Murderbot Diaries 07 - System Collapse, page 20
I sent, ETA on shuttle arrivals. Sum Total only had two big enough for bringing up large groups of colonists and was offloading to both Holism and its own module dock to save time. They could have brought more ships, but Holism had already been en route here—too late to find out that preserving the main colony site was impractical at best and negligent homicide at worst.
ART said, 7.32 minutes at the same time as Holism said, 7.3247 minutes. The resulting silence on the feed was stony, except for Seth’s exasperated sigh. (He was on the Preservation responder, sitting with the captain on the bridge.)
I pinged Three, who was in its assigned cabin watching educational videos, and asked it, Do you want to listen to Holism explain planetary infrastructure to you? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Three indicated that it did want that. It was still tricky trying to tell if it was actually interested instead of just saying yes to everything you asked it, but it did have that weird thing for nonfiction and educational entertainment. I connected it with Holism on the feed.
It wouldn’t be too long now before ART could leave.
One of the first things Holism had done on arrival was deploy one of its modules designed to operate as a temporary station. Docked to ART, its crew and bots had started to help with decontaminating and repairing ART’s wormhole drive. Once they were done, and the contract stuff was finished and the colonists were situated, ART would be ready to leave the system, with Holism staying here to work on infrastructure with the separatists. Mensah and the rest of my Preservation humans would be going back home on the responder. Amena had decided to apply to the University, but she had education modules to finish up at FirstLanding on Preservation.
We were going to have to figure out what Three wanted to do, or how to get Three to tell us what it wanted to do. Ratthi and Arada had been talking about putting together a team to work on a trauma recovery program for free SecUnits. They wanted me to work on it, too, which I think they knew wasn’t going to happen.
I had given them a bunch of the data about my memory incident, and they were going to get Dr. Bharadwaj to work on it with them. They thought they had enough information for a good starting point.
They also would have liked Three’s help with it, but they were afraid to ask it, since they didn’t want it to think it was being conscripted or something. Yeah, that was going to be an ongoing problem for a while.
So was my whole memory incident/thing. But at least I knew I could still do my job.
(I know I needed trauma recovery, I just didn’t want to help figure it out for anybody else when I was still figuring it out for myself. But at least I knew now that was what I needed. I wanted to send a message to Dr. Bharadwaj about it—I don’t know why, but just telling her stuff made it easier for me to figure out what I wanted to do. I had asked ART for a detailed description of what its trauma recovery treatment entailed and it had sent me the file, I just hadn’t been able to make myself open it yet.)
(I’m getting there, okay.)
I was ready to get out of this system. I was never going to like planets, and nothing had happened here to change that.
And I had decided, for real this time, which ship I would be on when I left.
Do you know where we’re going next? I asked ART.
Acknowledgments
It takes a team to make a book happen, and this book would not be here without the entire Tordotcom team, especially editor Lee Harris, Irene Gallo, jacket designer Christine Foltzer, Matt Rusin, Desirae Friesen, Michael Dudding, and jacket artist Jaime Jones. And thanks also to my agent Jennifer Jackson, Michael Curry, and Troyce Wilson.
About the Author
MARTHA WELLS has written many novels, including the million-copy, New York Times and USA Today bestselling Murderbot Diaries series, which has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Alex Awards. Other titles include Witch King, City of Bones, The Wizard Hunters, Wheel of the Infinite, the Books of the Raksura series (beginning with The Cloud Roads and ending with The Harbors of the Sun), and the Nebula Award–nominated The Death of the Necromancer, as well as YA fantasy novels, short stories, and nonfiction. You can sign up for email updates here.
Martha Wells, Murderbot Diaries 07 - System Collapse
