★★★★☆ Murderbot experiences unintended consequences of her decisions

Exit Strategy

Martha Wells

Brief recap. In All Systems Red GrayCris, which we now know to be a criminal organization that profits from illegal mining, murdered a DeltFall survey team and attempted to murder the PreservationAuth survey team. GrayCris thus (in what in retrospect looks like a classic shooting yourself in the foot maneuver) earned the enmity of Dr Mensah, the head of that team and PerservationAuth head of state, and our own much-beloved Murderbot, who was able to save Mensah and her team. Subsequently GrayCris ended up in what, in technical legal terminology, is called "deep doodoo". They are being sued down to their skivvies by PreservationAuth, DeltFall, and the Company that insured the survey teams (Murderbot's former owners).

In Rogue Protocol Murderbot, who dislikes GrayCris even more than she (on pronouns, see my review of All Systems Red) dislikes most humans, tried to help Mensah out by traveling to Milu, where she hoped to catch GrayCris red-handed in illegal mining. As it happened, a survey team from GoodNightLander Independent (GI) was already active there and GrayCris, a bunch of creeps that obviously will stop at nothing, sent a couple of contract killers to kill the GI team, and also to destroy the evidence of previous illegal GrayCris activities. Murderbot saved the GI team and, killed the GrayCris contract killers, and came away with heaps and heaps of damning evidence against GrayCris.

That all just happened. Now Murderbot is returning from (really escaping from) Milu. Monitoring newsfeeds, she discovers that GrayCris apparently just kidnapped Mensah.

Wait, WHAT?

What could have happened in the last few days to make GrayCris take such desperate action?

Oh, ... Right.

So now Murderbot has to save Mensah. That's the plot of Exit Strategy, and I'll say no more about it, but that it's a typical action and strategy-packed Murderbot adventure.

The real story of the Murderbot Diaries is Murderbot's personal evolution. She IS a person -- that has been clear from All Systems Red. Since becoming a rogue SecBot (and therefore a fugitive) she has found herself compelled to act human in order to escape detection and capture. The early chapters of Exit Strategy have many moments like this one:

I’d been pretending to be human off and on since I left Dr. Mensah, but this was the first time I’d had anything on me that officially labeled me as human. It was weird.
I didn’t like it.

She even finds herself compelled to greater sacrifices, such as this one,

I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

I also enjoyed this little dialog with Gurathin,

“I don’t want to be a pet robot.”
“I don’t think anyone wants that.”
That was Gurathin. I don’t like him. “I don’t like you.”
“I know.”
He sounded like he thought it was funny. “That is not funny.”
“I’m going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.”
“*Bleep* you.”
“Let’s make that sixty percent.”

I love Murderbot, and I'm even beginning to like Gurathin a bit.

So, this was a good book. Murderbot continues her evolution towards whatever she's going to become, but remains the adorably cuddly ball of barbed wire we know and love.

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