Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

I didn’t want to see helpless humans. I’d rather see smart ones rescuing each other.

Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.

The only good thing about combat bots is that they aren’t combat SecUnits. Those are worse.

I was pretty sure the combat bot had been original equipment for the facility. We were talking about GrayCris here, whose company motto seemed to be “profit by killing everybody and taking their stuff.”

I reminded myself a combat bot wasn’t a human, it wasn’t a villain from one of my shows. It was a bot, and it wasn’t threatening us. It was just telling us what it was going to do.

(You should never refer to the clients as targets; you don’t want to get confused at the wrong moment.)

(I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.)

“With Gerth at the ship, we have a hostage situation.” I hate hostage situations. Even when I’m the one with the hostages. Miki said, “That’s not good.” See, that? That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.

I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.)

The core cutter had powered up and accessed my feed to deliver a canned warning and a handy set of directions. Why yes, I did want to disengage the safety protocols, thanks for asking.