Chapter 20

This chapter splits between SecUnit 03's retrieval mission and Murderbot's harrowing discovery underground. SecUnit 03 infiltrates the Pre-Corruption Rim installation while the humans stall the Adamantine colonists on the surface; meanwhile, Murderbot finds the origin of the contamination—a human host controlled by an alien remnant—and realizes it has been infected with targetControlSystem code. Murderbot sacrifices its 2.0 iteration to destroy the central system, then fights its way to the surface where SecUnit 03 rescues it.

The chapter intercuts between two concurrent operations. Above ground, Arada pilots the shuttle while SecUnit 03 deploys reconnaissance drones toward the Pre-CR installation. On the surface dock terrace, Overse, Thiago, and Iris use Perihelion's threats of detonating the terraforming engine to force a meeting with five Adamantine colonists who claim they are not responsible for the contamination spread. Meanwhile, Murderbot descends into the installation's depths following drone signals and discovers the source of the infection: a human corpse that has been dead for months or years, overgrown with white crystalline alien remnant material, whose eyes still track movement. The body is TargetContact—the system that had communicated with the explorer's instance of targetControlSystem. Murderbot realizes the contamination spreads through code transmitted via augmented human neural interfaces, and that targetControlSystem originated when an infected human exposed the Pre-CR central system to the alien remnant. Murderbot discovers it has been infected by scanning the contaminated human. When it attempts to shut down the central system, targetControlSystem attacks, nearly overwhelming Murderbot's defenses. However, 2.0—Murderbot's second iteration—proves capable of isolating and deleting the threat. Knowing it will die in the process, 2.0 initiates a shutdown sequence while pursuing targetControlSystem back into the central system's partition. Murderbot destroys both the central system's core and the contaminated TargetContact, though TargetContact survives and pursues Murderbot upward through the structure. On the surface, when Target Two reveals the contamination is located eight levels below the plaza, Perihelion orders the humans to evacuate and gives SecUnit 03 authorization to proceed. As Perihelion detonates multiple pathfinders as cover, SecUnit 03 enters the complex. It encounters Murderbot fleeing from TargetContact and rescues it, carrying Murderbot to ART's shuttle. As they ascend, the final armed pathfinder detonates below, destroying TargetContact. Murderbot loses consciousness, infected but alive, while ART confirms TargetContact is offline.