Exigency: The Old Guard

"Reading a mind" is something of a misnomer. Psions can, at most, exchange sentences or brief flashes of imagery and even then there's no guarantee they'll be interpreted accurately. Even the most disciplined of minds is a fragmented, disjointed thing, and it takes years of practise to discern anything coherent amidst all the noise.

But apparently Valon isn't troubled in the same ways as other psions. The trio are a shelf of books to him. He leafs through the pages of their thoughts quickly, casually, with little apparent effort. The feeling is bizarre and mercifully brief.

And afterwards, impossibly, Valon is holding Wilhelm's scythe, examining it quizzically. He never seemed to move from his position at the fore of the phase gate.

"Interesting. Little more than a toy, and yet in this backwards society it allows you to dominate in combat?" Valon gives it a skillful twirl. "To be expected. Primitive as you now are, you are nevertheless superior to the rest of the maggots wallowing in their own filth.

"You are of... Erdain, yes? Hah, of course. That makes you House Loydamon." Valon nods. "Erdain Loydamon was named Grandmaster for good reason. We are practically brothers-in-arms."

Valon turns to Serana. "It's muted beneath all those cogs, but you are plainly House Celanrul. I will not pretend that we were allies, but we never came to blows."

And Pudge. "Ah, the ever-engimatic House Gemorai..."

Valon stops. And frowns: no longer bored, but shocked. Perhaps even angry. "No. Wait. You don't just have the genetic markers of House Gemorai. You are Gemorai. Yes, I can feel the potential within. One of your... grandparents? No, perhaps closer! An immediate family member! One of them must have come from stasis. Explain yourself!"

Valon is dumbstruck. Again the icy wind of his psi sweeps through the party's minds.

"You're not attempting to trick me." A statement, not a question. He's already corroborated it with his sweep. "You genuinely don't understand what I'm talking about, do you? None of you know? How long has it been?"

Valon's eyes flash. Pudge can feel a spike in infranet activity: Valon is interfacing with the facility's computer systems.

"I'm the first one to emerge at this hub. How long has it been since...? No. No, it can't be.

Ten thousand years?! That's ridiculous. I can't have been gone that long!"

He rifles through the party's thoughts again. He's getting increasingly rough, less considerate.

"A 'Schism'... the Unification failed?"

His rage, his confusion is palpable. It's boiling over, to the point that everyone nearby can feel it ebbing, growing. It's painful to be so close to it. And it's going to get worse.

Valon was apocalyptically angry, but Pudge's words temper his fury. "It was routine," Valon growls in response. "Establishing sleeper colonies in the wake of the evacuation: gates left buried on a hundred worlds, ready to be reactivated. Only we never returned. And, as you deduced, I was left in the Vault, frozen for aeons."

His gaze pans across the trio, his disgust obvious. "Something else came to dominate these worlds. Something beneath my notice." His psi pulses with obscene power...

And just like that, the party are paralysed. Valon walks away and the team can barely move their eyes to follow him.

"I shall head to the surface," he says, "and from the surface I shall return to the stars. I wish to see what has become of this sector."

He places the scythe at Wilhelm's feet. "More will come after me. Do as you will. My House is dead and gone and I care not what happens to the others."

He walks to the centre of the shaft. Sensing his wishes, one of the platforms disconnects from the racks on the wall and allows him to step aboard. It ascends at high speed.

The large pod that Valon arrived in is spirited off by an articulated arm that appears from nowhere. Behind it, the phasegate begins to hum, preparing for another transfer from the Vault proper...

The team's communicators burst into life. "This is Chief Cáceres," the voice crackles and pops, barely coherent. "If you're hearing this: you're one of the few people left on this planet that I can trust. The Mercs are fighting over the Ivory Cliff military base.

"I don't have the resources to go in: it's a warzone. Ivory Cliff has the planet's only phase transceiver but it also has our only anti-ship cannon, and the renegades want to hold the city hostage with it.

"By the time you hear this... I'll probably be dead."

The message starts to repeat. It's a recording.

The phasegate thrums more loudly. Tendrils of energy arc between its prongs.