Fugitive Telemetry
Chapter 1 - Dead Body, No Identification
A dead human is found lying in a junction in Preservation Station’s mall - one of the side corridors that connects a residential area to a work area. Murderbot is called in alongside Mensah and Senior Officer Indah from Preservation Station Security. The body has no feed interface, no subcutaneous ID marker, no augment, nothing that would allow identification. Murderbot calculates the time of death at approximately four hours using archived data on body temperature, lividity, and fluid behavior. A second Security tech arrives and independently confirms the same estimate, which does not please Indah, who had hoped to find fault. The medical bot is unavailable (it’s preventative health check day at the school), which means proper identification will have to wait. Murderbot notes the dead human was not from any recent arrival list and does not match any Preservation resident record. The location of the body - in a camera blind spot - is clearly deliberate.
Chapter 2 - Security Objects, Consultant Role
Preservation Station Security initially objects to Murderbot’s involvement in the investigation. Indah’s objection is procedural and also personal: she doesn’t trust it. Mensah’s position is that it is genuinely useful, particularly since it found a third camera blind spot the Security team had missed. A compromise is reached: Murderbot will participate as a consultant, not as a member of the Security team, and will report through Indah. The victim still has no identity. The broken feed interface under the body’s hand is examined; it was likely destroyed intentionally before or during the murder. Murderbot begins reviewing station camera footage, using its ability to access feeds the investigation officially doesn’t have permission to review yet.
Chapter 3 - Victim’s Path, Concealed Arrival
Murderbot’s first official work as a Station Security consultant turns into something larger than a single murder investigation. It traces the dead human’s movements backward through the station: the victim had arrived concealed - probably in a cargo container - rather than through any passenger embarkation point. The victim had been moving carefully through the station for over 36 hours, using camera blind spots. This level of knowledge of the station’s surveillance gaps suggests the person was either a professional, had inside help, or had access to the station schematics. Murderbot identifies the victim’s intended destination: a data drop near the communications hub. Someone intercepted him before he got there.
Chapter 4 - Cargo Transport, Refugee Network
Ratthi is present and observing as Murderbot works on the lock of a small cargo transport docked in one of the quieter sections of the transit ring. This transport is connected to the victim’s path through the station. Murderbot opens it and finds it has been used to move people - refugees - not just cargo. The transport belongs to a legitimate operator, but its cargo records have been manipulated to hide repeated human transfers. The victim, now identified from historical records as Lutran, was running a refugee network: moving people off Corporation Rim planets where they were trapped in indenture or forced labor, through a chain of intermediaries, to Preservation and allied polities. Someone wanted that network stopped.
Chapter 5 - Port Authority Insider, Lalow Identified
Special Investigator Aylen makes it clear that Ratthi and Gurathin are not invited to the next phase of the investigation. The operation moves into the Port Authority’s jurisdiction. The theory: someone inside Port Authority was helping the killers track Lutran’s movements. Whoever it was would have had access to cargo transfer records, module routing, and ship arrival data - exactly the tools needed to intercept Lutran before he reached his drop. Murderbot cross-references movement data, looking for anomalies in routing records around the time of Lutran’s death. It finds that a module containing refugees had been redirected from its registered destination to a different ship - a ship that turned out to be a bounty hunter vessel called the Lalow. The refugees are alive, currently in that module, somewhere in the station’s outer docks.
Chapter 6 - Dock Surveillance, Bounty Hunters
After a lot more data analysis than Murderbot would prefer to describe, the dock surveillance records reveal the full picture. The Lalow is a bounty-hunter vessel that had been contracted to intercept the refugees and return them to their contracted employers in the Corporation Rim. The Port Authority insider had been routing refugee-containing modules to the Lalow by fraudulently reclassifying them as commercial cargo. Lutran had come to Preservation Station to warn the network’s contacts that the Lalow was here and that the operation had been compromised - and was killed before he could deliver the message. The Lalow’s crew has the refugees but hasn’t left the station yet, probably waiting for paperwork to be cleared. The problem: the bounty hunters have a legal corporate document authorizing their retrieval of the refugees, which is valid under Corporation Rim law, even though it is not valid under Preservation law.
Chapter 7 - Colony Ship Pressy, Life-Tender Escape
Murderbot is alone on the historic colony ship Pressy (officially preserved as a monument at Preservation Station) because a hostile ship - GrayCris-connected, hiding in the colony ship’s sensor shadow - is blocking station access to the Lalow’s docking situation. The hostile ship is small and has been monitoring station search-and-rescue channels for rescue transmissions, which means Murderbot cannot use a standard EVAC suit with a transponder to approach it.
The solution Murderbot finds: a life-tender, an ancient emergency evacuation device stored in the colony ship’s meticulously preserved safety lockers. A life-tender is essentially a sealed navigation bag - primitive propulsion, minimal life support, no transponder on an active rescue frequency. Murderbot asks Ratthi and Gurathin via feed to identify which item in the locker is most like an EVAC suit (it doesn’t have the historical language loaded), gets its answer, deploys the life-tender through the colony ship’s airlock, and climbs in. The bag, as described, is extremely cold, extremely dark, and smells terrible.
It works. Murderbot blorps up against the hostile ship’s hull in the dark. Instead of fighting through the ship, it realizes the life-tender’s own airlock capability can be used to extract the refugees directly from the module they’re trapped in, through the colony ship’s lock, without the hostile crew knowing. Less combat. Murderbot has come to prefer this when possible.
Chapter 8 - Refugees Rescued, Traitor Exposed
The refugees are extracted from the module. The hostile ship’s crew is dealt with by the Station Security responder team. Tural’s combined forensic/medical report confirms that Lutran was killed with a needle-like device that left no fragments - a professional hit weapon. The Port Authority insider is still unknown. Murderbot develops a plan to flush the insider out: using one of the refugees (a man named Mish, who distrusts Murderbot on principle until Indah points out it was Murderbot who got him out of the module) as bait to get the insider to move again.
A hover crane tries to fall on Murderbot in the empty Public Docks. This reveals the insider knew Murderbot was close to identifying them. The crane attack is a failed improvisation, which tells Murderbot something: the insider is competent at system manipulation but not at physical action. Murderbot uses its Station Security access to identify the pattern of actions around the cargo bot records that pinpoint the insider. The traitor is identified, arrested, and the refugee network’s existence is documented for Preservation’s legal teams. Pin-Lee’s General Counsel report confirms Lutran had been running the network for years across multiple stations.
The investigation is closed. Murderbot watches the beginning of episode 132 of Sanctuary Moon while everyone else does the paperwork.
What This Book Does
The structure of Fugitive Telemetry reveals what Preservation actually is: a place where doing the right thing is possible, but requires patience, process, and institutional trust. Indah is good at her job. Her protocols matter. The refugee network existed because the Corporation Rim makes people property, and Preservation’s existence as a functional alternative makes it a destination worth risking everything to reach.
Murderbot’s role throughout is to be useful without taking over - to supply the processing speed and feed access that human investigators can’t match, while letting the institutional structure of Preservation Security do what it is designed to do. It is still learning this. It is, reluctantly, getting better at it.
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