Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4)

by Martha Wells

“Hi.” She barely glanced at me, her expression set with disinterest. Then she took another look, frowned, started to speak, then stopped herself. She still wasn’t sure. I said, “We met on Port FreeCommerce.” I couldn’t resist adding, “I was the one in the transport box.”

“Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.”

“It would be tricky,” I said. By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 percent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky. (I know, that explains a lot about me.)

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare.

What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn’t going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four. Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.

I was still at 83 percent performance reliability. (It’s good there’s not a separate statistic for my mental performance reliability because I don’t think even I would rate it as all that great at the moment.)