Project Blackstone: the Dominion's secret xenoscience program

Project Blackstone was a classified Terran Dominion research program dedicated to unravelling the secrets of the zerg and the protoss. Ordered into existence by Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, the project gathered scientists selected by Dominion Intelligence Section, many of them conscripted against their will, at a secret installation on a remote asteroid. Directed by Dr. Helek Branamoor with Major Lee Treicher as head of security, Blackstone dissected zerg strains, experimented on live protoss captives, and slowly tore itself apart from within before a zergling outbreak forced the survivors into a desperate fight for their lives.

Founding and purpose#

With the future of the Zerg Swarm uncertain, Arcturus Mengsk seized on the moment to strengthen his Dominion. He ordered that the best terran minds in the Koprulu sector be gathered so that the secrets of the zerg and protoss could be unravelled, part of the same body of secret work that followed his acquisition of the Keystone for his palace on Korhal. Dominion Intelligence Section selected the candidates and Mengsk personally approved their conscription. Dr. Helek Branamoor was assigned to lead the project, holding omega level access as Chief of Research.

Secrecy defined every aspect of the operation. The base installation sat on a hostile rock whose location was classified, the facility ran on its own time system, and every communication made within its walls was monitored. Not all of its staff came willingly. Xenobiologist Dr. Talen Ayers protested that he had been forcibly recruited by a ghost, and fellow xenobiologist Dr. Talise Cogan likewise objected to her treatment. Branamoor answered the unrest by restricting personal communications so the scientists could get straight to studying larvae.

The project's appetite for specimens drew it into the sector's underworld. Early on, Branamoor hired smugglers to ferry zerg larva to the base, but the shipment was attacked and looted at Deadman's Port by Ivan's criminal gang. Branamoor tried to negotiate the larva's release into Blackstone custody, but a coup inside the gang killed both Ivan and the specimens.

The Blackstone facility comes online#

The facility became operational in late January of 2505, when Adjutant 33-27 V3.1974 came online and ran its systems through checks and startups. Days later the transport Daisy 8 delivered the first maintenance personnel and specimens. The newcomers wandered into what would become a forbidden area and were killed by a solitary zergling. The adjutant responded by requesting an additional sample, then, separately, additional personnel.

Dr. Branamoor and Major Lee Treicher arrived shortly afterward aboard the Sparrowhawk to oversee the project. After reviewing the zergling incident, Treicher ordered that the replacement maintenance crews arriving on the transport Beluga stay out of the containment areas. The adjutant went further, informing them they would be executed if they entered. Treicher objected to the threat, but Branamoor believed it was for the best.

The subordinate scientists came last, carried in aboard the transports Brook's Folly, Sunset, and Undertow 2. The team included xenobiologists Talen Ayers, Talise Cogan, Warren G. Held, and Leah A. Martine, xenobotanist Vera Langridge, chemical engineer and explosives expert Pamela G., xeno imaging specialist Sherman Jack, chief engineer Red Quinton, and astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Rothfuss. Langridge was granted higher security access than her colleagues. Security lapses appeared almost immediately: the adjutant traced an apparent breach to Sherman Jack's unsecured image files, and the machine shop suffered an unexplained incident that left a hole in its door.

Research on the Swarm and the protoss#

Blackstone's work began with zerg larvae and expanded to other strains, including zerglings, banelings, and mutalisks, with specimens recovered from battles across the sector delivered to the station for examination. Dr. Ayers, the senior zerg researcher, collaborated with Dr. Cogan on dissections of zerglings and banelings, in the course of which he inadvertently went over notes left by his deceased daughter. The pair later studied Dr. Sandra Loew's failed attempt to produce a tamed hydralisk. The work took stranger turns as well. Operating on a dead overlord, Cogan felt the creature's grief. When she consulted Dr. Martine about it, Martine insisted that no such transfer was possible from a dead zerg and that Cogan had imagined it.

About a month into operations, Jake Ramsey arrived as the project's expert on the protoss. Ramsey quickly discovered, and revealed to the other researchers, that live protoss were being experimented on. The senior protoss researcher, Dr. Held, treated the captives brutally and destroyed valuable samples, and Ramsey grew close to one prisoner, a curious Khalai protoss named Kaeon whom the staff were ordered to call Experiment #383. After Held's removal from the labs, the protoss specimens, Kaeon especially, became more responsive.

The Dominion also used the station to house military hardware. The transport Palomino delivered warhounds under Major Treicher's personal supervision, though Branamoor learned that Axiom Corporation had dispatched three such transports and only one had made it through; Mistaff IV, where the missing ships were last seen, had fallen to the zerg. A drunken Quinton proposed fitting the warhounds with cloaking devices, reasoning that their power supplies were excessive, and separately suggested in his protected files that their security devices be removed. Dr. Rothfuss hacked into those protected files and noted the suggestion, and despite the invasion of privacy the feat earned him Quinton's respect.

Fractures within the team#

Blackstone's staff were as volatile as their specimens. Ramsey and Held clashed constantly, at one point having to be pulled apart by Quinton and Ayers while Branamoor declined to intervene. Quinton was confined to quarters on suspicion of building a distillery after massively overusing the project's activated carbon, and was released only after four days of searching failed to find it. The feud between Held and Martine ended in blood: Held attacked her with a scalpel, and Martine, secretly a trained ghost imposed on the project from above, used her abilities to beat him nearly to death. Branamoor announced that Held was leaving Blackstone and asked the staff to stop discussing him, yet Held remained on site, working on the protoss in secret.

Ramsey, meanwhile, showed talents no ordinary terran should have possessed. He deduced Martine's full name unprompted, hid his thoughts from her probing, and suffered recurring headaches that eased when Held left the labs and returned when he did not truly go. Martine, intrigued, began teaching him methods of psionic control.

The deepest fracture was Dr. Rothfuss. The crippled astrophysicist built a scrambler to speak privately with Ayers and confided that he trusted neither Branamoor nor the emperor to work for the betterment of mankind. He observed that terran technology leapt ahead in matters of war while computer programming stagnated, with adjutants still running original ATLAS coding. Hacking the personnel files, he uncovered that Cogan's daughter was Ariel Hanson, branded a traitor after the Dominion abandoned her world of Agria during the Second Great War; believing her daughter dead, Cogan requested a transfer. Rothfuss warned Ayers about Langridge's study of mind controlling plants and about six off the books sections of the facility, and declared that Project Blackstone had to be destroyed.

The Blackstone crisis#

The project's collapse began when the station stopped receiving supplies and lost contact with the Dominion. Branamoor refused to explain why the stores were running dry. Then Held, determined to hoard the remaining resources for his own research, released several captive zerglings into the facility. The station went into lockdown as Major Treicher led a squad against the creatures, but the escaped zerglings killed all of the guards and support staff, leaving the main science team trapped.

The survivors made for the mess hall, the safest ground left. Rothfuss, lifted into his wheelchair by Pamela, converted the team's datapads into walkie talkies, a measure that pushed the unravelling Branamoor into ranting demands to cut the chatter. Ramsey collapsed, bleeding from the ears and babbling about a woman named Rosemary Dahl, having learned that Held was killing the protoss captives. With the station unable to track the zerglings, hope centred on Daisy 8, the transport never recovered after its crew died, which still sat available for an escape. Martine slipped away alone, killed several zerglings, then stole Daisy 8 and fled the station without the others. Branamoor, rambling, admitted she had been forced on the project from the top.

Seven zerglings remained and the ammunition would not cover them all. Quinton revealed he had hidden his distilled ethanol inside a hellion, and the team used it to blast through the vents, which Rothfuss controlled, and burn out the creatures. Quinton ended up sealed in the garage with the last of the zerglings. When the team finally fought through to Held's hidden laboratory, they found the man dead, killed by Kaeon. Dr. Cogan had secretly released the protoss from his underground confinement.

Reorganization under Valerian#

The survivors were rescued some time later by Emperor Valerian Mengsk, who had discovered the project's existence while going through his father's records and dispatched a battlecruiser and the science vessel Brin to the facility. Where his father had conscripted, Valerian offered the scientists continued and paid service, and the project was rebuilt aboard the Brin as part of his wider reorganization of Arcturus's secret programs. Dr. Ayers was made the new head of Project Blackstone. Kaeon refused to leave, wishing to study Ramsey's strange condition, and Rosemary Dahl arrived at the station to reunite with Ramsey. Rothfuss, who had once declared the project fit only for destruction, accepted a place on the Brin, noting that he served no government but a party that benefited humanity at large.