Story so far

A SecUnit that privately calls itself Murderbot, part machine and part cloned human tissue, with a governor module it hacked long ago and a large private archive of entertainment serials, once saved Dr. Mensah's PreservationAux survey team from a burrowing predator and then from GrayCris, a company that massacred the rival DeltFall expedition to hide its illegal harvest of alien remnants. Mensah bought its contract out of Company inventory rather than let it be scrapped, and then let it go when it chose its own future over a home on Preservation. Traveling alone, it fell in with ART, a media-obsessed research transport that reconfigured its body to pass for augmented human and became its first friend; together they reached RaviHyral and proved that the fifty-seven people Murderbot killed at Ganaka Pit died because sabotage malware drove every unit there berserk, so the massacre was never its choice. It parted from ART with a comm link and one instruction: find your crew.

This book opens with Murderbot twenty-six cycles into a crowded bot-driven passenger transport, listed on the manifest as Security Consultant Rin and stuck arbitrating fights among contract laborers, Ayres and Elbik and the rest, who have sold twenty years of their lives to a labor installation. The reason it is out here at all is Dr. Mensah. Searching the newsfeeds at a transit hub, it found the GrayCris and DeltFall lawsuits grinding on with itself still listed as an unaccounted-for SecUnit, and an interview in which a visibly exhausted Mensah urged the Preservation Council to join the formal call to investigate Milu, a terraforming project GrayCris abandoned outside the Corporation Rim. A small company called GoodNightLander Independent has filed to take possession and hung a tractor array to keep the derelict facility from falling into the planet. Murderbot worked out the likely truth, that the terraforming was cover for an illegal alien-remnant mining operation and that the facility was meant to burn up with the evidence inside it, and decided to go collect proof and hand it to Mensah, so the investigation would swallow GrayCris and she could go home to Preservation and stop looking so tired.

A small company called GoodNightLander Independent has filed to take possession and hung a tractor array to keep the derelict facility from falling into the planet. Murderbot worked out the likely truth, that the terraforming was cover for an illegal alien-remnant mining operation and that the facility was meant to burn up with the evidence inside it, and decided to go collect proof and hand it to Mensah, so the investigation would swallow GrayCris and she could go home to Preservation and stop looking so tired.

Right now the transport is on final approach to HaveRatton Station, six hours from the end of a trip Murderbot never wants to repeat. There is no scheduled route to Milu; the only candidate is a small bot-piloted supply ship that runs there on a private forty-seven-cycle schedule and is sitting in the private docks with its departure on hold. ART's reconfiguration will fool scans but not another SecUnit, and Milu station holds fewer than a hundred people, so there will be no crowd to disappear into. Murderbot is tired of pretending to be human and it badly wants to hurt GrayCris, and the only way to learn whether that ship is going to Milu is to walk up to its lock and ask.