Rory Swann

Rory Swann was a terran engineer and the chief engineer of the Hyperion, the battlecruiser commanded by Jim Raynor. A former miner who lost an arm in a crushed revolt against the Kel-Morian Combine, Swann joined Raynor's Raiders and became the backbone of their armory and the man who kept the Hyperion together through the Second Great War. He later served the Terran Dominion regime of Valerian Mengsk.

From the mines to the Raiders#

Rory Swann came from a family of tech-savvy miners, though his own understanding of technology ran deeper than theirs. Rather than leave to become an engineer, he stayed in the mining industry, opening a mining operation on Meinhoff at considerable cost. His early success was crushed by ever-rising taxes, while rival operations secretly controlled by Tavish Kerr escaped the same burden, Kerr having bribed Kel-Morian Combine officials to tax his competitors out of business. Swann tried to lodge a complaint, but everyone involved with Meinhoff had been bought.

He started a miner's revolt and declared independence from the Combine, but Combine forces arrived and mercilessly crushed it. Swann lost an arm and many friends, and was saved only because Raynor's Raiders answered the distress signal. With nothing left, he joined the Raiders and became chief engineer of Raynor's ship, the Hyperion.

Chief engineer#

Swann worked to keep the Raiders' spirits up through dark times, mindful of his debt to Raynor, and often pushed Raynor to fight the Dominion. He established an armory bowling team aboard the ship and encouraged people to sign up. When the freshly defected Kel-Morian Milo Kachinsky joined the Raiders, Swann, still bitter over his failed revolt against the Kel-Morians, argued with Raynor about admitting him, but he came to respect Kachinsky and placed him in charge of the robotics wing of weapons research. After a particularly nasty engagement, the Raiders' SceeVee Special Engineering Corps pitched in to help repair the ship, and Swann became good friends with their leader, Bill Bousquette.

With the onset of the Second Great War, Swann's chief role was procuring weapons and technology and providing upgrades for the Raiders, though at times he took a more direct hand by providing reinforcements via special ops dropship. Across the campaign he supplied marauders, siege tanks, banshees, firebats, goliaths, and Wraiths, obtained the schematics for hellions, vikings, and diamondbacks, and reverse-engineered the thor from the captured war machine Odin, making it cheaper to produce. He manufactured spectre equipment from data submitted by Gabriel Tosh and ghost equipment from data submitted by Nova Terra, depending on which the Raiders chose to support.

The alliance and the Battle of Char#

When Raynor allied with Crown Prince Valerian Mengsk to retrieve the xel'naga artifacts that might make Sarah Kerrigan human again, Swann was concerned, knowing the Hyperion's crew was full of people who had lost family and friends to the Dominion. His fears were borne out: he defended Raynor against Kachinsky's outburst, and when the convict Tychus Findlay came to blows with him, the unarmored engineer was easily thrown until Raynor intervened to calm the crew. Swann nonetheless welcomed the battlecruiser schematics he obtained from Valerian.

During the assault on Char, the Hyperion came under zerg attack, and Swann dealt with the damage while keeping in touch with the planetside Raynor. After a beachhead was secured he was brought down to the Warfield Forward Base. Raynor took him into the tunnels beneath the surface to keep the zerg from using the nydus network in the coming assault on the main hive, and Swann carried the seismic charges that flooded the tunnels with lava, along with an enhanced Perdition turret he called Flaming Betty. He was visibly uncomfortable on the battlefield, to Raynor and Findlay's amusement.

After Char#

When Kerrigan was de-infested and Arcturus Mengsk's fleet arrived, Swann took part in the running flight from the emperor. He searched the Bucephalus for the tracking devices that let Mengsk find the rebels, oversaw the disguising of the battlecruiser as a burnt-out hulk at Deadman's Port, and took command of the Hyperion in Raynor's absence, breaking the ships out of cover and counterattacking when they came under fire. At Space Station Prometheus he helped uncover the Moebius Foundation's treachery and transferred the Hyperion's shields to cover the fleet during the escape, a loss that included the death of crewmember Annabelle Thatcher. He later provided tactical advice navigating the asteroid field around Mira Han's base during the operation to retrieve Colonel Orlan.

During the Legacy of the Void era, Swann was present with Raynor when Moebius Corps besieged Korhal, and afterward he organized and transferred all data on Emil Narud and the Keystone to the protoss Karax and debriefed Hierarch Artanis, the first time he had ever spoken to a protoss. He commanded terran forces alongside fellow commanders during the End War.

Service to the new Dominion#

After the End War, Swann continued to serve the Dominion regime of Valerian Mengsk under Admiral Matt Horner. He established a military research base and experimental weapons lab on the planet Borea. When feral zerg attacked Borea, he managed the gear of Agent Nova Terra, sent her a jump pack to navigate the terrain, and asked her to save his crews in return for whatever weapons were inside. During the Defenders of Man Insurgency he aided in repairs to the Hyperion at the Cerros Shipyards.

Character#

Swann was described as a big, fun man who spoke with a New York accent and was called the soul of the ship. His main task was keeping the Hyperion together in the years since it had been stolen from the Dominion, and he was constantly working on new technology. Usually genial, he had a temper, and his crew knew better than to poke the bear when he was in one of his moods. He disliked being in command, preferring tools and a select group of people, and he liked to do things in a big, round way that made him the life of any conversation.

He had extensive knowledge of technology and strong opinions about it, favoring the diamondback and deriding the vulture as poorly designed. He had nicknames for many people he met, often calling Raynor cowboy, hotshot, or chief while thinking of him as a brother. Though temperamental opposites, he got along well with Bill Bousquette, with whom he often drank, and during his time in the Raiders he served as an impromptu third-in-command, taking the Hyperion's bridge when both Raynor and Horner were off the ship. His cybernetic arm doubled as a repair tool.