Blackness. That was all he could feel. Strangely, he wasn't even nervous. He even felt… safe. Suddenly, he saw a bright spark in front of him. Somehow, distance didn't seem to matter in this place. "Do you want the power?" Strange, instead of a loud, booming voice, it was rather soft and sibilant. He thought for a moment, remembering prior circumstances. "Yes, I do." And as he faded, the voice chuckled.
It felt like he had been cobbled together and every piece was rejecting the others. Disjointed fragments of speech echoed through his mind, both incomprehensible and lucid. "He's burning up!...finally he's…we are caring for him!" As the pain reduced in intensity and spread, he grumbled: waking up won't be fun, before he lost to the blackness. Again.
Light was going through his eyes long before he realized it. Then he realized: he didn't hurt! Then his mind was buried under the load of their (Their? Wasn't it supposed to be his?) memories. After a period, the images aligned themselves into two separate timelines. The first was a man named Rob Steele, a farmer from Earth. He had had a family of five, several thousand acres, and had been bitten by a rattlesnake. He winced at the feelings in those last hours, and moved on to the next set of memories. A man named Newt, lived on a world named Pharce, and his favorite pastime had been "liberating" food from the garrison of Guardsmen. Guardsmen? Steele's memories gave a helpful hint: Imperial Guardsmen, Hammer of the Imperium. Now, what an Imperium was, he wasn't quite sure. Oh, well, he thought; might as well start. With a groan, as long unused muscles were called to work, he sat up. A girl of maybe 13 years old, wearing the red dress of a Healer put a bowl of water to his lips. While warm and a little stale, it did wet his tongue. When he finished, he laid back down. Then, since he had gained enough strength, he swung out his legs over the edge of the bed and hiked himself upright. The little girl came rushing over and started gesturing widely for him to sit back down, all while speaking in the foreign/familiar language. He moved her aside, and focused on the room. He was standing in a large room, which was located in the local monastery, and had recently been turned into a hospital wing by the monks. Twin rows of beds stretched down the walls, each with a window above the head, and the roughhewn wood was stained…oh. The girl, whose name was Jani, Newt's memories recorded, kept trying to coax him back to his bed, and then finally relented. Walking down the aisle, he saw dozens of illness stricken people, with maybe one in three beds empty. Obviously, one of the frequent plagues had come through and devastated the community. Looking out the door, Newt could see the entire area, from the guild building to the thick walls. As he walked down the street, he saw people who had been Newts friends, but he held his peace. As he left the town, which Rob's memories laughed at, he came under verbal abuse from the guards at the gate. "Hey! I remember you! Oh, you better run coward, or the Enforcers will get you!" The leader of the guard group was a fairly competent man, as well as the son of one of the lesser nobles. Newt ignored them and continued out of the city.
Coming to a clearing, several miles away from the city, he reached into his pocket, and found a lump of something fleshy. It warmed at his touch, and started pulsing. Newt scuffed at the ground, forming a small hole. He dropped the slowly expanding ball in, and covered it in dirt. Within seconds, a cocoon had swallowed up Newt and most of the clearing.
When Newt woke up, it was to a new clearing… and a new body. Looking down at his new form, he couldn't believe it. The most obvious changes were the melee weapons, claws and such. A pair of scythes had formed on his forearms, all four ready for action. His skin itself was now mostly carapace, capable of tanking large amounts of damage. There were also curious protrusions on his shoulders, but he wasn't sure how to fire them. Suddenly, he felt a small bubble of excitement and awe at his feet. Looking down, he saw a roly-poly like larva. While small and insignificant, it had the potential to be so much more. The awe intensified when he picked it up, and then turned to sheer joy. Unable to help himself, Newt laughed. Sending mental probes to the other larva, Newt felt as if there were little projections on the surface of their minds "ball." The projections were almost shaped like DNA, and he scrutinized one. It gave a picture of a small-ish grub with wings and claws. An impulse struck him and he had them become drones. As a dozen armored balloons formed around the large building like thing that had formed, and he eyed it. It looked a bit like a volcano, but one that was covered in forest. If you thought hard, it almost looked like a boulder covered in moss. Its identity was clear. It was a Hatchery, home and birthplace of the Swarms. Then Newt frowned and started to scout the immediate area, to give himself time to think. How had he known that?
A few dozen yards from the clearing was a road. When he found it, he frowned. He was sure that they were much further than that from major roads, but this one was also different, smooth and covered in a dark, bumpy substance. His hearing soon detected a rumble from a ways off and he faded into the undergrowth. The sound got closer, until its source was revealed: an unknown vehicle, tracked, and what looked suspiciously like a turret mounted on top. He could feel the minds of a dozen humans inside the machine, but was puzzled. The rest of the planet didn't have internal combustion engines yet… So where had this come from?
After another hour of exploring, Newt had found a large deposit of metal ore, in the forest and on his side of the road. This would allow work to continue uninterrupted and unobserved. When the drones punched out of their cocoons, Newt immediately had them head to the metal deposit and then had a few take chunks of ore back to the hatchery, while the rest cut down smaller trees and took them back, too. Soon, as Newt had Rob's tendency to economize and cover all of his bases, a small army of drones were slashing and hauling underbrush back to the base, guarded by 14 zerglings. At the base, several buildings had been made, including the Spawning Pool, which had multiple chambers each containing their own unique blend of protein sludge, a quartet of Sunken Colonies providing protection (with strict orders to not attack anything on the road unless the base had already been discovered) and several mutating constructions.
Pounding music flooded the garage. A mechanic's tool whirred in a shrill counterpart to the rhythm. Private O'Nill, of the 9th Highland Regiment, was tapping a pair of pencils as the beat was declining. Must have seen an officer, O'Nill mused. He was surrounded by paper, and had been ordered to sort it all… That night. Thirteen armloads of maps and training reports later, the stacks had reduced to reasonable levels. At his fourteenth, though, a small badge of purple on one of the rolls of paper caught his eye. It was an unfamiliar design, so he set it aside to look at later.