Michael Liberty

Michael Daniel Liberty was a terran news reporter whose loyalties shifted over the course of his career as the politics of the Koprulu sector shifted around him. A lanky man with dirty blond hair swept into a ponytail and a habit of trying and failing to quit smoking, he hated being called "Mickey" by his former editor-in-chief Handy Anderson. Over the years he moved from the Confederate press to the rebel Sons of Korhal and at last to a lonely campaign of pirate broadcasts against the Terran Dominion, becoming the most persistent journalistic enemy of Arcturus Mengsk.

Early reporting#

Liberty spent much of his career under the auspices of Universe News Network, a Confederate news organization. One early piece concerned groundwater pollution outside a middle school, and in an expose he described the mind of Talen Ayers as an interplanetary treasure. His complaints about the Confederacy's censorship of Guild Wars information earned the respect of fellow reporter Max Speer, who otherwise disliked him and who later, gone freelance, sometimes passed information Liberty's way. In 2491 Liberty reported on an attack by the Sons of Korhal on the Tarsonis Ghost Academy, bringing the rebel group to public attention; he wryly suggested it might be a sign of things to come. Over the years he cautiously commented on the corrupt nature of the Confederacy, his favorite target being the Tarsonis City Council, which he considered a large bunch of crooks, and he held the Confederate Marine Corps in similar regard.

A dangerous occupation#

In 2499, Liberty's life was threatened by political interests, including the Old Families, tied to illegal dumping activities. To keep him alive, Anderson arranged for him to be embedded aboard the Norad II, the command ship of Alpha Squadron commander Edmund Duke, with Lieutenant Emily Swallow as his assistant. He saw the aftermath of the destruction of Chau Sara and witnessed the protoss, who nearly attacked Duke's fleet in Mar Sara's orbit before withdrawing. When Liberty pressed Duke to explain why the protoss would concentrate their attacks on uninhabited parts of the world, Duke threw him off the bridge, and from then on none of Liberty's reports were published without heavy editing; his speculations were cut entirely from the published account of Chau Sara.

Forbidden to contact anyone in the Sara system, Liberty overcame the interdiction on Mar Sara by swapping ID tags with a local reporter named Rourke and slipping into the evacuee camps, escorted by Swallow, who did not know the excursion was unauthorized. He interviewed evacuees and made contact with Sarah Kerrigan, an undercover Sons of Korhal operative. On her advice he and Swallow entered Anthem Base and were attacked by zerglings and a hydralisk; Swallow was killed, and Liberty was rescued by Marshal Jim Raynor, becoming acquainted with the Mar Sara Colonial Militia. After Raynor and his men were arrested by Alpha Squadron, Liberty, still masquerading as a local reporter, was released. Driving Raynor's vulture, he was intercepted by Kerrigan, who told him he was officially dead, the real Rourke having died in his stead while wearing Liberty's tags, and that his outspokenness had made him a wanted man. Kerrigan put him in contact with Arcturus Mengsk, who wanted Liberty to generate publicity for the rebels during the coming evacuation of Mar Sara; in return the rebels agreed to free Raynor and the militia. Liberty took part in the raid on the Jacobs Installation and watched Mar Sara burn at the hands of the protoss, by then affiliated with the Sons of Korhal.

Dealing with the devil#

Liberty was granted a series of one-on-one interviews with Mengsk and traveled to Antiga Prime to broadcast that the Confederacy's master command center had been taken, framing himself as working with Mengsk rather than for him. But with the induction of Duke and Alpha Squadron into the Sons of Korhal, doubts began to stir in him as they did in Raynor, though Mengsk still seemed the lesser of two evils. Mengsk showed Liberty a fabricated flat-screen report featuring an idealized fake Liberty, who claimed to have escaped the Sons of Korhal and accused Mengsk of releasing poisonous mind-control drugs on Antiga Prime and of sabotaging the Norad II; Mengsk noted that a flat report was easier to fake than a hologram and mocked the forgers for laying it on thick.

Angered, Liberty no longer wanted anything to do with the Confederacy, yet his unease with Mengsk deepened when Mengsk ordered Kerrigan to activate a psi emitter inside the base camp of Delta Squadron to lure the zerg and break the blockade around Antiga Prime. Liberty helped her with the task but never warmed to it. He later aided Raynor and Kerrigan in a raid on a moon of G-2275 to retrieve upgraded goliath plans, infiltrating the base as Kerrigan dispatched the guards and scientists.

The breakaway#

After the destruction of Antiga Prime, Liberty fought alongside Raynor and Kerrigan in the streets of Tarsonis City, even returning to the ruined UNN Building, as Mengsk's repeated use of psi emitters and the early arrival of the protoss worsened the situation. When Mengsk sent Kerrigan to New Gettysburg to engage the protoss, Liberty and Raynor, grasping the suicidal nature of the mission, set out after her, fighting through Duke aboard the Hyperion and the defenses over Tarsonis to reach the surface. They saved many soldiers and civilians, but Kerrigan was not among them; Mengsk had abandoned her to the zerg, and it became plain to both men that he would do the same to them. Offered a comfortable job under Mengsk by Anderson, now working for the rebel leader, Liberty refused.

Freelance#

Liberty turned his reporting against Mengsk on the propaganda front, adopting holo transmissions because Mengsk had himself noted they were harder to fake, and frustrating the new Terran Dominion's efforts to locate him by broadcasting over open and random frequencies. He wrote on the origins of Raynor's Raiders for The Sentinel and delivered the Liberty Manifesto, which he called his last report, laying bare the true nature of the war that destroyed the Confederacy. His defection led the Dominion to ban the embedding of reporters in its military units for years. The Umojan Protectorate kept in contact with him and considered using him to spread anti-Dominion propaganda, and Liberty helped publicize the story of the disgraced senator Corbin Phash, whose son Colin Phash was forcibly inducted into the Ghost Academy.

Newsworthy and beyond#

In 2502 Liberty was embedded with the Knights of Freedom, tuning into whose broadcasts was punishable by death in the Terran Dominion. He reported on how Candore Colony had vanished after offering sanctuary to the Knights and being attacked by Dominion marines from the battlecruiser Victory. Tracking the ship down and boarding it, the Knights rescued UNN reporter Kate Lockwell from its commander, Tom Hawkins, who had already killed her cameraman to bury evidence of a massacre; Lockwell gave Liberty a copy of the footage for his pirate broadcasts but chose to remain behind. Disturbed by the images of stacked civilian corpses, Liberty was disappointed when Lockwell's report aired as pro-Dominion propaganda, though he suspected she was protecting the original footage, and he aired his own counterpoint.

Liberty later became entangled with the Umojan Protectorate and the renegade Dominion faction Project Shadowblade in a plot to kidnap Arcturus Mengsk and force a confession, a plot that failed and left Mengsk safe. In 2504, as the Second Great War neared, he sent Jim Raynor the cryptic transmission, "Run from your past, and it'll chase you down even faster," which the Dominion intercepted but could not interpret. After Raynor's Raiders revealed Mengsk's hand in the Fall of Tarsonis, Liberty was among those who commented on the revelation.

Years later, after Valerian Mengsk ascended to the throne, Michael Liberty and Radio Liberty were both still active. Liberty personally investigated the disappearance of many Terran Dominion ghosts, uncovering encoded orders hidden in innocuous government messages and trailing Nova Terra to a Defenders of Man base. After Radio Liberty was raided by masked gunmen, Liberty leaked clues to his listeners, including the message "keep your eyes open because the writing's on the wall," and ultimately provided them with Nova's last known location and an access point to the Defenders of Man database, exposing the fate of the missing ghosts.

Character#

Liberty was driven by a stubborn instinct for the truth and a deep distrust of concentrated power, whether held by the Confederacy, the Old Families, or Arcturus Mengsk. His outspokenness repeatedly made him a target and forced him from one affiliation to the next, yet he turned every reversal into another broadcast against the powerful. He was originally conceived under the forename Danny before the name Michael took hold, and his strongly anti-Dominion convictions defined him to the end of his recorded activity, his Radio Liberty broadcasts remaining a thorn in the Dominion's side for years.