CBR18 Bingo: Free space (replacing Clown)
Naja sent back an acknowledgment but didn’t tell me what she was planning to do, which, great. This is why working with humans is so exciting in the bad way.
― Martha Wells, Platform DecayI’ve been out of the game for a while, as they say on some of my shows. Not the good ones, though.
― Martha Wells, Platform Decay
Murderbot and Three, the emancipated SecUnit from the previous book, are sent to rescue Mensah’s partner Farai and their daughter Sofi, along with Farai’s mother, Naja. They were kidnapped and sent to a mining colony, but “rescued” by Leonide, one of the bad-guys-turned-good-guys from the previous book. Murderbot is able to infiltrate the safe house where they are hidden, but only has minutes before a kill squad descends upon them. Before they escape via a secret passageway, Murderbot agrees to save Leonide’s family members who are being held hostage in a separate location. From this point on, Murderbot must find Leonide’s kidnapped family members and extract them while keeping Mensah’s family safe in the process.
This is Murderbot book eight and honestly after book five, I don’t remember many of the details of books six and seven. It’s not that things aren’t happening. In fact, these books are one action sequence after another. However, they each follow the similar formula of Murderbot rescuing humans or protecting humans while trying to keep humans from self-sabotaging. Since humans from Preservation are raised to help others and eschew the values of corporates, Murderbot tends to spend a lot of time keeping humans from walking into traps or exposing themselves to unnecessary danger as a result of their altruistic tendencies.
Murderbot books are fast and fun reads, and this one was no different. However, this book doesn’t move the overall story arc forward in any meaningful way.
