escaped and disabled the Palatine's communications, and Hauler concluded she would make for Gehenna Station, the conspiracy's mobile base, and headed there to regroup for an invasion of Augustgrad. At the station he killed the recovered Kath Toom with his powers as useless to him, then had the spectre Dylanna Okyl frame Nova for the killing, driving Tosh into a rage that committed him fully to the hunt. The station soon came under attack as Travski threw in with Nova. Hauler confronted Nova in a cavern housing the station's psi indoctrinators, where he revealed his plan to build a psionic army and, failing to bend her mind, took Kelerchian hostage again. Tosh arrived, learned through Travski that Hauler had killed Toom rather than Nova, and lashed out psionically. A stalactite fell from the ceiling, and though Hauler tried to shift it aside with telekinesis, it plunged through his skull and killed him. His body was buried under the rubble that followed.

Powers and character#

Hauler was a powerful psychic both as a ghost, by his rating of 8.5, and afterward as a terrazine-enhanced spectre, his abilities including telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, the conjuring of apparitions, and the projection of false surface thoughts to deceive other telepaths and hide his nature. People tended to defer to him willingly, and those who did not could have their brainwaves altered to follow him, at least briefly. To Nova Terra, reading the thoughts he chose to show, he seemed a good soldier loyal to Mengsk and ready to die for the Dominion; in truth he was a bitter man with sadistic and sociopathic tendencies. When she saw through him, she recognized that for all his talk of restoring democracy he was no different from Mengsk, simply another would-be dictator. Physically he was a balding man with massive arms.