THERE’S ANOTHER BOOK IN THE MURDERBOT DIARIES! I WAS SO EXCITED TO GET TO HANG OUT WITH MURDERBOT AGAIN!
I actually preordered this one from my local book store, but the first printing sold out, so I had to wait for the second printing to get my copy, which I actually bought for my dad for his birthday. In the meantime, I requested the ebook from my library because I just couldn’t wait!
This book is so much fun. If you enjoyed any of the novellas in this series, I highly recommend picking up this one. Murderbot is just as sarcastic as ever and I could hang out with it all day!
Much like the novellas, the first, full-length novel in this series starts off with Murderbot’s humans in mortal peril. Murderbot has already been shot and thrown off a ship (a water ship, not a space ship, so Murderbot is fine, just wet and “leaking fluids”), and has had to climb back on board and regain control of the situation of which they lost control because the humans were idiots and refused to follow the safety protocol they had all agreed to ahead of time.
But Murderbot manages to get rid of their attackers without losing any of its clients and they all make it back safe and sound.
Since we last saw Murderbot and its favorite human, Dr. Mensah, Murderbot has pretty much just been chilling with Dr. Mensah and her family, which includes multiple marital partners and several children, the oldest of which, Amena, is a teenager. Dr. Mensah is struggling with PTSD after the attempt on her life the last time we saw her, but so far she has neglected to go to therapy, or even tell her family about it. So, when she asks Murderbot to accompany some of her family members on a mission, Murderbot says it will only go if Dr. Mensah agrees to go to therapy.
So Mensah agrees and Murderbot sets off on another adventure with Overse, her wife, Arada, Thiago (a member of Mensah’s family who doesn’t trust Murderbot, and whom Murderbot doesn’t like either), and Amena. Things start out rocky between Murderbot and Amena, but as usual, Murderbot grows on Amena and they form a sort of friendship. Murderbot also reveals to Thiago some of what happened to Mensah, thereby enlightening Thiago as to the “nature of their relationship”, after which Thiago begins to grudgingly trust Murderbot.
But, before all that, their mission goes horribly awry right off the bat because, come on, this is a Murderbot novel. Not only would smooth sailing deprive us of a plot, it would deprive us of Murderbot’s sarcastic asides about things going wrong and humans being dumb, which is 98.7% of the reason I read these books.
Their ship gets attacked and is about to be invaded, but Murderbot manages to get all the humans except Amena aboard a shuttle, so they escape while Murderbot and Amena climb into space suits and arrange to meet them outside, but while they’re in the middle of attempting to make it from the ship to the shuttle, the gunship attacking them traps Murderbot and Amena in its tractor beam and sucks them on board, but not before Murderbot recognizes the ship’s sigil: it’s ART.
When they get onboard, they find two humans from the Corporation Rim and five gray-skinned, human-like creatures that Murderbot refers to as Targets, even though Thiago doesn’t like to think of people (even very violent people who are actively trying to kill them) as targets.
Murderbot calls out to ART, but there’s no response. When it questions the targets, they gleefully tell Murderbot that they deleted ART, at which point Murderbot sees red and kills all the targets on board, even though keeping at least one alive would be super useful for intel.
It turns out ART had stored a copy of itself somewhere safe and it managed to communicate that information to Murderbot before it was completely deleted, so Murderbot is able to reinstall ART. But then Murderbot finds out that ART intentionally led the Targets to Murderbot and its humans, at which point Murderbot stops talking to ART.
In the meantime, one of the humans shoots Murderbot, then promptly suffers cardiac arrest and dies instantly. That’s when they discover both humans were implanted with a device that acts kind of like a governor module and controls their movements and can even kill them at a moment’s notice, as it did with the one human. So they get the implant out of the other human, run into the shuttle carrying the other humans from Murderbot’s shuttle and get the humans aboard ART, then they negotiate a trade to get the recently de-implanted human back to her ship in exchange for information from her captain about what happened to them and ART and who the Targets are, although her captain doesn’t know much.
In the midst of all this, Murderbot has come to realize that ART was in a super tight spot when it led the Targets to Murderbot, and that it didn’t even have time to consider that it was putting Murderbot’s humans in danger. ART’s own humans were already missing and it really didn’t have any other options. So they make up, even though Murderbot still insists to Amena that they aren’t “friends”, nor do they have any kind of “relationship”, because those are all sappy human terms.
Trying to find out what happened to ART’s humans proves challenging because someone or something messed with ART’s memory and it’s not sure how, when, or where its humans left … or if they left willingly … or if they left alive.
Murderbot seriously doubts any of ART’s humans are still alive, but it knows how much ART loves its humans, so they go on a quest that takes them to a planet that had been colonized and was in the process of being terraformed when the company that owned the colony was bought out by another company, at which point the original company destroyed all documents about the colony so that it could never be found.
In theory, this means leaving the colonists to die just to spite the company buying you out, but in this case, the colony had stumbled upon some remnant alien technology that infected them, turning their skin gray and leading some (but not all) of them to believe that there was some sort of hive mind. At the point that Murderbot reaches the colony, the colonists are engaged in a gunfight over the issue of whether there is, in fact, a hive mind, keeping about half of ART’s crew is trapped. Murderbot manages to get the crew to ART, but not before it takes so much damage that it shuts down and is taken prisoner.
I can’t remember where they find the rest of ART’s crew, but they do manage to get everyone back on ART safe and sound, at which point there’s nothing left to do but launch a rescue mission to retrieve Murderbot. Murderbot is pretty good at getting itself out of scrapes, so it’s able to meet them halfway, but when Murderbot learns that they returned to rescue it, that makes Murderbot feel all kinds of feelings it’s not used to feeling and so doesn’t know how to process.
Somewhere in the midst of all this (I can’t remember exactly where), Murderbot needed to recruit the help of a SecUnit that was guarding some of ART’s humans. In order to gain its trust, Murderbot gave it a bunch of files detailing some of Murderbot’s exploits with its humans, then gave the SecUnit the code to deactivate it’s governor module.
So, at the very end of the book. Murderbot is reunited with all of its humans (Dr. Mensah and the rest of her crew showed up while Murderbot was busy escaping from the infected colony), ART is reunited with all of its humans, and Murderbot has a rogue SecUnit following it around. Murderbot keeps asking the rogue SecUnit what it wants, but it’s so unaccustomed to getting that question, that it has no idea how to answer.
In the end, Murderbot gets an invitation to join ART and its crew, and as much as it loves Dr. Mensah (Murderbot would never use the word “love”, but it totally does love Mensah), it tells her that it has to find out if it might be a good fit for ART’s crew.
And that’s where we leave Murderbot … for now…