Let me be perfectly candid and say - I am a dedicated Murderbot fan. I love all the books. I have reread them multiple times. When I am having a bad day I will play the audiobook versions to cheer myself up. So, of course I was excited at the release of the latest addition to the series.
This adventure takes us away from Preservation and even from the crew of Perihelion (a.k.a.ART), and has our favorite SecUnit attempting a rescue mission on a giant torus. As Murderbot approaches the torus, it is grousing, “Space was okay to look at but not super fun when you were out in it.” It is also aggravated with how finicky ART had been about the choice of armored suit that would be used during the approach. Although MB does add, “I’m not saying using the armor design is not a good idea; I mean, that is some quality paranoid overthinking right there, we all have to agree on that.” As we all know, MB appreciates paranoid overthinking because that is how it has avoided being decommissioned and sold for spare parts.
There are some characters from previous books who are part of the story. Three, the SecUnit liberated from Barish-Estranza in Network Effect, is assisting with the mission. Farai (one of Mensah’s marital partners), and Sophie (one of their children), are also involved along with another family member called Nanna Naja. And much to MB’s disappointment, Supervisor Leonide is part of the situation. She is as happy to see MB as it is to see her. She remarks, “Oh, this is some sort of curse, isn’t it.”
Completing a successful hostage extraction from a Corporation Rim controlled area is a challenge. Add in details such as Nanna Naja being elderly and needing a mobility device, various corporations having firefights over contract renewals in zones the group needs to traverse, and limited (or no) mass transit options to cover the distances necessary to reach their exit rendezvous, and things start getting rather complicated. What else would we expect, right?
Some new things in this story:
1. MB has installed a mental health module to help it deal with the aftermath of trauma it suffered on “Hell Plague Planet” (as it refers to the setting for Network Effect). As it explains how the module works, “When my neural tissue started to generate weird chemicals and whatever, it would ping me to "check in with my emotional state.”” Throughout the book there are parenthetical references to the module. “Emotion check: Again? It's been like two seconds.” “Emotion checks suck. How am I supposed to analyze something that has no inherent rationality in the first place?”
2. MB has to deal with young children, not adolescents like Amena. At one point it offers to carry a child and “she immediately clamped on to me like a tentacled parasite in a horror movie.” Later, MB says the child is “attached to me like she had been welded on.”
3. MB is also learning to communicate with Mensah’s family and dealing with their preconceptions of what a security unit is like, working with them even though they do not yet trust it like Mensah and “ART’s humans” do.
Readers who have not read the other books can still enjoy the suspense and the humor, but those who have been following the narrative since All Systems Red will be delighted with the continued character development and growth of Murderbot as a free person. It expands the variety of settings in which the stories take place. It gives us more time with some of Mensah’s family and with Three (okay - and Supervisor Leoinide). Many of the situations the characters encounter in the torus underscore even more how little regard the Corporation Rim has for individuals, or for anything other than the bottom line, which just makes us appreciate Preservation and Perihelion’s crew even more.
I read an ARC provided by the publisher through NetGalley for review purposes.
