Mengsk's Uprising

Mengsk's Uprising was the rebellion waged by Arcturus Mengsk and his Sons of Korhal against the Terran Confederacy. What began as a planetary resistance movement on Korhal grew, against the backdrop of the Great War, into a sector-wide campaign that toppled the Confederacy as the dominant terran power of the Koprulu sector and laid the groundwork for what would become the Terran Dominion.

Origins on Korhal#

The end of the Guild Wars in 2489 left the Terran Confederacy the uncontested power of the Koprulu sector, dominant over the Kel-Morian Combine and free to expand. Fear of that expansion drove the worlds around Umoja to band together as the Umojan Protectorate. On Korhal, meanwhile, discontent with Confederate rule had been building for years under Senator Angus Mengsk, who denounced the Confederacy as corrupt, drew backing from Umoja, and steered the planet toward independence while privately organizing attacks on Confederate holdings.

By the close of the Guild Wars the rebellion counted millions of supporters, and Angus declared Korhal an independent nation. The Confederacy responded by sending a force to impose martial law, but the population rose up en masse. In answer the Confederacy dispatched a ghost team led by Sarah Kerrigan to assassinate Angus Mengsk, and it succeeded. The murder passed the rebellion to his son Arcturus, who swore revenge and began striking Confederate bases and factories. Hoping to end the matter, the Confederacy loosed a salvo of a thousand Apocalypse-class nuclear missiles on Korhal, reducing the world to a smoldering desert. United as never before, the survivors named themselves the Sons of Korhal.

Open rebellion#

The atrocity at Korhal brought a flood of recruits and renewed backing from the Umojan Protectorate. Mengsk led the rebellion from a captured Confederate battlecruiser he renamed the Hyperion, and with ruthless hit-and-run tactics the Sons of Korhal won victory after victory, confounding Confederate enforcement and drawing support from dissenting Confederate officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Horace Warfield.

With his revolution established, Mengsk turned to a personal matter, the agents who had killed his family. He tracked one to the Fujita Facility on Vyctor 5 and overwhelmed the base to retrieve a ghost held within, Sarah Kerrigan. Though she had been his target, Mengsk spared her, nursing her back to health and working to undo the conditioning on her memory. Within the facility the rebels also found Confederate researchers working with strange xenomorphs alongside their ghosts, and destroyed them. Kerrigan joined the cause, and after a raid on Tarsonis in which she killed an officer who had once tortured her, Mengsk publicly announced the Sons of Korhal and their aims, triggering mass protests across Tarsonis. By 2497 the rebellion had grown beyond the Confederacy's power to quell.

The Great War#

In 2499 the colony of Chau Sara was burned from orbit by the protoss, throwing the Confederacy into panic, and the zerg the Confederacy had been secretly studying broke loose upon the Fringe Worlds. The three-way Great War that followed gave Mengsk his opening to rally the frightened people of the sector against their rulers. When Confederate forces abandoned the colonists of Mar Sara to a zerg attack, Mengsk sent dropships to evacuate them and recruited their magistrate and the reporter Michael Liberty. The rebels then freed the marshal Jim Raynor from a Confederate prison ship, and, sickened by the Confederacy's crimes, he joined them. A raid on the Jacobs Installation recovered Confederate data the rebels took for weapons designs.

Falling back to Antiga Prime, the Sons of Korhal stirred the populace to revolt and turned back a Confederate counterattack under General Edmund Duke. When the zerg came to the system and crippled Duke's flagship, Mengsk ordered a rescue and then offered the general a choice between defeat with the Confederacy or a place in his own cabinet. Duke defected. As the full might of the Confederacy bore down on Antiga Prime, Mengsk decrypted the recovered disc and learned to build the psi-emitters the Confederacy had used to lure zerg to the Fringe Worlds. He had one planted in the heart of the Confederate position over the protests of Kerrigan, and the zerg descended and overwhelmed the defenders while the rebels escaped.

The fall of Tarsonis#

With the Confederacy weakened and the Sons of Korhal stronger than ever, Mengsk moved on the Confederate capital of Tarsonis. While Duke drew off the orbital squadrons, Raynor, Kerrigan, and Michael Liberty led ground forces into Tarsonis City. On Mengsk's order, Duke planted and activated a cluster of psi-emitters despite the protests of Raynor, Kerrigan, and Liberty. The zerg swarmed the capital, killing billions.

When the protoss arrived under Executor Tassadar and chose to land ground forces rather than burn the world, Mengsk saw a chance the Confederacy might escape and sent Kerrigan to neutralize the protoss at New Gettysburg. She succeeded, but a wave of zerg then overwhelmed her position. When she called for evacuation, Mengsk ordered his forces to disengage and left her to the zerg, who took her not to kill but to seal in a chrysalis for infestation. The brutality of Tarsonis shattered Raynor's loyalty. He, Liberty, the magistrate, and a young Matt Horner defected, seizing the Hyperion and fighting clear of Tarsonis as Raynor's Raiders.

Aftermath#

With the Confederacy destroyed, Mengsk returned to Korhal and addressed the terran worlds, calling on all humanity to unite under his rule against the protoss and the zerg. The colonies rallied to him, and from that union rose the Terran Dominion with Arcturus Mengsk as its emperor. Raynor's Raiders swore vengeance for Tarsonis and would fight his regime for years. Kerrigan, reborn from her chrysalis as the Queen of Blades, became a power within the Zerg Swarm and a lasting threat to the Dominion Mengsk had built. Confederate holdouts persisted for years, but the Dominion endured, surviving even the later invasion of the United Earth Directorate.