Story so far

Previously, on an isolated planetary survey contract, the SecUnit that calls itself Murderbot had already quietly hacked its own governor module and was watching serials instead of its clients when something started killing survey teams. Protecting Dr. Mensah's PreservationAux group, it uncovered deleted hazard data, the slaughter of the rival DeltFall expedition by SecUnits running combat override modules, and an illegal GrayCris operation stripping alien remnants out of the planet; when its rogue status and a much older accidental massacre came out, Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Gurathin and the others chose to trust it anyway. It was nearly destroyed shielding Mensah from the beacon blast that brought rescue, and at the Company's station Mensah bought its contract outright while Pin-Lee won a court order preserving its memory, and then Murderbot walked away alone, before anyone could take it home to Preservation, because it wanted whatever came next to be its own choice.

This book opens a handful of cycles later, with Murderbot crossing the mall of a busy transit ring in the Corporation Rim in gray and black work clothes that cover every inorganic part of it, passing so far successfully as an ordinary augmented human and trying not to panic when strangers make eye contact. A newsburst out of Port FreeCommerce stops it cold, partly because it is only now learning that the station where it spent its working life is actually called that, and mostly because one of the images in the story is of Murderbot itself, standing in a hotel lobby with Pin-Lee and Ratthi. The journalists tagged it as nothing more than an unnamed bodyguard and never connected the SecUnit Dr. Mensah famously purchased with the generic augmented human in the picture; the real story is the Company, DeltFall, Preservation and three other polities ganging up on GrayCris amid a many-sided solicitor fight over jurisdiction, liability and bond guarantees. Rattled, it keeps moving toward the automated docks, hacking an ID-screening system, some weapon-scanning drones and a guard bot and deleting itself from their memories, because it is off the Company's inventory but in the Corporation Rim it is still property. It has a plan, or the beginning of one: it needs the answer to a question it will not yet say out loud, and the answer is at RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station.

Mensah famously purchased with the generic augmented human in the picture; the real story is the Company, DeltFall, Preservation and three other polities ganging up on GrayCris amid a many-sided solicitor fight over jurisdiction, liability and bond guarantees. Rattled, it keeps moving toward the automated docks, hacking an ID-screening system, some weapon-scanning drones and a guard bot and deleting itself from their memories, because it is off the Company's inventory but in the Corporation Rim it is still property. It has a plan, or the beginning of one: it needs the answer to a question it will not yet say out loud, and the answer is at RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station.

Right now the crowd around its first choice of ride is too thick, a hauler accident having drawn humans and blame-sorting inspectors to the lock, so Murderbot has slipped into the private docks and pinged its second option instead: a bot-driven long-range research vessel owned by a planetary university, rented out for cargo runs between assignments, its hail for human crew answered by a flat null. It has offered the ship hundreds of hours of downloaded serials, books and music in exchange for passage, along with the convenient lie that it is a free bot trying to get back to its human guardian. The ship accepts and the lock swings open. Twenty-one cycles of isolation lie ahead, and after less than seven cycles as a free agent among humans Murderbot wants nothing more than to sink into its media and pretend it does not exist, which is easier than deciding what it will actually do when the ship reaches RaviHyral.