Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

quarters, only just giving the door enough time to get out of his way. Toby and Flynn exchanged a puzzled glance and hurried after him, with Ffolkes dithering along in the rear, as always. Bartok marched down corridor after corridor, ignoring the salutes of those he passed, until he was well into territory that was usually off-limits to the two reporters. Toby felt a growing excitement. He'd been trying to bluff, badger, and threaten his way into this area since he first came aboard, with no success.
    Everyone knew there was Something Big locked away, a secret weapon for the invasion, but no one knew what. The few who did were too senior or too scared to talk, all of which had whetted Toby's appetite to the boiling point. And now he was finally going to get a look at it. He surreptitiously signaled Flynn to start filming. The camera was locked into Flynn's comm implant, and could be activated with no outward sign, a trick which had come in handy on more than one occasion.
    Bartok finally came to a massive bulkhead door that would only open to an esper scan, and it was all Toby could do to keep from fuming visibly as he waited impatiently for the esper on the other side of the door to clear them. A quick glance at Ffolkes's white and nervous face suggested that he'd never seen what lay waiting on the other side of the door either, but knew enough not to be at
    all keen about seeing it now. And then the door finally swung open, and Bartok led the way in, with Toby all but stepping on his heels.
    Before them lay a vast auditorium, surrounded by ribbed steel walls. Filling most of it was a huge glass tank. The sides were easily thirty feet high, and they stretched off into the distance for farther than Toby could comfortably look. The tank contained a thick, pale yellow liquid that moved constantly with slow syrupy tides. And floating in that liquid, huge and dark and awful, was a great fleshy mass, spotted with high tech, connected to the tank and beyond by countless wires and cables. The mass bulged shapelessly, an unhealthy conglomeration of fused living materials, like a single great cancer floating in a sea of pus. It stank horribly, and Toby screwed up his face as he moved slowly forward, fascinated. Behind him he could hear Ffolkes coughing and choking.
    "Marvelous, isn't it?" said Bartok. "This will be the secret of our success, the single element that makes our invasion of Mistworld possible. It's currently projecting a screen that keeps the Mistworld espers and their tech from detecting our presence. It has other abilities, too, to be revealed when our invasion begins."
    "What the hell is it?" said Toby. "Is it alive?"
    "Oh yes," said Bartok. "You are looking at the very latest in bioengineering.
    Imperial scientists took all the espers imprisoned in Silo Nine, all that were left after the aborted breakout, and executed them. They then removed the thousands of brains and melded the tissues together to form the single construct before you. Thousands of living brains, fused together into one giant esper computer, a single giant esp-blocker, and more besides. It's controlled by the worms that previously controlled the prisoners—Wormboy's legacy. They're hot-wired into the brain tissues at regular intervals, monitoring and
    maintaining the thought processes. The worms have formed a crude gestalt that enables us to communicate with the construct directly via the brains' telepathy.
    It calls itself Legion."
    "The esper minds," said Toby slowly. "Are they… alive in there? Aware of what they've become?"
    Bartok shrugged. "No one knows for sure. They're part of something greater now."
    Toby moved slowly closer, till his face was almost pressed against the glass. He could sense Flynn not far behind him, quietly getting it all on film. The horror Toby felt at what had been done to thousands of defenseless people silenced him for a moment, but already he was working furiously on how best to present it to the viewing public. They were going to want to know everything about this…
    abomination, and he was the only one who could tell them. He brought his thoughts firmly under control. You couldn't let your feelings get in the way of a good story. Every reporter knew that.
    "Why is it called Legion?" he asked finally.
    I am Legion, because I am many. The psionic voice rang inside Toby's head like the rotting vocal cords of a month-dead corpse, forcing its way into his thoughts. It curled inside his mind like a poisonous