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Earlier appearances

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character

Murderbot

SecUnit · Consultant Rin · Security Consultant Rin · Rin · Eden · security consultant

The SecUnit saves the whole team and kills the last combat bot, but loses Miki; grieving, it fakes its death and resolves to bring its evidence to Mensah in person.

Story so far

In the geo pod, Murderbot lets Miki dig the projectiles and shrapnel from its body while Don Abene boots the diggers and, together, they reason out GrayCris's true plan: not to kill the team but to let the terraforming facility fall into the planet and erase the evidence. Wilken and Gerth were sent only to disable the tractor array holding it aloft, via an encrypted signal that launched a combat bot aboard a work zipper to destroy the array. Murderbot commandeers the diggers as a diversion, springs the crew off the shuttle, and freezes Gerth's armor to capture her, while the researchers steer the shuttle to knock the zipper off course and save the array.

But a combat bot pursues and breaches the fleeing shuttle. Murderbot arms itself with a core cutter; Miki, refusing Abene's order to save itself, launches at the bot's head to give Murderbot an opening. Murderbot drives the cutter through the bot's processors and kills it, but too late: the bot has crushed Miki's chest, ending it.

Devastated, Murderbot sits on the deck as Abene sobs over the feed. It has its geo pod evidence, and it seals the wound of Miki's death by leaving in silence: it dons an evac suit, stages its own body being blown out the breached lock, and jets to Ship to slip away. Sorting the assassins' gear, it finds a hidden pocket of identity markers and a different memory clip, and, moved by Abene's instinctive love for Miki and unable to stop caring now that it has started, it decides not merely to send the evidence to Dr. Mensah but to bring it to her personally.

It is going back.

Appearance

A lean humanized construct with a generic human face, its facility wounds now cleaned and sealed by Miki, dressed in dark clothes, later in a full evac suit with maneuvering jets as it escapes into space.

Role

Protagonist and narrator; the SecUnit who saves everyone but cannot save Miki, and turns its grief toward finally seeking out Mensah.

Relationships

Miki — The bot friend it could not save, whose sacrifice and Abene's love for it break something open in Murderbot.
Don Abene — The client it saves and quietly leaves; her love for Miki teaches it something it carries away.
Dr. Mensah — Whom it now resolves to seek out in person, evidence in hand, rather than from a safe distance.
GrayCris — Whose facility-collapse scheme it foils and against whom it now carries hard proof.

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

Sources — 6 recorded facts, by chapter
Chapter 1
  • The rogue, self-freed SecUnit, traveling alone toward Milu to gather evidence against GrayCris for Dr. Mensah.
Chapter 2
  • The rogue SecUnit, hidden aboard the Milu expedition, recruits the trusting bot Miki to reach the facility and expose GrayCris.
Chapter 3
  • The rogue SecUnit, stowed away in the GI shuttle's hauler-bot slot, rides Miki's feed toward the facility while wrestling with envy.
Chapter 4
  • The rogue SecUnit gets its GrayCris evidence, then blows its cover saving Don Abene from a hostile, improvising a story to survive.
Chapter 5
  • The SecUnit destroys a combat bot, hijacks a drone swarm to retrieve Hirune, and hacks the traitor Wilken's armor to save Abene.
Chapter 6
  • The SecUnit saves the whole team and kills the last combat bot, but loses Miki; grieving, it fakes its death and resolves to bring its evidence to Mensah in person.
Character portrait