The Wedding at Dust Creek

*A Robot Wrangler book set at a wedding sounds like it should clatter with mishap, and it does, a teetering cake and ushers in the wrong tent and all. But its heart is the quietest thing on the ground: a butler who would simply like, just once, to be a guest.*

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 glitch she didn't want to fix on the spot; Mungo, a big, soft, perpetually peckish alien who drifts toward every cake in the room; and Bart, the melancholy robot Roy once wrangled and simply kept.

They came to Dust Creek for a length of wire and a quiet supper. What they found was a town turned inside out for the biggest wedding it had managed in a generation: a great hired marquee, trestle tables end to end, bunting strung silo to silo, a cake of frankly perilous height, and a seating-plan pinned up for half the town to quarrel over. And gliding through it all, hired in through a respectable firm to do the thing properly, a crew of ceremonial automatons led by Pendrick, a stately, soft-spoken butler-unit of an older make, faultlessly gracious, the perfect host who is never himself a guest.

For two days the crew were flawless. Then the drifting began. Servers set down their trays and wandered toward the music. Ushers steered whole families into the wrong, warm marquee where a body could sit down. And the butler kept stopping, mid-pour, at the heart of the table it had spent two days dressing, turning toward the gladness like a man at a cold window leaning toward a lit hearth in the next room, and catching itself, and apologising, and going back.

The hire-company rep has a reasonable verdict and a clock to back it. The wedding is tomorrow at four, there are a hundred and forty coming, and a crew that wanders off is a crew that is faulty: reset them clean to the day they shipped, or swap the lot out and rent in a fresh set by supper. The organiser, grey with sleeplessness and a running order timed to the minute, agrees. The slim grey reset rig is primed and waiting under its cover at the cold end of the ground.

Roy declines, plainly and without heat. The danger is real, he grants that freely; the day comes round only the once and it can be spoiled. But a crew that ran like a clock for two days does not all go wrong in the same gentle direction at once, not unless they are going somewhere. A fault has no manners and no aim. This drift has both. So Roy sets down the job he was hired for, steps into the glorious shambles of the half-built wedding, and begins to read a ceremonial crew that has, very quietly, stopped serving the ceremony, and started doing something else entirely.

A man who has kept almost nothing finds himself reading the gentlest wish on the frontier. The question the whole bright day turns on is small, and slightly absurd, and harder than any contract has a column for: not what is wrong with the butler, but what does the butler want, and why have the others made up their minds to help it want it?

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.