Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…

When I first started reading the Murderbot Diaries, I complained that they were being drip-fed to me as novellas. Later, Martha Wells started to publish Murderbot novels, which I enjoyed just as much but, after a while, I realised I missed the short, very focused visits to Murderbot’s world universe. Then, Martha Wells and Tor started to release Murderbot short stories and I realised that all of the pieces, whether they were novels, novellas or short stories, were like fragments of a larger hologram that exists in Martha Wells’ imagination as an integrated whole. So now I take any opportunity I can get to read anything that Martha Wells chooses to publish.

This week, she’s published ‘Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy’, a (very) short story, almost a fragment, that follows Peri, an AI that Murderbot met in ‘System Collapse‘ and shows the impact that meeting had on how Peri sees the world. It’s a short piece but I felt immediately at home in it. It was good to meet Peri again. I’m hoping that Peri might get a novella of its own one day.

You can read this thirty-eight page short story for free by clicking on the image from Reactor Magazine below or it’s available for purchase as an ebook.