Quotes from Martha Wells

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

If I was wrong, I'd probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse.

Nicholas, dressed in black and trailing them like a sinister storm cloud, had a dry little preoccupied smile.

Your face just got really weird. Are you all right?

If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn't have time to think about anything else.

Picking up on my reaction, ART said, What does it want? To kill all the humans, I answered. I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational. I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.

A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn't careful, and rogue SecUnits were not excatly known for lying low and avoiding trouble.

Yes, I'm fine, I'd sent her over the feed. It's a good thing I don't bleed like a human because hostile marine fauna was about all this situation needed. I've got everything under fucking control, okay. "No, it says it's fine," I heard her relaying to the others on our comm. "Well, yes, it's furious.")

If this went wrong I was going to feel really stupid. The Targets would finally show up and be all "What the hell was it trying to do to itself?

I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are.

Bhawardwaj squints as she reads the message, and she laughs. "I don't even know what that is." Ayda looks at the catalog image. It's the thing that fits on a backpack or harness, and has giant extendable spikes. She sends back, All right, I believe that it's real, but it doesn't look very practical.

On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an "oh shit" moment.

I've had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I'm talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I've also had clients who thought they didn't need any security at all, right up until something ate them.

They had passed a lift junction, but it wasn't big enough for all of them at once and Wilken sensibly refused to split the group.

I knew Amena well enough by now to recognize she was feigning polite interest to disguise horrified interest.)

lure humans in with promises of room privacy so it could record them in the public spaces.

within easy unwanted talking range.

He can't hear me," Jai retorted. But it was better to present a cool united front to Canon Hain, not look as if they had been arguing like children. Especially if they had been arguing like children.

That was stupid." Everything was clear, sharp. Note to self, never, ever jump into a gunship with a bot pilot and fight off a construct Attacker code again. You almost deleted yourself, Murderbot

When the company owned me and rented me out for surveys, my security protocol included datamining, which meant monitoring and recording the humans every second for the duration of the contract, which was excruciating in a lot of ways. Pretty much all the ways. (All the ways involving sex, bodily fluids, and inane conversations.)

The thing that surprised me is that nobody stared at us. Nobody even gave us a second look. The uniform, the pants, the long-sleeved T-shirt and jacket, covered all my inorganic parts. If they noticed the dataport in the back of my neck they must have thought I was an augmented human. We were just three more people making our way down the ring. It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didn't know each other as I was in my armor, in a group of other SecUnits.

Then she frowned at Khat, realizing what he had said. "If we jump? No one's jumping. Don't say that. We'll have to climb to get back.

Kai stepped close, circled to face his prey, and wrapped his hand around the ghoul's throat. "Do mortals just walk into your channel house all the time? Am I one? Am I stupid?" The ghoul choked out, "I didn't know you were a..." "Say it." Kai smiled. "... a demon." "You idiot." Kai leaned closer to whisper, "I'm the demon." —Martha Wells

The kinet believed that if something was worth saying once, it was worth saying a few more times, but Jai had long recognized that this was not the way of other species. She promised, "I'll stop.