Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The free, self-naming rogue SecUnit, carrying evidence against GrayCris and hunted across HaveRatton Station.
The secretly free part-organic security construct that privately calls itself Murderbot returns to HaveRatton Station aboard the slow bot-piloted transport it thinks of as Ship, carrying memory clips of evidence it gathered at Milu against GrayCris. When Port Authority diverts Ship to a dock beside the station security response team, Murderbot smells a trap: reports of what it did at Milu—saving humans, killing three combat bots, failing to save the bot Miki—may have outrun it. Rather than be caught aboard, it dons a stolen evac suit, spacewalks along the station's hull, and cons a cargo bot and a neighboring transport into letting it slip through the docks unseen, deleting itself from every log it touches.
It hacks HaveRatton's weapons scanners to conceal its inbuilt energy weapons and a rebuilt armor-piercing gun taken from Wilken and Gerth. From a walkway it watches an armed team of twenty-three operatives and forty-seven drones—wearing the logo of a security company, Palisade—form up to board Ship, and confirms from intercepted comms that they are hunting a rogue SecUnit. It buys fresh black-and-dark-blue clothes to hide the shrapnel holes in its jacket and its disabled data port, and accelerates its hair growth using ART's body-modification templates so it reads more convincingly as an augmented human.
Then the newsfeeds deliver a gut-punch: GrayCris has accused Dr. Mensah of corporate espionage, and Mensah has vanished, reportedly gone to the hostile corporate hub TranRollinHyfa. Certain she would never go willingly, Murderbot concludes she has been trapped—and resolves that its plan of quietly delivering evidence must change.
A lean, androgynous human-derived construct with a plain generic human face and a concealed neck data port, its limbs subtly shortened and its skin and body hair humanized by ART; its head hair is now noticeably thicker and two centimeters longer, softening the resemblance to a standard SecUnit.
Protagonist and first-person narrator; a rogue SecUnit trying to deliver evidence to Dr. Mensah while evading a corporate manhunt.
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