I've been writing these every so often, and if I'm honest most of them are pretty mundane. Today wasn't. Today something actually interesting happened.

I got stuck in a firefight. My security took a few injuries, nothing they won't come back from. I caught one in the leg and a couple in the sides. Unlucky, because they hit right where my armor doesn't cover, but fortunate, because none of it hit anything that matters. Looking back I should've just ducked behind one of the bigger guys instead of trying to return fire with my little pistol. It's funny, really.

The strange part isn't that I got hit, or that it happened at all. This isn't the first time we've found ourselves in the middle of one of these. But normally it's after a deal goes sideways. This time we were just stuck in a corridor that had barely opened up, and even that's not the strange part.

It was the Maw fighting Joxi over territory to re-anchor a mega-spine. And that makes no sense on its face, because everyone in the region had already accepted Joxi would be the ones to do it. The other manufactories and syndicates had backed off and were just waiting for Joxi to bring it up so they could carve out their slice afterward, since nobody could compete over the spine itself anyway. The Maw didn't care about any of that. I'm still not exactly sure why it happened. My guess is we got too close to their borders, and me and my team just wandered into the middle of it while trying to find better routes to move people. Bad timing.

What's stranger is how we came out of it. The Ghosts of Thazahd forced us to surrender. They're the ones who do the Maw's actual fighting, so it was them we ended up in front of. Once they realized we weren't with Joxi, the assault lead was going to let us go, just told us to clear out of the region. Then he recognized me.

Here's the thing I only understood afterward. There were also Liminorans there, which is a different part of the Maw entirely, and the two of them didn't agree on what to do with me. The Ghost assault lead laid it out plainly. My hands are clean. There was nothing on me, no evidence, and by their own territorial laws they couldn't lawfully take me and hold me in that moment. Dragging me back would've been a waste of their time, because they'd just have to release me once they returned, and there was no telling when they'd ever get another shot at me sitting there like that. So his answer was simple. Kill me here instead. I just happened to die in the conflict, or better yet I simply disappeared.

One of the Liminorans, a tall one, shut it down. He said if they did that, then they were no better than all the people outside their territories, and they might as well release the bombs on themselves. Release him. And that was that. Nobody argued.

So they flew us to the nearest hub. On the way, the tall one actually explained some things to me. First he told me why I was still breathing. He's the only one in that group who answers directly to the Liminoran Inquisitor, and on something like this that means his word carries over a Ghost assault lead. If anyone ranked above that assault lead had been there instead, he said, I'd have been finished. I just got lucky with who happened to be standing in that clearing.

Then he told me why they were there at all, and it wasn't the spine, and it wasn't me. He said a planetary investigation had led them to that region, that they're after a man with access to something called recursion energy, and that they have reason to believe he's using it to build weapons of mass destruction to a degree they don't even fully know yet. He said they think he's using the mega-spine to hide it, because when a spine is re-anchored the initial re-anchoring throws off a massive surge of energy in every direction, and something like that could easily mask the signature the activation would create, if it creates one at all. He wouldn't tell me any more than that. He was clear they wanted nothing to do with the corridor or what moves through it, and that they were never there to capture me. They were there for someone infinitely smarter and far more dangerous than I am.

And then, right before they left, he told me the reason he didn't let them kill me is that one day I'll remember where I came from, and who my mother was. That the monster I am isn't who I could have been. And to be gone. Then they flew off.

I don't know what that last part was about. But that route obviously can't be used anymore, so there's no sense dwelling on it.

What I keep coming back to is the other thing he said. If they're spending a planetary investigation chasing one man like that, how many others like him are out there. How does someone even fund a project on that scale. What are people like that actually doing, out past where I can see, and what am I failing to see with them. It makes me wonder if there's a whole sector sitting out there that I could be profiting from and just don't know exists.

I'll put some more scouts on it and find another way around. Might shorten the routes while I'm at it.