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The corridors gradually become darker and grimier, the faded or completely burned out lights unable to keep back the encroaching shadows. The air grows even more stale and heavy, and the sampler starts giving out regular warning beeps, the light of its display shifting to orange. The background thrum of machinery and station systems grows faint before fading completely, leaving only the sound of your footsteps as you enter the abandoned sections - nodes that, for one reason or another, have been deemed unfit for any purpose or viable for restoration, but have become lodged too deeply within Barter's structure to be jettisoned or dismantled.
In theory, access to an abandoned node should be sealed off and it usually is - for a time. People are people after all, and there will always be those who will seek privacy. Debtors seeking to escape a lifetime of indentured work. Traders wanting to conduct the kind of business that no bribe, no matter how large, would cause ProfSec to look the other way. People who boarded Barter and became passengers expecting one thing only to find it was something different, but decided to still try to live out their own reality in the only place they could: religious cultists, political extremists, and fringe ideologues of countless stripes. They find these abandoned spaces, break the seals, and simply move in.
Valsen belonged to that last group. A human from one of the more conservative Core Worlds, it was the typical story of a psion being shunned for his powers by his family and community, falling in with the wrong sort of mentor, and building an identity around the psionically gifted being the next step in evolution of sapient life. Bitterness, insecurity, and a desire to show them all, all wrapped in a single package. But he had some charisma and, from what you've been able to gather, he either learned the Sensing path or had a subordinate with that talent, cause he was able to discover those with latent psionic talents among Barter's population, awaken them, and recruit those people into his coven with the typical promises of power, wealth, and a better life. It also had to be the way he discovered you were a psion - you were always careful about how and when you used your powers, after all, mostly sticking to the ones that didn't manifest any obvious physical phenomena. Frying that drone earlier was just about as close you dared to approach being ostentatious.
Come to think of it, wonder what method those things are using to track you? A mostly academic question - you can think of several, but none of them could be blocked without using magic yourself.
(cont)
