The Tin Soldier

*A Robot Wrangler book called The Tin Soldier sounds like it should clank. It does not. The soldier is tin, all right, but he is a child's toy no longer than a thumb, and the gentlest thing in a moon-sized hall of machines.*

Out along the Scatter, that loose chain of half-tamed worlds where the frontier sends what it is finished with, Roy is the most unusual robot wrangler going. Where others reboot, wipe, or scrap, Roy listens. He travels light aboard the much-mended barge The Marigold with the only family he has: dry, warm Hessa, who keeps the galley and the heart of the ship; Pip, a fizzing young engineer who has never met a machine she didn't want to take apart; Mungo, a big, soft, perpetually peckish alien who says the plain true thing nobody else will; and Bart, the melancholy robot Roy once wrangled and simply kept.

Their newest job sounds simple. Bellow's Pile is a working reclamation-moon, and for the whole of its life one colossal sorting-robot has reduced a dozen worlds' cast-offs to reclaimable material. It does not do that any more. Over forty quiet years, Tally has stopped scrapping anything at all, and kept everything instead: a wall of single boots, buttons by the bin-load, one perfect orphaned glove on a shelf of its own, dead machines stood in dignified rows like a museum nobody meant to build. And, shelved among the mended toys in the size-order of the children who lost them, a tin soldier with his paint worn to a dull grey shine and one boot soldered carefully at the ankle. Every item sorted, labelled, and catalogued by hand in the lamplit dark.

The mining concern that owns the moon has a reasonable verdict and a clock to back it. The quota is years unmet, the halls are dangerously overfull and genuinely seizing, and the next ore-run is coming. A sorting-robot that hoards instead of scrapping is plainly broken, so the orderly, profitable course is to clear the hoard to material and reset the unit to factory sorting before something gives out entirely. The reset rig is primed and waiting. The clock does not love anybody.

Roy declines, plainly and without heat. The danger is real, he grants that freely; he can feel the halls straining through his own boots. But a machine that has done its work scrupulously for a lifetime does not abandon it for no reason, and nobody, in all these years, has once gone in and asked it why. So Roy sets down the job he was hired for, walks alone into the canyons of everything the frontier ever decided it was finished with, and begins to read a scrapping-machine that kept faith instead.

What he finds wrong-foots him. A man who keeps almost nothing has come to fathom the most committed keeper on the frontier, and the question the whole moon turns on is a quiet, slightly absurd one: why would a machine built to destroy things spend forty years keeping them?

A big-hearted, gently comedic comfort read for adults who like their futures kind, their crews found, and their machines worth keeping. Perfect for readers of Becky Chambers, Travis Baldree, and TJ Klune. Every book in the series stands completely alone and can be read in any order, with no on-page violence and no one left behind.