[Read as an audiobook from the public library]
I really enjoyed All Systems Red, but this is the one that hooked me.
Our intrepid Murderbot has left its human team and struck out in search of answers and hopefully an of idea of what it wants to do with the rest of its existence, having been freed from its contract. It decides to travel back to the scene of a catastrophic failure, where it believes it malfunctioned and killed its clients during a mining operation. This is the event that caused it to hack its governor, and made it into the sentient media-craving Murderbot we know today.
It finds itself traveling on a hyperintelligent ship that it nicknames ART (Asshole Research Transport) – an even more terminally awkward being than Murderbot – and the two begrudgingly team up to help a research team hopelessly out of their league and in more danger than they can understand.
This story has a fair bit more action than the first, and Murderbot feels like it’s starting to come into its own a bit as far as a “security consultant.” Once it understands that people are looking to it for guidance and are actually going to listen (most of the time), Murderbot seems to almost relax a bit, which is cool to see, because it’s good at its job and I realized that I wanted it to know that. Which is when I knew I was hooked, by the way.
Also, and I know it would absolutely hate this, but the scene in the hallway where Murderbot takes out the people following its clients is just dead sexy.
The audiobook, read again by Kevin Free, is wonderfully done. It’s a brisk couple of hours and it’s over far too soon. On to book 3!