Murderbot is a rogue SecUnit, a part-organic security construct that hacked its own governor module and has been free ever since. On a planetary survey it saved Dr. Mensah and her PreservationAux team from GrayCris, the corporation that massacred the rival DeltFall expedition to hide its illegal mining of alien remnants; Mensah bought its contract afterward and it left anyway, rather than be owned by anyone, even someone kind. Traveling alone it fell in with ART, the media-obsessed research transport that remade its body so it could pass for human and became its closest friend, and with ART's help it learned that the Ganaka Pit massacre of fifty-seven humans it had blamed itself for was caused by sabotage malware and not by any choice of its own. Then it smuggled itself to GrayCris's abandoned facility at Milu, befriended Miki, the guileless human-form bot of Don Abene's assessment team, and exposed the assassins Wilken and Gerth, only to watch Miki die throwing itself at a combat bot so that Murderbot could kill it. Grieving, it faked its own death and decided to carry the Milu evidence to Dr. Mensah in person.
This book opened at HaveRatton Station, where Murderbot escaped a Palisade boarding operation and learned that GrayCris had accused Dr. Mensah of espionage and made her vanish onto TranRollinHyfa. It mailed the Milu evidence to her family on Preservation, followed on stolen identity markers, and found Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin alone on the station with the gunship barred from docking. Together they baited GrayCris with a forged ransom document, and when Mensah's implant pinged, Murderbot ambushed her escort, destroyed the Palisade SecUnit guarding her, and walked her through the cargo backbone to the port, telling her it had left and would not be leaving with her. A port lockdown trapped them short of the docks; it talked a supervisor into raising a barrier for Mensah alone, stole the port's drone fleet, turned the hauler bots into a killing maze, and destroyed two Palisade SecUnits before a Combat SecUnit nearly finished it and Gurathin cranked open a manual release. Aboard the gunship it called in an emergency retrieval, refused a repair cubicle, and was ordered by Mensah not to seize the ship over an insulting extra bond. Then Palisade loosed a disembodied construct into the gunship's feed; Murderbot went into the bot pilot's hardware, baited the Attacker into the docked shuttle with its own Milu recordings, and had Mensah and Pin-Lee cut the shuttle loose, after which the gunship destroyed its attackers and Murderbot suffered a catastrophic failure. In this chapter it woke in fragments aboard a shabby old Preservation ship, rebuilding itself out of human neural tissue and an intact archive of its favorite serial.
Aboard the gunship it called in an emergency retrieval, refused a repair cubicle, and was ordered by Mensah not to seize the ship over an insulting extra bond. Then Palisade loosed a disembodied construct into the gunship's feed; Murderbot went into the bot pilot's hardware, baited the Attacker into the docked shuttle with its own Milu recordings, and had Mensah and Pin-Lee cut the shuttle loose, after which the gunship destroyed its attackers and Murderbot suffered a catastrophic failure. In this chapter it woke in fragments aboard a shabby old Preservation ship, rebuilding itself out of human neural tissue and an intact archive of its favorite serial.
Right now Murderbot is standing on the balcony of Dr. Mensah's office on Preservation Transit Station, memory rebuild complete, having bought passage off the station and let the transport board without it. Nobody here knows what it is except its own people, and Mensah has apologized again for assuming it would need help learning to be a person. The newsfeeds say the bond company has declared war on GrayCris, and that the Milu data and the assassins' blackmail clip have gone public and pulled in other corporations and polities. Arada wants to hire it for a survey outside the Corporation Rim, Pin-Lee has slipped it forged IDs and currency cards to prove it is not a prisoner or a pet, GoodNightLander Independent has offered work to a person who may or may not be called Rin, and Dr. Bharadwaj wants its story for a documentary arguing that constructs deserve citizenship. Mensah has just asked what it wants to do. It still does not know. But it has options, nobody is rushing it, and it has just met her small daughter, who wanted to hear how it saved her mother.