CBR 17 BINGO: Black (see cover)
I’d taken a short hiatus from reading Murderbot, but watching the Apple series put me in the mood again. Apparently it did the same for many fans, and probably generated a bunch of new ones, because when I went to my local library almost every Martha Wells novel had been checked out. Fortunately, I had plenty of other BINGO books to read while I waited for my turn to borrow Fugitive Telemetry.
This time around, SecUnit is brought in to help investigate the murder of a human on Preservation Station. Well, not so much brought into the investigation as pushed into it by Dr. Mensah over the objections of Senior Officer Indah. Like most humans, Indah doesn’t trust SecUnit. She even thinks that maybe this murdered guy Lutran worked for GrayCris, which would mean SecUnit would have motive for killing him, which, to be fair, is totally something SecUnit would do. But it didn’t, and all this questioning of SecUnit’s trustworthiness is tiresome, especially since, as it points out, “The big danger to humans is not raiders, angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits; it’s other humans.”
What makes this murder unusual (the body count in this series isn’t insignificant) is that it takes place on Preservation Station, which is one of the safer places in the universe. Station Security immediately locks down ingress to and egress out of the station, essentially making this a locked room mystery, where the room is the size of a space station. SecUnit’s biggest problem is that, even though it is supposed to be helping with the investigation, Station Security won’t give it access to their systems, which makes it a lot harder to work its usual tech magic. At one point they relent and give it five minutes to check for hacking (“I know, five minutes was a hilariously long time, but I wanted a good look around while I was in there.”).
The story is told with Murderbot’s usual combination of snark and vulnerability, and if you like the series, you’ll enjoy this installation. Still, the plot is pretty thin. It takes a break from the bigger story arc, and I don’t feel like we got anything particularly new in terms of character development. We get some interaction with Ratthi and Gurathin, and I love those guys when they tag-team. Indah is a new character that might be recurring, provided we spend more time on Preservation Station. There’s a little bit of Mensah and Pin-Lee, but those interactions are fairly superficial.
The themes are familiar: infantilization of sentient (non-human) beings; corporate overreach; privacy; prejudice. There’s one point at the end where a human demonstrates themselves to be shockingly ungrateful, and my heart did break a little for SecUnit in that moment. Those bits of hidden heartache are where SecUnit is at its best, and sometimes I want it to go full CombatUnit and rip off an ungrateful human’s stupid head. But, as SecUnit comes to realize, its approach to the world is very different from a CombatUnit’s approach (which, to correct myself, is a new piece of character development). Also, ripping heads off of humans would lead to bad things for our hero, so I’d better curb my revenge fantasy.
Overall, Fugitive Telemetry is more of the same. It’s a nice diversion, but it left me feeling a little unsatisfied.