Lisa Cassidy

Lisa Cassidy was a terran medic in the Colonial Fleet and a member of the Special Tactics and Missions Platoon of the 321st Colonial Rangers Battalion during the Guild Wars, where she was known as "Doc." A skilled doctor and an addict, she was coerced by Colonel Javier Vanderspool into spying on Tychus Findlay's squad, a role that placed her at the heart of the Heaven's Devils even as she worked against them.

A medic in chains#

Cassidy was a Colonial Fleet medic, a Petty Officer 3rd Class, addicted to a drug called crab. In 2488 she was caught up in the Battle of Fort Howe, where she gave aid to at least a dozen fleet personnel and shot a Kel-Morian Air Wolf in the face before passing out from drug abuse. Arrested for the third time, she became eligible to be sent to a work camp. After two days in the brig she was suffering withdrawal when the base commander, Colonel Javier Vanderspool, met her privately and made an offer: crab and a reprieve from punishment in return for spying on Sergeant Tychus Findlay and his Special Tactics and Missions Platoon. Vanderspool feared Findlay had interfered with one of his criminal schemes and judged that Cassidy's looks would aid her in the role. She agreed.

Inside the platoon#

Cassidy was introduced to the platoon as an experiment in attaching medics to front-line combat units. She immediately clashed with its commanding officer, Lieutenant Marcus Quigby, acting just short of insubordinate and arranging for his inoculation records to be lost so that he had to endure a series of needless injections. Quigby tried and failed to have her transferred, and her treatment of the unlikable officer made her popular with the platoon. Desired by both Tychus Findlay and Private Hank Harnack, she began a romance with Findlay. When Quigby sought to show off the Thunderstrike armor to his visiting father and to Vanderspool, Cassidy poisoned his water so that he alone botched the maneuver, an embarrassment that drove him to transfer out and left Findlay in command. Summoned by Vanderspool to explain the incident, she admitted the poisoning and was punished by plain-clothed soldiers who struck her in the belly.

Doc of the Heaven's Devils#

When Max Zander's charity to refugees led to his capture by the bandit Silas Trask, the squad stormed the hideout to free him and Private Connor Ward. Cassidy slipped into a barn and shot the fleeing Trask in the head, and when a grateful prisoner called her an angel, she disagreed. Her drug addiction increasingly clouded her judgment, and after Vanderspool learned of an assault on a treacherous bartender, he summoned her conspicuously to the command center, struck her when she argued, and forced from her what she knew, though he kept the platoon intact for the time being.

During the assault on Internment Camp-36, Cassidy and Findlay found Jim Raynor suspended before the prisoners as torture, and she gave him a stimpack to ease his pain after he was cut down. When the overseer Hanz Brucker was wounded in the fighting, Cassidy told Raynor to find clothes while she treated the wound, then injected Brucker with a lethal poison to simulate a heart attack and delivered Vanderspool's revenge message. After the victory the platoon was named the Heaven's Devils, and Findlay's squad took commemorative tattoos, Cassidy's depicting an oversized needle. She also quietly took Ryk Kydd's DNA under the guise of a routine medical test, suspecting his true identity as Ark Bennet of the Old Families.

The road to Korsy#

At Polk's Pride, Cassidy reported Brucker's death to a pleased Vanderspool, who gave her crab while insulting her as a disposable junkie, and she informed him as well of Ryk Kydd's identity. In the battle she comforted a soldier whose legs had been blown off, applied dressings to his stumps, and later treated Jim Raynor's scalp wound after he drew a sniper's fire, admonishing him and offering stimulants he refused. After Lieutenant Samantha Sanchez was killed and the Confederates took the city, Cassidy got high on crab while UNN reporter Max Speer photographed the survivors.

When Ryk Kydd and Max Zander brought word of Vanderspool's plot to rob a Kel-Morian train and resocialize the platoon, Findlay proposed stealing the loot for themselves. Cassidy chose instead to inform Vanderspool, finding him at the most expensive hotel in town and shaking off her guilt with the belief that Findlay would discard her in time, steadying herself with another injection of crab. Forewarned, Vanderspool took the platoon to the occupied town of Korsy disguised as Kel-Morian troops. The plan collapsed when the overseer Aaron Pax double-crossed Vanderspool at the train platform, and the train escaped. A furious Vanderspool had Lieutenant Fitz hold Cassidy hostage and revealed her betrayal; an anguished Findlay tried to shoot her, but Jim Raynor stopped him, and the platoon escaped toward the starport.

Death and character#

Cassidy and Vanderspool were captured by Aaron Pax and brought to the starport, where Pax demanded the platoon surrender or watch the colonel die. The platoon refused, and Ryk Kydd killed Pax and wounded Vanderspool while the rippers were cut down. Cassidy was mortally wounded in the crossfire. With her dying breath she told Tychus Findlay that betraying him had not been personal. Vanderspool pleaded for a medic, but with Cassidy dead there was no one to save him, and Jim Raynor shot him in the chest soon after.

Physically, Cassidy had short brown hair in a shaggy cut that could have made her appear boyish, offset by a face Vanderspool found very feminine, with large, luminous eyes that seemed at once worldly and vulnerable. Captain Marvin Ling considered her intelligent and a skilled medic, and her evaluations noted an addiction to the adrenaline of combat as well as to crab, the latter driving her to dose herself with stimpacks to hold off withdrawal. Coerced into treachery and ground down by her addiction, she remained a genuinely capable doctor to the end, even as the drugs that bound her to Vanderspool steered her toward the betrayal that destroyed both the platoon's trust and, finally, herself.