– [Evolution Unchained] –
1
Several meters beneath the frozen and icy ground, the prime larva – Prime – along with the rest of the Zerg spawns waited silently. Three days had passed and not a single marine could be seen scouting the surrounding woods. It was very odd. Usually when a dozen or so humans got mutilated and dragged off by the Zerg, a heavily armed party of marine would be sent out from the local garrison in order to locate the hive and assess the situation.
The marines would not be able to find the hive since there was none to begin with – at least not on this backwater and primitive planet prior to the untimely crash of the research vessel. The hatchery had not been spawned as Prime did not want to waste the limited resource to spawn one only to have relocated it again. The spawning pool was morphed because Prime needed to speed things up with the help of the Zergling, and out of the twelve Zergling that spawned from the pool, three had vanished.
Whatever happened to those Zergling was of concern, but not so much that Prime would want to waste time and send out a scouting party. It could replace those missing Zergling readily with the resources the Drones had harvested. Having hundreds of Drones scouring the ground sped the mining process greatly.
If those missing Zergling had not encounter any search party, they might have gone rogue – feral – and wandered far away from the group, doing whatever their instinct told them to. If they did encounter the marines, there would certainly be more activities in the immediate vicinity, especially from the nearby human's dwellings. In fact, there would be certainly be more of a commotion if those missing Zergling had gone feral and attacked everything within reach.
Despite the theories, nothing out of ordinary happened in the past few days as far as Prime could tell. It appeared as if the Terran did not care the slightest for their population and settlements, which honestly, wasn't all surprising considering all the usual discords between the Terran colonies on the outer worlds and beyond.
Prime knew this because it had been parted with genetic memories of those that came before. Thanked to the memory, it had witness much in the eons since the Zerg first revolted against their creator. Under the absolute will of the Overmind, there was only harmony and a single goal for the Swarm. Under the Queen of Blades' leadership, there was strife and chaos – directionless and aberration. Perhaps that was because she was originally a Terran.
In truth, Prime found humanity peculiar and contradicting race. Even during its captivity, the scientists bickered constantly on how to proceed with its experimentation and further enhancement. If they had collaborated like a hive mind would, striving towards a single ideal and purpose, their ambition would be realized much sooner. Now, they were all dead.
Prime pondered why it was thinking so much about seemingly random topics as of late. Perhaps it could no longer hear anyone dictating its will and action on this uncharted planet, allowing it to regain its own individuality and a sense of self. Even so, there was still a faint lingering echo in the back of its miniscule mind, telling it to spread out, multiple and assimilate all life in existence, especially the Protoss to reach biological perfection. Perfection was the one and only goal of the Swarm. Without that purpose, Prime wouldn't know what to do at all. Without a purpose, its existence was meaningless.
Still, Prime thought it was redundant for the Dark Voice to tell the Swarm to seek out the Protoss. Since the Swarm's purpose was to assimilate all life form and reach biological perfection, the Protoss would be assimilated as they are part of life after all. That goal was forsaken by the Queen of the Blades, however, and despite her effort to render the Swarm subservient to her will, the original directive lingered within the subconscious of every Zerg. Not even the Terran for their ingenuity could undo the indoctrination brought forth by the Dark Voice when their race was uplifted from their birthplace of Zerus.
Prime spent the next couple of days speculating what the Dark Voice actually was – almost curiously. It knew that any Zerg it spawned and would spawn were enslaved to the Dark Voice, driving them all feral just like every Zerg that the Overmind had spun forth from the Swarm for millennia. There was nothing Prime could do about that, and it didn't want to change the status quo.
The Dark Voice gave it a purpose and a meaning to its otherwise pointless existence.
Once Prime was sure that the Terran wasn't searching to eradicate the Zerg, it resurfaced along with the rest of the Swarm – its brood. Prime decided that it was appropriate to reallocate to a suitable location and form a base. Upon giving its order, the Drones, numbering in the hundreds, collided into each other in a chaotic mess. They were pushing one another out of the way while the Zergling tore a few apart to get to the front of the line.
They stopped moving when Prime gave the order to halt. It requested a few Drones to come forth and mutated into Overlords. Overlords were evolved from a giant space-faring and semi-intelligent creature which had pled to be assimilated into the Swarm. Doing so had prevent their impending extinction and granted the Swarm telepathy, basic psionic power. It wasn't the same as mental link shared by all of the Zerg since the Zerg lacked innate psionic power unlike the Terran and the Protoss – especially the latter.
With the large, bulbous brain armored in bones and cartilage emerging from the cocoon and hovered into the air like bloated hot air balloon, Prime tried to speak to them, seeking a way to coordinate the fledging Swarm with their powerful psionic ability. The Overlords were forthcoming despite realizing their connection to the Zerg no longer there. That mental link was severed by the scientists to prevent theirs specimen communicating to each other and collaborating amongst many other reasons.
The Overlords blanketed the Swarm with their psionic ability and coordinated the Drones and Zerglings to move in one cohesive unit without resulting into anarchy. The Drones autonomously collected all the precious minerals they had mined while the Zergling began scouting the path head, preventing possible ambushes.
Prime rode one of the Overlords to have a clear view of the surrounding landscapes as they headed to the South West, where the mountain towering high into the misty sky. Minerals within those mountains were abundant.
On the way, Prime noticed a gigantic ice wall far to the South. The ice wall looked artificial constructed and impressive enough to warrant attention. To the North remained shrouded in endless mist, however.
The Overlords collectively sensed several ghostly presences within the northern mist and relayed what they were able to scan to the rest of the Zerg, telling them to take precaution. They assured that there were no invisible enemies anywhere on the ground or any kind of electromagnetic waves riding in the air – the kind that Terran used to communicate to one another over vast distances.
The information concerning electronic transmission reinforced Prime's speculation. There was obviously Terran inhabiting this primitive world, but they weren't the Terran that the Swarm had fought against for many, many years. These humans were technological inferior in comparison. Knowing its opponent's technological state did not alter Prime's grand plan the slightest. The new piece of information did made things much easier in the long run, however.
The entire brood migrated over the flowing body of water – river – and into the hilly landscape using the descending snow and frost as cover. In the spacious valley, easily defendable thanked to the elevated ground and rocky terrain, Prime wished to build a thriving hive worthy of the Swarm.
The Overlords ferried much of the broods and minerals into the area over the salty river since grounded Zerg loathed vast amount of moving water. While the Overlords carried out the task, one of the Drones cocooned itself at Prime's behest. The cocoon swelled in size, throbbed and pulsated.
Within an hour and a bit, the engorged cocoon burst violently like an oversized balloon, revealing within the first of many hatcheries to come. Creep swiftly spread outwards from the structure, nourishing the already settled Zerg and strengthened them. With the expansive creep crawling across the rocky terrain, morphing a Spawning Pool to spawn Zergling was much faster than before. An Evolution chamber – a place to evolve Zerg further – was also morphed from one of the Drones.
After giving orders to the Overlords, which passed them to the Drones and Zergling via telepathy, Prime latched onto the evolution chamber to analyze its genetic makeup. It was very much Zerg, but there was many strains that were alien in origin. Those strains were mostly fractured or incomplete. Prime tried to fix those strains using Evolution Chamber and spawned several larvae via the hatchery with the modified genetic code to see what would happened, but those larvae either went feral or died agonizingly.
Self-preservation came with individual awareness, thus Prime did not want its fate to be a pool of blood coated with slimy gory guts. It stopped trying to mend its genetic makeup after a couple days more days of failure. During that time, the Drones had managed to mine the side of the vast mountain and gained unrestricted access to the mineral embedded within. In contrast, the Zerglings were very bored while burrowing in the ground.
The Zergling had waited for something to happen, but nothing did. Some did wander around the area, searching for anything to sharpen their claws, but always returned to the hatchery and burrowing since the area was enclosed by rivers and mountains. If they were of normal Zerg, they would stay in one spot until they day they died when no new order was given. They were behaving very much like self-aware individuals, and whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen.
Prime curled into a ball and rolled towards the hatchery. The new larvae were ready, and with minerals and nutrients fed directly into the hatchery, where larvae could morph into any kind of Zerg. Sadly, the only Zerg that they could morph into with available minerals was Zergling. Anything else cost vespene gas, which the world had none so far. Petroleum was also lacking. That was a big problem.
The Overlords relayed that the knowledge that petroleum commonly found in arid landscape such as desert. Since this area covered entirely by snow throughout the years, the likelihood of an oil reserve in the earth was exceedingly rare. Since none of the Zerg knew the geography of the planet, Prime decided to move onto another matter – shoring up the base defenses in case of invasion.
Spore Crawler and Spine Clawer were defensive structures, and both could be morphed from Drones if sufficient minerals and biomass were provided. Minerals could be mined in the mountain or within the earth, but biomass had to be harvested from indigenous life form.
Prime was sure that the remote planet weren't colonized by any of the Terran Dominion's forces despite there were humans villages about. With that in mind, those small villages were ripped for the picking. It gave no more further thought on the matter and ordered several larvae wandering around the hatchery to cocoon and morph into Zergling. They stopped mutating when the number of Zergling reached fifty or so, giving Prime decent size hoard.
With the Overlords coordinating the brood from high above, they filed into several lines. Prime boarded one of the Overlords to overseer the Zerglings below. Prime knew it wasn't a commander, but currently, there were no commander available so it would do what it had, and with the lack of resistance from the Terran so far, the hunt would be in full swing.
– To be continued –
Current place settled by the Zerg is North West of the Wall and South-East of the Frost fangs. They are in the mountain ranges next to the Bay of Ice. It is on the opposite side of the Haunted Forest (Where Bran is), and the Bay of Seals, where the army of undead were. Story takes place in season 6.
