Half of the time was spent in some mildly-engaging action sequences and it made me realize that I like the Murderbot Diaries more for its worldbuilding of a weirdly hopeful dystopian spacefaring future.
This story picks up right after Fugitive Telemetry, which confused me for a while, because it has been more than twenty-nine months since I'd read it. A team from Preservation must convince a group of colonists on an alien-contaminated planet to evacuate and let them help to set up a research lab on the planet. The problem is that an aggressive corporation called Barish-Estranza is simultaneously trying to seduce the colonists into indentured servitude in some terrible corporate mines. Murderbot and its humans must travel into a blackout zone ravaged by storms, remnants from earlier terraforming endeavours. They get caught up in some troublesome negotiations that naturally turn awry.
I didn't enjoy this book as much as I seemed to enjoy the earlier books. It's either because the action plots were truly less engaging, or because my tastes have grown to something less in-tune with this specific genre. Either way, I still found this a satisfying little story. And my heart is increasingly rooting for Murderbot's careful journey of experiencing and accepting its emotions.