This is the third novella of the series and by now I know what to expect. It largely follows the same formula in having Murderbot unexpectedly run into a group of humans who are hopeless at protecting themselves and ends up saving them. A welcome twist is that most of the opposition here comes in the form of implacably hostile enemy combat bots, which ramps up the threat level to Murderbot considerably. This is still a very simple and straightforward young adult book. It amounts to little more than introducing all of the new characters and then throwing Murderbot right into the action. It’s a rollicking good read, being fast-paced and punctuated by Murderbot’s particular sense of humor, but it’s nothing very sophisticated.

While travelling away from RaviHyral, Murderbot reads news about more suspicious activity by GrayCris. Since it wants to help its friend and nominal owner Dr. Mensah gather evidence against the corporation, it makes it way to a recently abandoned orbital terraforming facility which it suspects was a cover to find alien artefacts. It enters the facility in secret, hiding from a human team who is there to assess the viability of reviving the terraforming project. Accompanying the humans is a non-combat robot assistant named Miki that Murderbot is disturbed to see is treated as a friend or a pet by them. Also there are two human members of a security detail hired on in case anything goes wrong. Naturally things do go wrong as the team is attacked by hostile combat bots. Murderbot is forced to reveal its presence to save them and pretends to be operating under the instructions of an independent security contractor assigned to them. Miki helps convince her human friends that Murderbot is friendly but the two security guards remain suspicious even as they try to rescue one of the humans who has been abducted.

This is pretty much an action movie the whole way through against what outwardly seems like much more powerful opposition than in the previous books. Combined with Murderbot having to hide its presence from everyone else at the beginning, it has almost no non-combat interactions with other characters here and as such I like this entry a lot less. Furthermore while Murderbot is outmatched in terms of numbers, firepower and durability by the combat bots, it effectively cheats by employing its superior hacking abilities. It would have been more entertaining if it thought of some clever strategy to deal with the superior opposition. Sneaking in to deploy hax doesn’t count. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that the human guards turn out to be bad guys too as it’s telegraphed early and this is the established formula of the series. But even here the novella ducks out of any real moral quandary by letting Murderbot defeat the hostile humans without killing them. The slick writing and quick pace make it fun to read but this is a really simple story, even by the standards of the young adult genre.

My favorite part of the novella is Murderbot’s mixed feelings about Miki. It thinks she is hopelessly innocent and naive and is disturbed that she believes her owner Abene is actually her friend. Yet we can tell that it really desires for itself the relationship that Miki has with Abene. Unfortunately this is as far as the character development for Murderbot goes and once again I feel particularly cheated that the book ends immediately once the action is over. There are no scenes of the human characters having to grapple with the revelations they’ve learned or deciding what to do about Murderbot. No doubt we will only get to hear about the aftermath of the events that take place here as exposition in the next entry of the series.

As I’ve noted before the formula obviously works so Martha Wells keeps writing these stories. I’m more puzzled that the series keeps winning awards as surely there must be better books out there. Its themes about a sympathetic AI character whose supposed murderousness is only a cute affectation seems so shallow. It’s even disturbing here that Murderbot seems to value humans over bots as it doesn’t spend much time worrying about the enemy bots are sapient. Since there’s only one novella left in the first complete story, I might as well read it but I think that will the stopping point for me.